The Critical Role of Human Capital in Business Success

[Music] shum hello good morning everybody we still have h a 20 minute session and then uh we hopefully can all break uh for lunch it's great to see you all here and uh get all these uh work and life lessons and advice at the Abu Dhabi Finance week Lawrence let me first uh put things into a little perspective and context because golb capital and you as the CEO are a market leading awardwinning direct lender and private credit manager with some 70 billion US dollar uh in credit under management my head is spinning already and you were founded in 1994 about the year when I was born um and you partner with our institutional investors family offices and offer solutions for credit asset strategies um very complex and trying to find Solutions um to companies backed by private Equity um sponsors you've won a lot of Industry Awards recently I was reading such as the uh lender of the decade for the Americas or senior lender of the decade for the Americas and you also uh earned a Lifetime Achievement Award by the m&a uh advisor so really inducted in the Hall of Fame you're a rock star Lawrence in that space but let me first of all ask you um we've seen two major announcements from golop capital in the last week which really highlight your commitment to this uh region can you explain uh to us what latest Investments you have made in um you know the the community building and also talent management space happy to so we we've had investors in the region for about 10 years been coming for many years and over the past few years realized we want to have an even closer relationship with our clients and potential clients here so we announced yesterday that we're opening an office in adgm that will be opening in about a month in which floor I'm not sure [Applause] okay we'll make sure to stop by next time well done Muk uh and we we also announced last week a partnership with NYU Abu Dhabi uh the goop Capital impact investing education fund where we've made a multi-year commitment to provide funds for NYU Abu Dhabi students and incoming students at the stern Business program the NYU Stern program starts also next month for MBA students uh to use these funds to make impact Investments Venture capital-based impact Investments to learn to learn how to evaluate to learn as some of our previous panel pist said to learn how to make mistakes we expect them to lose all the money uh you have to reinvest in that Cas well I mean hope yes we we plan to reinvest uh but it's it's a learning experience and we're very committed to business education and business principles and we're here at Finance week and you describe gollop Capital accurately but it sounded a little complicated even to me the way you're describing it our business is really an operating business it happens to use money it happens to use financial principles but we think it's so important whether it's here or in the United States to really Foster the understanding and use of business principles in growing organizations so what we've done what we're doing with NYU Abu Dhabi is an outgrowth of what we've been doing for more than five years in the United States States we have partnered 5 years ago with three leading Business Schools Stanford Northwestern and University of Chicago to create social impact labs to experiment with using business principles bringing them to nonprofits or in the case of Stanford for example Susan ay who's a leading data scientist bringing AI before we all knew the term AI to KH Academy which is an online learning organization and we're big Believers in experimentation we call the word learnings mistakes but you know we'd like to be a little more positive about it and we also are big Believers in taking wins and expanding them so at Northwestern for example uh Northwestern devised with our help a board fellows program to help train MBA students and MBA graduates how to be better members of board of directors including Boards of directors of nonprofits or government related organizations and we actually started with the thinking that we' bring so we have that board fellows program with seven business schools in the United States uh Northwestern Chicago Carnegie melon NYU Stern uh Yale Warton and Berkeley we started by thinking we wanted to bring that particular program to NYU Abu Dhabi and as we talked to Dean Solomon and and folks we realize it's not ready yet the first class of MBA students is only starting so we're starting with this program with a view toward rolling out our board fellows program more fully over the next couple of years as NYU ABAB Stern is ready I think these two announcements deserve a round of applause well done thank you and actually I'm an alumni of NYU Stern business school in New York so maybe I should do another degree here in Abu Dhabi now now you have just uh celebrated 30 years anniversary of gol Capal which is remarkable since you and I were both born in 1994 exactly exactly I mean with longevity we're getting younger and younger right um just have to take the right supplements now um uh what has been crucial in your overall success would you say over the last uh three decades now so I particularly in the past 15 or 20 years I think that we built the business based on two important pillars one comes back to how I opened which is investing is hard we're not a hedge fund we're not we're we're A lender actually making loans is easy it's getting paid back that's hard and I'm sure R Dalia would have been interested in that uh so so we decided quite some time ago we have to actually operate as a business yes with a culture yes with goals but with real uh taking goals and forming strategies using the strategies develop tactics tactics then get implemented and assessed that's one pillar that's been critical for us the other pillar which feeds right into it is that as we evaluated what kind of business are we I mean we we really decided we have four groups of critical partners partners customers however you want to think about it and yes there's two different kinds of investors there's the private Equity firms and their companies who borrow from us but we specifically identified our team our employees as a fourth group of Partners and customers and we've applied the same standards of we call it gold standard of of really trying to put yourself in the shoes of the each of these four groups and figuring out what they want what they need we have a thousand people we have focused on having longevity and all of these what really the business principles aren't that complicated but once you decide our objective is to be an employer of choice to recruit successfully to recruit carefully to give people growth opportunities and to make sure we're recruiting the right kind of people and then giving them the right employee value proposition there is a lot of demand uh Lawrence for talent in private credit is it an interesting attractive industry to look for a job and um how do you Source the talent can you maybe share some insights in that you look like you were cringing when you said is private credit ATT for job in private credit it it's it's not that bad is it okay tell us the so so when we started in private credit when I started our private credit strategy approximately zero people in the history of the world had said you know what I'm doing private Equity but I think private credit's smarter uh everyone want to be a private Equity partner or hedge fund partner but the fact is that uh the credit skills the problem solving skills the partnership skills of Being A non-bank lender are really important we consider ourselves to be in the business of making private Equity firms more successful we consider when I talk to our midlevel Underwriters I talk to them and say you know yes your job is to make sure we don't lose money and you need to have developed 10 years of experience and a lot of at bats and get mentoring and make mistakes and learn but your job isn't just to protect our investors your job we're a service provider anybody can lend money your job is to think about how do you get that Junior your partner you're working with how do you get her promoted to partner because we'll work on and complete 80 loans a year but she'll do one or two deals every one or two years and it's part of this partnership mindset so it is a challenge with a thousand people we have many different functions we work hard on Cross trainining we have lunch and learns every month we're one of the leaders from The Firm we'll sit down and just have an informal discussion with with other folks uh and there's a a tension everyone in the firm wants to see what's going on at investment committee but investment committee has to function and and really make decisions so there are limitations to that I think that uh we have found that one of the really critical things is training our managers to give good feedback that transparency not as radical as Rey I couldn't handle that I don't think our people could handle that and I I think that works for Bridgewater it doesn't work for an organization like ours where we're in a service business and we' be partners with our investors and partners but he's absolutely right you need to have an identified culture and our culture is a combination of being meticulous being open and candid but also being smart and thinking about where are the risks and which risks are for us and not for us so we start that process in our recruiting we actually give testing we have determined that most of us and most people are actually very bad at assessing a candidate based on an interview I'm very good at assessing if somebody's likable I'm very good at assessing if they're reasonably well prepared I'm not very good at assessing how good a job is he or she going to do six months from now how open are they to learning new things how good are they going to be at mentoring so we use IQ tests personality tests numeracy tests and initially this was a very challenging thing I got a lot of push back from our HR department and uh they came we're very data driven they came and said this is horrible a third of the people we were planning to give offers to didn't achieve high enough performance on our quantitative test we have to change the test this is Mis and you I was a little worried at first and I said well wait a minute what's happening to our onboarding experience what's happening to the six-month check-in and the 12-month checkin and in fact our hit rate of people who stuck who stayed for more than that first 18 months had gone through the roof so in fact the people who weren't getting offers I'm not saying they're bad people they're great people it wasn't it wasn't the right fit and we develop that further we in our onboarding process have a very formalized system that leads to a 30-day and 60-day check-in which all of senior leadership sees I see the interview results and surveys from the new candidate the new employee from their bosses and we we carry this out and we do have it's not all uh roses and kisses you know we do have evaluation systems for sure now sourcing Talent is one thing then you have the actual hiring process and then also retaining talent and now in our fast-paced lives how do you actually retain talent and how do you at go of capital invest in them so we have uh a talent development program that 90% of our senior managers and almost 100% of our employees participate in going back to their recruiting process we tell people you want to learn you want to develop professional skills you want to be trained you want to be assessed this is one of the best places in the world to work if you don't want to learn this might be a little hard and may not be the right place for you to go so I mentioned the lunch and learns we have formal Talent Development programs we uh used LinkedIn learning we have at different levels uh uh sort of talent appropriate schemes uh David gab the president has for a senior management team his own mini Academy with reading lists and discussion groups uh so we work very hard and and uh I would say that that employees expect to learn they expect to get promoted and it's one of the hardest things is teaching managers how to give constructive feedback and how to really be honest about when somebody's not meeting expectations now what is special about this session is that we have a short moment exactly four minutes for a Q&A um there is a mic in the room so there are just um three housekeeping rules please uh state your name and the company where where you from um one question only and keep it short please so who would like to ask the first question who is looking for a job at gulp Capital we can do the hiring process right here all right there's a gentleman by the name of Bobby but Bobby please introduce yourself up there first wow you have a long pipeline okay hi Lawrence uh sorry I'm forced to ask a question by the chairman right so I don't know how it will sound but how much money do you have sorry that's not the question I left my wallet with one of my colleagues no we would could you just explain more on the the talent development because we develop a lot of programs um I'm sorry I didn't introduce myself my name is manur from the adj academy and uh we look up towards those kind of programs which we can regionalize around here so just a little bit so I'm I'm a little biased I I really am uh I I went to a fancy business business school and they teach you how to be a leader but they don't teach you the basics like project management meeting hygiene I'll talk for a minute about meeting hygiene our meetings start two minutes before the time it's called if we have a 9:00 a.m. meeting and you're not there by 8:58 and the the key people are there we start one of my most fun things ever is we also require an agenda which people people have to read in advance about twice a year we start a meeting at 8:58 and we end it by 9:00 because the agenda's light or things are obvious and ending a meeting by the start time and then seeing who pops up on teams or Zoom after the meeting's over is very exciting but it teaches people respect respect for other people's time if you think about starting every meeting five minutes late and adding that up over the course of the year it's a disaster but the meeting hygiene doesn't end there it's project management there's a scribe who's following up on what's each action item who's responsible and what's the timeline and extensions are fine forgetting about timelines not fine so I really find we we hire people sometimes out of other financial institutions they have great credit skills uh they know how to make a decision or make a recommendation sometimes they even know they're supposed to say here are the three reasons three best reasons not to do it but so much of the basics of be on time be specific tell other people what you're doing is is a big part of the force multiplier for us and a big part of the education I think uh that that you might think about offering I feel you Lawrence I'm Swiss and you have to be on time um second question last question goes to Bobby because we have to finish on time uh sure thank you very much much um just a quick question you mentioned providing quality feedback to uh employees and what I found is that the big issue is that a lot of people can't handle constructive criticism or negative feedback so how do you feel the best way is to deal with that and how have you dealt with it practically so it's worse than that I I find the average high performing manager is not comfortable giving negative feedback uh so you can't give it and you can't receive it well then how do you ever learn it one of the things you do is you have a forced system we use nine Block it's not perfect it has two Dimensions based on the employees potential based on the employees performance in that period and you have to put the employee in one of the boxes now of course everybody's above average but at least somebody knows they're in the middle on the nine block not a superstar or if they're a superstar that gets reviewed higher up similarly we force the managers to say here are the good things but here are three areas for improvement they must list three things and if they don't that shows up on their three things my Swiss watch says times up thank you so much Lawrence thank you everyone [Music] I