Yesterday, we visited the University of Salford Media City UK Campus for their breakfast networking event, where our CEO, Arjen, was a keynote speaker.
The captive audience gathered to hear about the importance of leadership in driving growth and building resilience among small and medium-sized businesses.
Arjen thoroughly enjoyed sharing our experiences at this event, and we received some fantastic feedback afterwards.
The talk was recorded, and we look forward to sharing the recording with you soon. In the meantime, we wanted to highlight some of the key pointers that Arjen shared, which you may find useful for driving growth and building resilience within your organisation.
1. How to Impove Performance
So how do we improve performance, and by that, I mean what are the inputs required to build a long-term successful, more sustainable and resilient business? This is all about building leadership capabilities, resilience and confidence.
The way we chose to go about this is by creating an organisation with a culture of High Performance led by its Purpose and Values. Over the years, we have created our Values Handbook – the most important document in our company – more important than our contracts of employment.
If I could distil all the things in this book into 1 idea, it would be that to improve performance, we would have to change the way we thought about ourselves and our customers.
In order to achieve this, we recognised that we would have to shift peoples’ behaviours. Not easy to do, but if we could do that, we will create more engaged, naturally resilient colleagues, which would be a genuine win/win for colleagues, customers and the organisation.
And it all boils down to our 5 values.
2. Our Values
A) Image and Reputation:
This was so important when I came into the business because it was under threat when all the change and uncertainty were going on. People were saying the company is finished. It will fail. It is going to be sold. What’s this guy doing coming up from London thinking he can run a business? He’s never run an organisation like this before. It isn’t going to work.
All of these things were untrue, but I owe the people who were spreading those rumours a huge debt of gratitude. It made me even more determined to succeed.
It remains a cornerstone of how we act. It makes you think about how important reputation is. Doing what you say you are going to do. It was something that we had built up a very good reputation for, and it is something we are very determined to uphold and build upon.
It actually helps you make decisions. For example, by doing such and such, is that going to enhance our reputation or not?
B) Customer:
When I came into the business, the customer wasn’t seen as a top priority. I saw a business that did have very loyal customers, but we perhaps took that for granted a little bit. So I started to think about how we can start to change that thinking within the business.
Well, how about getting people who had never actually met a customer to actually meet them? Let’s get the people who have the biggest impact on our customers (e.g. the people picking the goods and delivering the goods) sitting down in front of customers and hearing first-hand why they ask us to do the things they do.
We called it Walking in Other People’s Shoes. That was a game changer in how we thought about our customers; it gave people a much deeper understanding and ownership of why our customers ask us to do the things they do. This was a great idea, which is a nice link to our value of Innovation.
C) Innovation:
When I came into the business, I was really struck and dismayed actually by the mindset that people had that they couldn’t innovate in their roles.
But actually, when you completely reimagine what Innovation actually is, you can unlock so many improvements. So what is Innovation? We don’t make anything? Does that mean we can’t innovate? We aren’t Apple. Does that mean we can’t innovate?
No – not at all. We had to think differently about what Innovation is. How do we bring that to life? That was the challenge. How do we get people actually believe that they can innovate in their role?
One of our answers was – a 1% Improvement. A very simple idea, but it got huge traction. We can all think of ways of improving what we do by just 1%. Imagine hundreds of these 1% improvements implemented over time and the compounding effect that has.
It’s not a new idea; it’s just that we got quite good at actually making it happen within an organisation.
When I ran the first workshops introducing this idea, I thought that we’d be doing ok if we got a few ideas. We had over 100, 1% Improvement ideas from the very first workshops from people actually doing the job. Amazing!
D) Performance:
Well, how does this link to performance? Well, the performance of the business has completely transformed. Previously it was a business which had been run well, but some years it made a profit, and sometimes it didn’t.
My overall goal was to build a much more resilient, sustainable business over the long term, and we have achieved some amazing things. All our key measures are going in the right direction, and we’ve won some amazing awards and recognition. Our absenteeism rates have gone right down. That’s one thing that blew me away. So much so that I had to take a day off to recover!
But I don’t want to dwell on the results too much. To us, Performance isn’t just about the results; it starts with the inputs and the behaviours we have to demonstrate in order to achieve these results. Absolutely key to High performance is being ambitious, having very high aspirations and saying it’s ok to have very high expectations. You have to find the right balance between motivating, challenging and inspiring colleagues.
E) Team:
Our final Value is the team and the simple fact that everyone in our organisation makes a difference. Your people are the one thing your competitors can’t copy. It’s your one true competitive advantage. When I came into the business, I saw a fairly loose group of people who were working together, and that is not a high-performing team.
How we’ve gone about this is really thinking about what a High Performing Team is. You’ve got to listen to your colleagues. It takes effort to put your arm around them and guide them, but that’s what leadership is to me. Engage people in the future, and in order to be able to do this, you’ve got to really know your people and think and act on them.
A Real-Life Example
When I think about our people, it made me reflect on the journey I’ve been on, and it made me reflect and appreciate some of the journeys other people have been on. 2 people come to mind in particular, which hopefully makes it more real for everyone.
Alfonse came to this country from Uganda 15 years ago. He came only with his suitcase, no more than £100 on him. He didn’t even have somewhere to stay – he met someone on the plane who offered to put him up for a couple of weeks to help him find his feet. He worked nights in care homes and studied during the day for his accountancy exams.
My father actually first gave him an opportunity in the business, but then when I first met Alfonse, he was the most qualified person in our finance team, yet he was stuck in the corner doing very basic tasks. I thought, what is going on here – this is wrong. Now he is our Finance Director.
I must mention Stuart. He is now our Head of Customer Experience, but it may surprise you when I say that when he came into the company, he had absolutely Zero sales or customer service experience.
He had worked in our Accounts Team, having come to us from working in the local council again in an Accounts role. He was happy with his spreadsheets and bank reconciliations. Yet we saw something a bit more interesting in Stuart, something a bit more special.
He’s great at engaging with Colleagues and Customers, so even though he had zero sales and zero customer service experience, we plucked him out of the accounts team and dropped him into the sales Team because we really felt that he could change the dynamic in that Team and transform the Customer Experience.
3. Build the Leadership Capacity of the Entire Organisation.
There’s so much written about leadership. There must be a new book every day on the subject, and sometimes people ask me what my job is. My kids ask me – what do you actually do, Dad, apart from being on teams all day? Brutal.
What’s the role of a CEO? What’s my view on leadership? Yes, my job involves setting the vision and strategy, shaping the Culture, getting the right Team, leading the Top Team, Effective Decision Making etc., but I sum it up in 3 words: Make People Better.
It’s not about me; other people are my priority.
So we’ve got to build the leadership capacity of the entire organisation. Not just the Senior Leadership Team they are already very fortunate and have a lot of time and money invested in them. This is about building the leadership skills of every single person so every single person in our organisation has high-performance plans.
Every single person in this organisation has Quarterly Goals that they working including myself, and we have to report every quarter on what we’ve achieved or, in my case, what I haven’t achieved.
We have set ourselves the ambitious Goal that next year every single person will be involved in our Coaching/Mentoring programme.
4. Take a Leap of Faith
If you are thinking about starting a journey about transforming a business, building resilience and leadership capabilities, and much more fore focussed on its values and its people, take a leap of faith. Look at what we’ve achieved.
We didn’t know how to do what we’d done. We’ve learnt and improved through practice. The most important step we took was beginning – the first mile.
Don’t wait for the perfect time. You will never be fully prepared. The single biggest step we took was just beginning.
We hope that you have found this piece useful. As always, please don’t hesitate to reach out and let us know what you think or even pop a message to us in the comments below.
