Non-Lawyer - Mike Clarke
Our Non-lawyer of the Month is Mike Clarke. Mike was born in Lewisham, London in 1957 to Jamaican parents. After leaving school, he joined the Civil Service, working as an executive officer for the Crown Agents for Overseas Governments and Administrations in their Fund Management Department. In 1979, having been tipped off that he was being discriminated against in terms of his next assignment, he transferred to their IT Department. Between 1981 and 1988 he was a freelance IT Consultant until joining Lloyds TSB (then Lloyds Bank) IT division in October 1988.
Within Lloyds TSB Mike managed and led groups since 1990, including Assistant to the IT Director, a secondment to the Career Management team within the University for Lloyds TSB, a secondment to Equality and Diversity (E&D) department and being the IT Resource manager/people champion.
In May 2000 he founded and became the first Chairperson of the Lloyds TSB GEM Network, a group for ethnic minority employees within Lloyds TSB Group (which includes Scottish Widows and C&G Building Society) with a current membership of over 1,000 employees. After founding GEM Network, Mike worked more closely with the Lloyds TSB Group HR and while on secondment with them in 2002 managed the operational aspects of the Lloyds TSB Group Race Equality Strategy.
He returned to IT in January 2003 to lead the Lloyds TSB’s IT corporate social responsibility drive, covering community, diversity and charity initiatives. In 2005, he became the Chairperson of Southwark’s Better Bankside CSR Group which links public, private and voluntary sector organisations to work together to encourage new community initiatives towards sustainability. Mike’s GEM Network role combined with his Equality and Diversity Experience complemented Lloyds TSB’s IT corporate social responsibility drive that includes its current and prospective employees and the inner city communities across the UK that include London, Manchester, Birmingham, Bristol, Brighton, and Edinburgh.
Beyond IT and still within the Lloyds TSB Group, Mike has acted as an adviser to the AXIS Network for Lloyd’s disabled employees and a point of contact for the Spectrum Network for Gay, Lesbian and Bisexual employees and provides consultancy to management teams across the Group nationally, including previously the Asian Jewel Awards National Stakeholder Group. As chair of the GEM Network, Mike was often first point of contact for internal and external enquiries on race matters. He co-ordinated the operational aspects of the GEM Network, linking strategies and plans with internal and external groups, (where appropriate). He was always looking for opportunities that can develop the potential of the GEM Network members and their value to the Group. He is particularly pleased at the increasing opportunities through initiatives such as the Asian Jewel Awards, India Banking Service, and Islamic Financial Services and Mike looks forward to similar initiatives emerging in Chinese and Black African/Caribbean communities too. He especially encouraged the ethnic minority workforce, to access and attend the Career Development Programme (CDP) and to do so in conjunction with having one or more mentors and a career coach.
Mike has sat on the Commission for Racial Equality (CRE) Private Sector Advisory Group. He has featured as a speaker at Race for Opportunity events sharing the Group’s best practice with other public and private sector organisations. He represented Lloyds TSB Group and the GEM Network when speaking at diversity-related conferences, workshops and events, including at the House of Commons and collected the Business in the Community Diversity Award for Excellence from HRH Prince Charles on behalf of Lloyds TSB. Mike was also Lloyds TSB Group’s main contact with MERLIN (Minority Ethnic Role-models for Learning and Inspiration) programme, Eastside Young Leaders Academy (EYLA), Brooke House 6thFormCollege in Hackney, the Race Equality in Employment Project (REEP), Executive and Professionals Network (EPN) and City Circle amongst other community groups. Internationally, in October 2004, he represented Lloyds TSB at the IMS “AutumnUniversity” in Paris on the subject of “Preventing Discrimination and Managing Diversity – UK Best Practice”.
Mike works with the Chairs of other ethnic minority networks to share best practice, and maintain momentum in raising diversity and race equality awareness across organisations, and ultimately British society. He also shares best practice with organisations towards the same aims. He encourages GEM Network members to become more influential in community initiatives such as mentoring youngsters, and assisting community charitable groups to access funding via Lloyds TSB Foundations.
Mike is a committed Christian and a keen traveller who loves escaping to warmer climates such as the Caribbean, Florida and the Mediterranean.
Below is our interview with Mike.
BLD: What was the best career advice you were given?
MC: To “look at the faces and listen to the voices”. This was a reference to why I was being overlooked for a move into the Dealing Room in 1979, my next agreed assignment. A kind senior manager, realising my naivety and that I was still looking forward to the move, took me aside to kindly explain to my why it hadn’t yet happened and why he didn’t think it was ever going to happen. I’ve always believed that as one door closes another opens, and so asked for a transfer to the IT Division and haven’t looked back since.
BLD: What was the best career advice you will give to others?
MC: “Be smart, be known for visibly adding value in all that you do”. As a community, our elders have been exemplars in working conscientiously, diligently and hard. But they didn’t reap the recognition and rewards of their hard work because often they were comfortable just having a job, secondly they didn’t mind contributing to the team’s objectives (often leaving aside advancing their own personal objectives at the same time) and thirdly they were not given to “blowing their own trumpets”, certainly not as loudly as their white counterparts. Nowadays the concept of “working smart” is well known, I suggest in every interaction in the workplace, let it be obvious how you, your actions and your suggestions and your decisions have added value – and not wait for an appropriate moment in a performance appraisal to have to remind your manager.
BLD: If you were to choose another job/role, other than what you are doing, what would it be and why?
MC: I’m acutely aware that we need far more interaction between the successful achievers in our communities (particularly males) and those who are often being neglected in our education system (particularly young black males). We need to offer them more options than music and sports as potential career paths. We need to help them to realise, where they have not already, that as a community we have people who grew up with similar peer pressures as they experience, from similar family backgrounds and the same neighborhoods as they are in, from the very same schools as they attend… Show them that we are willing to help them, to meet them, to offer coaching and mentoring opportunities, even work experience/shadowing opportunities to help make a difference in their outlook on why it is important to study at school/college/university, to get the best exam results they can, to open up a greater variety of potential job avenues. We need to be available to them. It’s OK to have personal/professional network of contacts when already in employment, but they need it to stand a chance of getting into employment… that’s exactly what I’d like to be making happen, putting especially our young black males in contact with those of us who are achieving our dreams and who are happy to show an interest and concern in helping them to achieve their dreams.
BLD: The person you most admire (dead or alive) and why?
MC: Every single member of the Windrush generation (and similar) who left their beautiful homelands to come to the UK to progress their dreams, and then suffered discrimination in so many forms (employment, housing, financial etc), who suffered indignities and atrocities, but who did so with their heads held high with utmost dignity and respect to give this generation and those who follow us a chance of achieving our own dreams and in doing so letting the Windrush generation know their personal sacrifices were not in vain. As we achieve we feel their support, and we recognise they paved the way, and whatever we suffer now in employment and housing and educational opportunities does not compare to what they suffered in the late 1950s, the 1960s and the 1970s.
BLD: If able to, please tell us your views about what practical steps the legal profession and users of legal services can take to ensure that organisations pay more than lip service to diversity.
MC: “Monitoring with effective commentary afterwards, including competitor analysis”. Probably already being done, however, the facts are often what make the decision-makers in organisations take a proactive stance on diversity. Just how many of our number have passed their legal qualifications, and where are they now? Numerically, are they choosing to work for “competitors”? And how are the brightest of our legal number faring, why wouldn’t the legal profession want to attract more of such quality into their own organisations? How do the demographical figures look for the legal profession? And once the monitoring has taken place, and it’s oh so obvious that the numbers demonstrate the wealth of talent in our communities not being representative at all levels, then simple action plans with practical steps such as law firms partnering with local inner city schools/colleges to give a talk in assemblies about working in the legal profession, to allow their students to visit a law firm, sponsoring/presenting a small award to the most improved student in GCSE Law Studies (for example) at the prize-giving, attending the school/college’s careers fair, allowing students to interview a “law partner”, encouraging law professionals to allow a teacher to job shadow them to gain a better insight into the legal profession etc. These are just one dimension of a programme which is ethical, is corporately responsible, reaches all communities, but by virtue of being “inner city” actually focuses on the communities which are generally most at risk of exclusion from the positive sides of the law/legal profession. If such corporate responsible actions are taken, firstly it’s more than just “lip service to diversity” and importantly it will open the minds of all concerned to the true underlying benefits of embracing diversity in business operations.
BLD: The most famous/interesting/challenging diversity issues you have had to tackle in your professional role to date.
MC: Receiving the Diversity Award for Excellence from HRH Prince Charles after founding the GEM Network was a real surprise and gave my late mother an immense feeling of pride, reinforced my sense of how our parents who came over in the first wave of immigration sacrificed so much in terms of their own aspirations and ambitions, and did so to create the way their own hopes to be realised by us, their children and grand-children. Being invited to speak in Paris on the subject of “Managing Discrimination in the Workplace” and realising within the first 10 minutes of the conference, just how BIG issue race discrimination can be in France, particularly at the application stage with the scrutiny on family name, residential address, and photograph! I very quickly realised I had to change the tone of my address, though not the substance of it. The additional challenge at the conference was on the second day during a Question and Answer panel when it became clear that the French Black and Arab delegates were looking to me to not waste the opportunity to make clear to the leaders of French organisations present that what was possible in the UK should be possible also for them in France. It was amazing to hear them speak so passionately when asking questions (well, actually they made statements rather than ask questions!) about what they admired about the progress of Black professionals in the UK. They really admire the number of Black faces on our news and documentary programmes!
BLD: What are the greatest issues/challenges on diversity that needs to be tackled now?
MC: I still see, read and hear of so many instances of “cross cultural” ignorance, where it’s the sub-conscious barriers that prevent the benefits of equality, diversity and inclusion being realised. It will get better over time, but still too many influential people have little/no tangible experience of us and our communities because they didn’t grow up with us in their neighbourhoods, in their schools, or (for some) in their organisations, so they too often under-recognise, under-value or under-reward us. Too many organisations sponsor equality/diversity programmes either for minority groups or for people to self-select onto, when actually it’s the leaders who need to undertake the programmes first, with their management teams, and then allow the programmes to “cascade” down to through the senior and middle-management to enable genuine progress on the diversity agenda in their organisations. Such an approach might really help address some of the inappropriate “phobias” that exist in the UK at the moment.
BLD: What are you most passionate/happiest about?
MC: I just love seeing people thrive in achieving their aspirations, ambitions and goals. It’s all the more satisfying as I spot where there’s been a real “barrier breakthrough” where the achievement is now just accepted as the way things ought to be, when actually not so long ago there were obstacles that prevented such “meritocracy” actually prevailing! And if I’ve been in any small way instrumental in some of the “breaking down the barrier”, then I’m happiest. I’d like to look back in years to come and see our community represented on merit across all aspects of society and business, civic leaders, political leaders, QCs etc, and if I can do so with a sense of pride in the achievements of our community, then I can only imagine how happy our parents’ generation must feel their sacrifices were “worth it all”.
BLD: What are your dislikes/makes you angry?
MC: I still get upset when organisational leaders and their senior people try to tackle diversity “on our behalf”. They look at under-representation in their own organisations and ask me how should they go about setting up an ethnic minority network. I now just tell them straight that if the organisational culture of their organisations is mature enough, and merits it, then the ethnic minority professionals can decide for themselves if an ethnic minority network will add value for themselves as well as perceived benefits for the organisations. Another “dislike” of mine surrounds the area of those of our community who just don’t actually want to help pass the baton of personal success onto others from our community. It’s one thing not to have the time to do so, or not to have the resources/contacts to do so, but it’s an entirely different thing to take the attitude “I had to make it on my own, why shouldn’t they!” The African proverb is still true, “it takes a village to raise a child”, and our communities in the UK can only be strongest when the more able in our communities lend their resources to help the young and aspiring in our communities. The Chinese proverb is also so appropriate here, it makes me angry when we lag behind other communities in self-sufficiency because we so consciously refuse to ”teach a man to fish”. As professionals we didn’t want a hand-out, neither should we think all the youngsters in our communities just want a hand-out, some just want us to share some professional and personal inspiration with them to motivate them towards their own personal career success in a increasing diverse workplace.
BLD: If you could rule the world for a day what would you change/do?
MC: Wouldn’t I just love to have people “walking a mile in someone else’s shoes”. Oh to get some of our civic and political, business and professional leaders to experience life from the perspective of the opposite to themselves... Can you imagine the learning process as they get a “fish out of water” look at their own life from the actual viewpoint of another person’s life. Hey, they wouldn’t have a Damascus Road conversion, but surely some of the equality/diversity blinkers, some of the unjustifiable biases and prejudices, some of their personal blindspots would be pulled back a little, surely so! In the business world, we have the “Take Your Daughter To Work Day” and it can be an eye-opener trying to explain why things are the way they are at the office to your young daughter, why office politics prevails. Well, imagine the impact on people’s tolerance and understanding as they tackle life for a day in someone else’s shoes, for a white QC to walk in the shoes of a young aspiring Black man from the inner city, who has challenges enough avoiding the pressures of the gang culture, the knife culture, the gun culture around him and is just hoping he won’t be judged on the spelling of his name, the residential area he lives in, or the colour of his skin when he seeks equality in education and employment, and a career as a QC being just one of maybe the 10% of QCs who are non-white... now wouldn’t that be something, at least for a day!
BLD: Do tell us about your family
MC: I’m the second eldest of seven siblings, the eldest of the 6 born here in the UK. My father sacrificed so much for us and our mother to provide the best he could for us. Mum gave the last 6 years of her life caring for him 24 hours a day, seven days a week because he is paralysed and unable to speak or eat – fed through a tube direct into his stomach because he had stroke after stroke after stroke. It is only natural that I join with my siblings and do my 24 hours a week turn to live and care for him in the parental home. I’ve been doing so for more than four years honouring the promise we made to Mum before she died that we would not ever put him into a nursing home, but would care for him as lovingly as he cared for and brought us all up. As I have the power-of-attorney and am his primary carer, I’m hoping that my own 3 children (Stephen is 27 and is a consultant with IBM, Annisha is 26 and a primary school teacher, and Joanna is 23 the proud mother of my grandson) in watching their Dad, uncle and aunts look after their grandfather they will always identify with the benefits of a strong close-knit family, and by extension a strong, close-knit community. Though divorced, their mother and I remain good friends.