The CEO of one of the world’s largest hedge funds enjoys Slack emojis as much as you do — because ‘authenticity is a superpower’

Welcome to Human Capital, an open exploration of the ideas and people moving financial services forward. In each edition, we feature a leader or rising star who’s changing the game in his or her own way. “Finance is an apprentice business,” one often hears in this sector. Here are some of the teachers. Click Subscribe above to be notified of future editions.

Run into Robyn Grew on the subway in New York or London’s tube, and you might not realize you’re speaking with the leader of the largest publicly traded hedge-fund firm.

That’s because, as Grew is the first to admit, she is not the “streaming-service version” of a hedge-fund manager.

I wanted to explore what the 55-year-old former lawyer meant by that, and so around her first anniversary in Man Group ’s corner office, we spent an hour discussing that and more — including her early move to finance from law, the evolution of investment management, technology’s growing role in the industry, and the unique leadership style that sets her and, she hopes, the firm’s culture apart from the rest.

Below are excerpts from our conversation.

What were your early influences in life?

Both my parents were in public service in some ways. My dad was an NHS doctor; my mum was a state school teacher. And they came from relatively humble backgrounds themselves. That has been part of my connection with society at large. As a youngster, I was always interested in community and justice and social issues. I was the kid who would have a number of banners in my bedroom waiting to go on a march to protest something or to support something.

I was always thinking about what the “right” thing was, while believing that every voice should matter. I wasn’t going to just stand by and not add my two cents. So, perhaps not surprisingly, I studied law. I saw myself as that barrister who would stand up in a court and represent clients, and I did just that.

But then you find yourself at the heady age where you think, you know what, maybe crime doesn’t pay. I decided to go into industry and explore this idea of commerce, with the intention of learning as much as I could to pivot my career and become a commercial barrister.

It’s perhaps the only career plan I’ve ever really had. And I stand before you today having never returned back to the commercial bar.

How have you seen financial services, particularly investment management, evolve over your career?

Early on, I was at Fidelity for a little bit, then I ended up at LIFFE, the financial futures and options exchange in London. It was proper open outcry, and I was 5-foot-1 in these big trading pits of really huge people, where size mattered in being able to literally reach over and trade contracts. Then, into investment banking. Ultimately, 15 years ago, I moved into the buy side.

Through that time, I’ve seen the evolution of exchanges — from open outcry to electronic. You’ve seen the investment-banking world go through huge booms and busts in the space of the great financial crisis. And we’ve seen this tremendous change in the development of alternative-investment management, and indeed the way that people have looked for financing and capital in the world.

Also changing are the challenges that allocators — endowments, annuities, pension funds, local councils, sovereign-wealth funds — are faced with while trying to navigate the world and return value to, for example, pensioners who have saved all of their lives.

So, how has it all changed? In one word: dramatically.

It’s the strength of financial services that it has benefited from some of the smartest, most capable minds who are navigating these challenges. It has never been a space that has remained static.

If you want to be part of a fast-moving, globally important, highly technical, very creative environment, you’re at the cutting edge when you’re in financial services.

That’s why I’ve stayed.

The buy side in particular, over the last 15 or so years, has moved from “Here is a product; I have one product; it’s a very nice product; would you like to buy this product?” to a space where we are now much more sophisticated in the way that we can understand the challenges faced by each allocator in style and type. We’re not in a textbook world — we’re not in a world where you can take a blank sheet of paper and write down something that is perfect. If you did that, tomorrow it wouldn’t be.

So, what I have seen is this movement toward being more able, more capable, more equipped to partner with your clients in finding solutions to their challenges. That is why, for organizations like Man Group, it is about content to offer. It’s about capability. It’s about scale. It’s about technology. And it’s about listening. It’s an old-fashioned skill, and yet I can’t emphasize enough how important it still is.

You mentioned scale, which is perennially debated as a pro versus con in investing. Why is it important?

If I go home and try to cook a meal, I open up my cabinet and fridge and I’m looking for content. If I have a lemon that’s been there for a couple of weeks and some dried pasta, I don’t think people are choosing to come and have dinner with me tonight.

It’s not only about having the content, either; it’s about having the capability. So, the ingredients plus the skill plus the equipment on which to cook.

So, scale is important both in terms of what you can do — what is the content, what are the ingredients that you have — but also in the ability to understand them and seamlessly put them together. Scale for us is both of those things. It’s the operating platform into which, over the last five years, we’ve invested around $600 million in our technology, in our quant capability, in our data-science capability.

You’re also seeing the benefits of scale in allocators needing to face fewer investment managers. They are continually challenged with particular queries from their own investors, they can’t be managing 100 or 200 different managers. What they’re looking for is managers who are able to be in a strategic partnership with them, and who are going to be around to match their maturity and duration.

What do you bring to your work today that you learned or honed as a lawyer?

I think great lawyers listen. Lawyers are good at taking in vast amounts of data and being able to get to the heart of issues quickly. I think there is an innate risk-management capability in being a lawyer.

It is absolutely part of me to want to represent what we do, to make this world accessible in plain English. One of the things that has changed over time is there was a moment when everybody thought we were the best employers ever, and that everybody who was smart wanted to go into investment management or financial services. And then we hit this thing called FAANG, and the great skill sets that we’re all keen on looked elsewhere.

So, I’m very clear about making sure that our people understand what we do every day, because our people are our assets. The real assets of my firm go up and down in the elevator every day. And my advocacy comes into play to tell them that what we do matters. I have one goal at Man Group, and that is to return value to people who have saved, who have paid into their pensions for 40 years. It’s not my money. It’s their money.

In leadership, it’s incredibly important that you set out what the organization does, the impact it aims to have, and everybody’s contribution toward achieving it. The service of being excellent at what you do matters to a lot more people.

How do you think about hiring, particularly for technologists who drive Man Group’s quantitative capabilities?

I want to hire the highest-quality people everywhere in the organization. I enjoy not being the smartest person in the room. That’s important to me. I want to empower them.

If I’m not prepared to give them the keys to the car, that’s probably not the right hire.

For technologists, we empower them with a toolkit of things. Open architecture is incredibly important. When you say to a technologist that they’re not going to be made to stay in one lane, that they will have real-world and very complex problems to solve, that excites them.

I get asked all the time whether our discretionary investment managers worry about technology. They love technology! All of a sudden, they can run sentiment analysis across thousands of research reports, as just one example. We tool them up.

And generative AI — I’m often asked whether we use it or worry about it. We think it’s an extraordinary tool in the hands of experts. Think about surgical tools — over recent decades, their precision has become extraordinary. However brilliant those tools are, you still would not want me operating on you. It’s the same with some of the most powerful tools out there in technology — you want skilled operators. It’s incredibly important that you know the datasets that you’re trying to interrogate, the parameters of the interrogation, the quality of the results that come back, and how they add or not add value to your process.

We use technology to enable us to be better at what we do — to find signals quicker, to combine nonlinear data points. But we put it in the hands of experts. And it’s not fully making investment decisions any time soon.

What are some of your leadership principles?

For me, an incredibly important piece is to be accessible. The entire senior management team is accessible in this organization.

Creating clear culture lines, value sets — also incredibly important.

People who might not achieve greatness at Man Group are those who don’t hold these cultural imperatives for me.

And I try my best to live them. I don’t sit here as perfect. But I think you must walk what you talk. You provide accessibility, you’re open, you’re responsive to queries, you invite discussion and challenge. I want productive challenge in this organization.

One of my challenges is that when you hire really capable, smart people, they don’t like failing. It’s quite difficult for really high-performing people to fail. And yet, in order to be better and smarter and ultimately brilliant at what we do, we need to continue to be creative and entrepreneurial. That, inevitably, means you have to fail.

Creating a space where people can explore new things, try new things, fail, and understand that that’s OK is incredibly important to me.

I am not a command-and-control leader. I fight against it. I turn up for work every day and am exactly like this, so people can expect consistency from me.

I send a Slack message to the firm every week or so with a report card of what I’ve been doing and thinking that week. It’s easy not to know what a CEO does, so I like giving people transparency on what I’m doing and why. And I enjoy the emojis that I get back! Very often, I haven’t even realized we’ve got certain emojis on there. But I write that Slack message not for the top 50 people in the organization — I write it for everybody. It’s written in plain English. And it’s about helping the entire organization understand what we are doing and why.

You brought up ‘Billions’ with me earlier, the hit drama series about the hedge-fund industry. You don’t strike me as a Bobby Axelrod type, the show’s hard-charging protagonist.

I’m happy to bust a stereotype. I don’t know another way. I think that authenticity is a superpower for everyone.

It takes courage to recognize that part of your superpower is not turning up and trying to be something that you aren’t.

I cannot stress enough that we are all better because of the people around us. I’m not the CEO of Man Group because I’m somehow an unbelievably brilliant person — I am not. I’m talking to you because I’ve been fortunate, because I’ve worked hard, because I’ve had great people around me, and because I continue to have great people around me.

Join the conversation with your own take on these topics in the comments below.