Page 5 - Future Leaders Magazine

FOREWORD

2017-18

A MESSAGE FROM OUR LEAD SPONSOR
HSBC

eading the stories of these Future Leaders is both humbling and inspirational.
Each has taken advantage of the changes and challenges around them, shown
R personal resilience and has had the confidence to be the best they can be. Above
all else, it’s their resilience that I admire.

A while ago, I wrote a blog post for our employees about the importance of resilience, defining it
as the ability to make progress despite challenges. I described the bank’s resilience as the sum of the personal
resilience of the people that work for HSBC in the UK.
Far more interesting than my post was a comment from one of our employees who said: “Our people are
the system, skin and heart responsible for HSBC’s consciousness, passion, character, charm, charisma, beauty
and soul.”
Put far more articulately than I ever could, this also explains why a diverse workforce is important to
HSBC’s resilience.
For the past 150 years, HSBC has been helping customers to buy their homes, grow their businesses and
increase their international trade. HSBC exists to serve customers and is meaningless without them. But of
course, organisations don’t serve customers, people do.
The more diverse our workforce, the more resilient we will be because diversity allows us to connect to our
customers and, therefore, to fulfil a meaningful purpose.
So, if resilience is my job as the UK CEO, diversity is too. That means I need to create an environment
where any one of our 43,000 employees in the UK, regardless of their background, race, gender, disability,
sexual orientation or, to be honest, whatever it is that makes them feel different, has the potential to run the
bank one day. To do that, I have to make sure that only two things really matter: what people achieve and how
they go about their business.
For me, that’s why education is so important. It gives everyone a fair chance at success and inspires young
people to achieve more than they thought was possible.
Our education programmes, collectively known as the Young People Programme, reach
over 41,000 young people in the UK. That philosophy of realising potential also applies to our
employment programmes, which cover work experience, traineeships, apprenticeships and
our graduate schemes.
I’m delighted that we are sponsoring Future Leaders for the fourth year running and I’m proud to be
associated with these talented young men and women. They have it in them to become the next generation
of future leaders for any organisation. For the good of HSBC, our resilience and our customers, I hope they
choose us!

ANTONIO SIMOES
CEO, HSBC UK

2017-18 | FUTURE LEADERS 3