Your weekly disruption

Building An A Team

The best thing that our HR director introduced was where you reviewed results times behaviour. And that was the big thing. At CCA, it probably leaned a lot more towards results and not the behaviour. It wasn’t necessarily that important how you got your results as long as you got the results, and that creates a very competitive environment. It can create quite a passive environment as well because other people then start opting out of that.

Lion had well established, 10 behaviours that add value. Normally people just pay a bit of lip service. This notion was challenged when a new CEO came in. He wanted to change some of the values and behaviours of the business. I remember being at the leadership conference, and there was a bit of an uproar. “Hang on a minute. I know you’re the new CEO, but we actually really love these behaviours. And we love these values, and we don’t see any point in changing them.” It was a really interesting learning for this new CEO, and, also for some of the newcomers like myself that when people actually do believe. You could hear them, talking about them in different meetings, that was guiding decisions that we were making. You can see people would play back a behaviour or a value of the business that did that. So for me, it was, again that my philosophy for managing these teams is always have that results and behaviours in there as well.

The mantra stated that the values will drive the behaviours, the behaviours will drive the culture of the company, and the culture will drive the engagement of our people. And the engagement of our people will drive the engagement of our customer base. We always measured where we were on our values. We measured how we’re going on our behaviours. So each year, everyone would be measured on the 10 behaviours. And that was all done by 360-degree feedback. There was feedback from your boss, feedback from your peers, feedback from your team, and it was an environment where you can get very open and honest feedback. The great thing about open honest feedback is you have nowhere to hide. And when you do receive it: “Okay, I get it. I think that’s right.” It really drives individuals to manage themselves, to make sure, especially as you become a leader in this business. Our HR director, Bob Barber used to say to us: “one of the hardest things is actually managing yourself and your behaviours because they have so much influence on others, especially when you’re in leading roles.”

When I got a promotion to the Sales Director role here at Lion, the previous Sales Director caught up with me. I remember one of the things he said to me: “Look, what made you successful in the previous level or role is not going to make you successful going forward now.” He also said “don’t try and be across every decision, you don’t need to do that. Your hardest decision will be to decide on which ones you need to get involved in. Really, you’ll be making less decisions at that new level. But they’ll be more important decisions.” But it was spot on to because you just didn’t want to micromanage.

I have a real passion for coaching. At first it amused me that I had to come up with all the answers with my external coach. You want to empower others to actually do that. Those coaching sessions were all about discipline, reflection. It’s a skill that I think every leader needs to have. You’ve got to be mindful enough that you can see how your behaviour, and how others are responding to you. You’ve got to reflect afterwards. And then work on areas that how you would avoid those behaviours, which may not be as becoming as collaborative as you as you’d want them to be. You can sit back and go right? “How do I check in before I go into meetings to make sure I’m going to show up the right way.”? And if you’re coming off the back of the meeting, when you’re annoyed about something or something’s happened, you need to gather your thoughts and make sure you’re not taking that into the next meeting, because you’re just wasting everyone’s time there. So, the coach has been really, really, really beneficial to me, but it’s probably more the skill lessons in the end that you have to coach yourself, and you’ve got a better workout technique to do that.

My biggest lesson is your career is not going to be linear. You are going to move around. And I’d really encourage people that do come into the industry to keep moving around. All of the studies show that people can have 123, different functional area experiences, that’s going to help them be a better leader in the future. So don’t just think it’s all going to be sales or marketing or finance, find ways to cross your paths over into different areas. And you need to be a bit brave about that.

You need to have a bit of confidence about that. A lot of people would probably may not have that sort of confidence level. And I would just say really back yourself. You can do these sorts of moves within existing businesses. There is a fair bit of safety around that to do that. And we do a lot of that at Lion, we can sort of put people in different roles. It may not work out every time. But don’t worry, what you will to gain from that experience will put you in good stead for the next role as well. So be brave and look left and right at all the different opportunities because when you’re going to learn more, you’re going to build your CV. And you’re going to get some great experience as well.