USA 
United Kingdom
Throughout Vanguard’s 50-year history, the investment management firm has kept mission and purpose at the core of its employee experience, architecting all people practices around the opportunity for staff to be a part of something bigger than themselves.
The approach is working. Maxim Tambling, Vanguard’s Head of Global Talent Management, joins the HR Grapevine podcast to outline the company’s market-leading approach to talent attraction and retention.
We discuss efforts such as ‘Developing Leaders from Within’, ‘Culture as a Strategic Asset,’ and ‘Purpose-Driven Employee Engagement,’ all of which contribute to Vanguard’s impressive attrition rate of 8%, nearly half of the industry average.
Host: Hello everyone, and welcome back to another episode of the HR Grapevine podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Broomfield, Head of Content for HR grapevine. And welcome back to our first US focused episode of 2026. I'm delighted to kick off another year of wonderful podcasts by being joined by Maxim Tambling, Vanguard's Head of Global Talent Management. Maxim brings over twenty years of HR and talent management experience to his role, leading a team of two hundred professionals. He oversees strategic recruitment, leadership development, employee engagement and succession planning, ensuring Vanguard's attracts and retains top talent. His forward thinking approach and commitment to diversity and inclusion have fostered a high performing, client focused culture. He's a strong advocate for continuous learning and personal development, and we're going to be touching on a lot of those themes over the course of today's episode as we discuss his talent lessons, touching on subjects like developing leaders from within culture, strategic assets, and purpose driven employee engagements, all of which contribute to Vanguard's impressive attrition rate of eight percent, which sits at nearly half of the industry average. So what can other companies learn from Vanguard's ability to retain talent? Well. Let's find out. And a very warm welcome to you, Maxim.
Guest: Fantastic. Thank you. Benjamin. Really glad to be here.
Host: Wonderful. Well, as I mentioned, fantastic news on the attrition rate sitting at eight percent, nearly half of the industry average. What can other companies learn from your ability to retain talent?
Guest: Yeah. So definitely it starts with mission and purpose for us. Right. So really from our founding fifty years ago, it was on a really revolutionary idea of how do we set up a business that is genuinely set up to deliver for our clients? And all throughout that time, we've tried to architect all of our people practices around delivering on that mission and purpose. So that's resonated for our fifty years. But I would say actually, even more so now as employees and people are looking for meaning through their work, and we are genuinely able to deliver on that meaning through their work of offering people the chance to be something bigger than themselves.
Host: Fantastic. And I know a really big area that's important to Vanguard is the concept of investing in middle management. And it's well, I've referred to him before as the maligned middle managers. Often they're kind of the focus of criticism in the media and the subject. We've seen quite a lot of layoffs over the course of 2025 from other organizations that have targeted a lot of sort of individuals sitting at that, at that layer. But for Vanguard, it's an area that you take very seriously. You're investing as perhaps others cut back. So what support do you give to individuals who sit in those roles to help them thrive?
Guest: Yeah, we do love our middle managers, because that's the group that carries our culture an masse to all of our crew. Right? We call our employees crew here at Vanguard, and we've focused very much on giving development at key touch points for those middle managers, like, what's the first time into people management, what's their promotion into their next stage and growth there? And so we've wanted to really ensure that they are set up for success through having not only clear development, but then also the tools and support that are around them to ensure that they're connecting our crew to that culture. So with that, we've been focused over, uh, you know, certainly the last few years of those clear touch points. But as we move forward, we're looking very much at how do we have an always on approach to development, right, where there's an offering that's very contextual, that's understanding changes in the marketplace, and that's what we're building for in 2026.
Host: Fantastic. And as well as investing in middle management, there's a broader approach you're taking at Vanguard across your workforce, giving them the opportunities to take part in talent rotation and succession planning and a real three hundred sixty approach to building skills. So perhaps you could kick off by just sharing a bit more about your successful talent development initiatives and what they look like at Vanguard.
Guest: Yeah, I think the thing we're known for mostly is our approach to strategic rotation, and that is moving people across the organization for their growth and career development, and we use that very purposefully as an always on development lever that enables people to gain the skills and experiences they need to continue to deliver the value that we need from them for our the benefit of our clients and at the very top levels. We do this very, very purposefully in a quite structured way. But then that culture flows through all of the organization in terms of sharing people around different areas, like we have a brilliant culture and a mindset from our leaders of wanting to promote and move their people across the whole company. And so to give you an example of that, like we've recently just promoted a new officer class, which is our sort of peak leadership designation that we have in the organization and of that group that we just promoted, forty four percent of them have worked in multiple different divisions across Vanguard, and even more impressively, thirty eight percent of them actually started with the company through one of our college recruiting programs. So when you consider that and that longevity and that career growth. We believe it's because of our approach to strategic rotation that keeps people engaged, that keeps people fresh, that keeps them learning. And that's why we really value that lever and see it as quite unique compared to certainly the other places I've worked in my career. And as I hear from new people joining our organization externally, they're like, wow, we've never seen this before.
Host: Absolutely. Yeah, I'd definitely be keen to learn a bit more about that and really help us help you to develop leaders from within. I think we kind of seen a lot of areas now, organizations struggling to recruit for some of those really difficult to defined areas, including really great leaders. And those are perhaps the individuals, especially this kind of time you need to have within your organization. But through those rotation programs and other areas of building that, that always on cultural development, you've been able to be a bit better and more pragmatic about developing those pipeline of leaders from within.
Guest: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, let me give you a real life example of that, of where it's resulting in success. So we've got a great hypertension leader on one of our succession plans for, you know, C-suite type roles. She started with us in finance and really got to understand the mechanics of the business, like how we operate from that economic point of view. Then moved into product, and so actually had to generate the offers that end up in our clients hands. So she understood what is it that they value? What don't they value. Then moved into strategy. So understood those sort of macro pieces of what should we be going after. What are the target client segments, how do we access those segments. And now most recently we've rotated her into a client facing role in our advice business. And that was all done purposefully because as we look to her potential and being able to move into one of those C-suite level roles, we want somebody who can connect across all of that. You know, they've been face to face with clients so they can understand and empathize with them. They understand the economics of the business, and they understand how to construct products that are actually used and valued by clients. So that is a great example of that really purposeful rotation approach that's deliberately building the skills and experiences necessary to be able to operate at that. You know, that C-suite level for us.
Host: Fantastic. Well, we've covered a lot on the development side and really giving people those opportunities to thrive, the support they get from managers and obviously from that pipeline of leaders. But I wonder, are there any other sort of particular, whether it's a specific policy or more an approach, a way of working that you found has really helped drive engagement at Vanguard? Um, it's really you feel contributing to that ability. You have to, to retain talent. And those individuals you've worked so hard to develop within your organization or to bring in.
Guest: Yeah. If I started at like our big architecture level, right. We have this diagram because we've recently gone through an approach of saying, make sure our cultural pillars are really crystal clear for everybody. Like we've had always a great lived experience of our culture. Let's make sure then that we're purposeful in what are those cultural pillars. We need to be successful for our next fifty years. So we're in the midst of doing a whole lot of work on that. And the architecture we built was this diagram that started with the culture pillars as the heart. Right. And then we drew a straight line through our big HR levers. So recruitment, onboarding, performance development and compensation. And we set an expectation that as much as possible, the practices that we apply in each of those areas should be that straight line alignment to the culture pillars. And so that's been a great way to step back from our processes that sometimes, you know, you get overengineered. You build out a little bit too much onto them. They're now losing their way of why do we even perform the steps we do. We've paired that back and looked and gone. No. Do we have that alignment? And so a really tangible example on the development side that we've done recently is we looked at what our culture pillars are and the four key pillars. And we've said, do we have a development offering that's building the skills so that people can live that culture? Right. So if you look at, say, one of our pillars around investor zeal. And we're deliberate in our language of being very vanguard, right. If you've got investor zeal, what do you need to know? What do you need to be able to do to bring that to life? So you've got to have knowledge of investor preferences. You have to understand investment fundamentals. And so that's then modules that we build in our development offering for all crew to be able to bring that to life. And we've done that for each of the pillars that we have is that straight line alignment. So you can say I'm doing this development program so I get better at Investor Zeal, which I can clearly see is one of the great pillars of our culture.
Host: Absolutely. And I think it's really useful to get that example of how you're being able to bring that culture to life within the organization. I think a lot of a lot of people probably have their values on their company page or in their onboarding guide or whatever it might be, and that's where it stops, right? You just don't quite see that culture being brought to life within the organization. So really investing to give people, like I say, the skills they need is, is a massively important step.
Guest: Absolutely. And so if I like, build on that, you know, one of the other bits that we regularly hear, which I love, right. So I look after our talent acquisition function as well. And we do get you to meet a lot of people when you join Vanguard. It's one of our processes where you'll hear from a number of different people in the interviewing process, and without fail, I hear from candidates of. They're amazed at how consistent all of the interviewers are in terms of their messaging. And what's brilliant about that, we actually don't overengineer that that's that is organic. People are selling the message of the company genuinely and organically because it is their lived experience. And so then I check in with people after they've joined the company, and that's again, the bit that I hear is that alignment of their reality with the experience that they had and what they heard through the recruitment process. So again, the more you can get that tight alignment, that absolute crystal clarity of what is it you're going to experience when you're here at this company, then we think that that's what translates to some of the leading engagement and retention rates that we have.
Host: Fantastic. And as I mentioned, this is our first episode of 2026. We're actually recording it at the back end of 2025. But I'd love to hear about what you have planned for the next twelve months and beyond. Sure, it's a constant process of improvement when it comes to finding those new ways to tap into those areas of retention, to offer that development culture, to invest in engagement of employees. So what's, uh, what's planned for the next year or any specific changes or programs or things you're excited about bringing to the workforce?
Guest: Yeah. So I'm not sure it's possible to have a conversation without saying something about AI in the current environment. And that's exactly where we're looking into 2026, and we're all geared up and we're going to roll out in January of 2026, is one of our AI agents to support our leaders across the organization. And so this is a leadership coach that will help and our current use cases, although I think there's a lot more. But the things we're rolling out to support with initially are around that performance process. So how can this help leaders set better goals? How can it help do that distillation of, you know, a broad goal statement into something that is really applying the principles of Smart goal setting so that there's enhanced clarity for our people. It's a coach, then that leaders can be bouncing off, you know, our AI agent, to be able to understand how can I approach some maybe difficult performance conversations? How do I give feedback that's going to land and be effective for this person? And this AI agent actually asks questions. It explores and it gives real coaching to leaders and why we think this is a game changer. If you look at most businesses models around like HR, business partnering, there's only quite a thin layer of leaders that you can get to through an HR business partner in a sustainable way. This now opens up that level of coaching to every single leader we have in the organization. So all four thousand get the benefit of a personalized individual coach to help them with some of these scenarios. So that's one of the ones that we're most excited as it ties into our overall approach to developing leaders continuously and ensuring they've got the support not only in a classroom type environment, but then day to day, moment to moment, right at the point where they need it.
Host: Absolutely. I think that's probably what we're starting to see a bit more of, is we've had perhaps over the last twelve months or twenty four months, how long of sort of a bit more experimentation, giving people sort of the tools to go and test out different areas, but seeing a bit more of that sort of structured, targeted approach, helping give a bit more prioritization to where some of these tools can be used within the organization, giving employees the support that they need throughout that transformation, I think, is where we're seeing organizations shift next year. So wonderful to hear about that. But yeah, fantastic to be just diving into to this subject with you and hear about all the different ways you're investing in employees and just creating that place where people love to stay once they're once they're through the door. So, Maxim, a huge thank you to you for joining us on the podcast today.
Guest: Thank you very much, Benjamin.
