Culture Club
Earlier this week in my Penneylaneonline.com Fan Club, I posted an article about Contact Energy’s Chief Executive, David Baldwin called ‘The Soul of Business’. It’s a great article about contemporary leadership.
The incident in question and highlighted by the article was when Baldwin “snapped publicly, in writing, in response to a question on his internal blog and was rebuked equally publicly. A customer service representative had highlighted how Baldwin’s terse response had failed on all four of the company’s values: united, open, first and fresh.
And she was bloody right. What she did was fabulous,” says Baldwin. Through his blog he apologised to the person he’d been sharp with and congratulated the customer service representative, encouraging everyone else to act as she had.” Baldwin puts openness above all at Contact. The only difference between his desk and others at Contact is that he has two of them — one in Auckland and one in Wellington, both in an open-plan environment.”
I like this article on a number of levels but mainly because Baldwin’s approach is neither new or ground breaking even but it is, when practiced in a business environment, culturally smart and sharp. In my old life as a Senior Manager in Recruitment, I implemented the same approach. I worked for a corporation at the time.
The owner of the business preferred a more old school approach (his own office and a closed door most of the time) but he soon got to like the culture I built in my Branch. Why? Because not only was morale consistently high, we were hitting it on the bottom line too.
I had the smallest team in the Corporation but our culture put us ahead of four other bigger branches with bigger teams. I love remembering the fact my team and me high-fived it around the room when the Weekly results came in each Monday. We didn’t always cross the line first mind, but we sure bit at the heels of those that did when we didn’t.
I remember the first day I completely rearranged the Branch and put Consultants desks facing each other. The melt-down was pulpable. And imagine my Consultant’s surprise when I chose a desk (facing the main door) opposite one of the ‘baby’ Consultants. It threw him completely. Like Baldwin, sitting some place, shut away from my team seemed inconceivable to me.
He said, “Culture, it’s the soul of a business. Contact has a very open culture, non-hierarchical. I do get interrupted from time to time, but that’s what I value. People see me, they know who I’m talking to. There are no boundaries around me.”
Angela Neighbours from Tonic, an Auckland based People Development & Executive Coaching Company said, “Openness and collaboration were cited by many CEOs as being key to their organisations’ culture. That openness grows innovation because people are allowed to think, to question and experiment. They are challenged. Without the right culture, you don’t get innovation and without innovation, you can’t grow a business.”
Being ‘seen’ by your team sustains morale, working at the coalface with them allows you as a leader to identify quickly areas for fine tunement and even actual modeling of cultural values. In short, if you’re the leader, keeping your finger on the pulse inside your business can help you in your capacity to sit ‘on’ the business to direct, maneuver and guide it successfully during those times of innovation.
My New Zealand business partner is a very practical lady, she’s smart and she calls a spade a spade. There’s something very refreshing about that. Between us, we have crossed over into each others worlds and together we have stepped off into a whole other one that has seen us develop not just one product but a quintet of them to take to the market. It’s exciting and we still can’t believe we’ve developed, tested and trialled them so successfully. Yet we have! I pinch myself sometimes.
Writing this blog today makes me think we shouldn’t be so surprised. There was a need and a niche and we’re filling it. There is a great deal of equality in our partnership despite my broader experiences in business. My business partner brings her own levels and areas of expertise so that adding scalability to the business model puts us both on an even playing field. We’ve both never developed a product from scratch, it’s a euphoric feeling when you nail it.
Ask us, and we’ll tell you we’re fairly ordinary girls, out the back of Onga Onga, competently assisted by our friend Nik who deserves all the kudos for the progressive development of our product. Three girls who think, question and continue to experiment. Contemporary leadership today, it’s an open sandwich on the all day menu. And may I just add, if we can do it so can you!
