Brett Ashley is a former business owner and executive with Woolworths NZ, with more than 47 years in the retail industry in New Zealand and Australia. He is also the founder and managing director of My Purpose. Below is an extract fro his new book,The Key to Unlocking Your Potential.
OPINION: During my leadership journey I have learnt many great lessons and have had the fortune to be exposed to many different leaders, both good and bad. Whenever I am asked what is the most significant leadership lesson I have learnt, my response is always: the power of the mind.
The ability to create a positive subconscious belief both in business and your personal life is a game-changer. However, you have to work hard to create and embed it. The lesson in business – and, more importantly, in life in general – is that you must be prepared to relentlessly deliver actions to achieve that belief. Otherwise your belief will amount to little more than empty words. It is action that gives beliefs life, and empowers and nurtures them. And leadership requires genuinely held beliefs that can inspire, direct and energise others.
In 2013 I was appointed as general manager of store operations and I was extremely excited about the opportunity to lead the operational store and support teams. Over the next seven years we were able to develop and implement a detailed plan to create a new environment and a new way of working for over 20,000 people. This was based on the leadership and life lessons I had amassed over the years. I knew that the plan would work only if we were able to create belief in all the team.
There were six key steps that we deployed to create belief and establish the right environment.
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Define and purposely design the environment
A lot of leaders talk to their organisation about the need to create the right culture, but I found through my conversations that most people can’t define or understand what culture actually is. As part of defining our culture we concluded that culture was in fact a reflection of the behaviour of people within an environment. We then all decided that we should stop talking about creating a culture, but instead talk about creating the right environment and just let the outcome be our culture.
We ended up agreeing that culture was a result of the environment people experience, and that it should be everyone’s responsibility to create that environment, but in particular it needs to be led not just by the chief executive but by the entire leadership team.
Structure
To create the right environment in business, especially in a large organisation, it requires the leaders to provide the right structural support for people to effectively operate within. Many leaders fall into making the key mistake that once they have implemented a new structure, it should not be changed for many years. They fear any further change may cause more confusion and disruption, and thus hinder overall performance. They tend to sell the disruption as a random change, thereby instilling a belief in their team that their roles are secure.
This is a fundamental mistake. I believe those leaders form these views because they don’t understand the importance of role clarity or alignment. You actually need to create an understanding in the team that their roles will change in order to meet the business’s changing needs, and that the security they seek is based on their ability to contribute to the overall success of the business, not to a title or specified role. So whenever the business needs to shift its focus or implement a new strategic direction, all teams should expect change.
TOM LEE/STUFF/Waikato Times
To create the right environment in business, especially in a large organisation, it requires the leaders to provide the right structural support for people to effectively operate within.
Role clarity
The issue for large organisations is that most leaders tend to leave role clarity to the HR team, and they think they have delivered it when they have signed off the position description (PD) for each individual. What I found was that most leaders read the PD once and then file it away in the hope that someone else will conduct a proper handover or orientation. The reality is that most people are left to their own devices to understand how best to navigate and operate within their roles.
That’s the reason why you tend to get a lot of individuals who are just “good enough”. And as we wanted best-in-class leaders we decided that we had better plan to provide real role clarity. Our aim was to ensure that everyone knew what their specific role was and how they fitted in at all levels: into their direct team, their wider team and finally the entire organisation.
Alignment
To create alignment you must be prepared to consistently communicate where you are at and what you are planning next. You also have to provide an opportunity to receive and act on feedback, both in an open team environment and also on an individual one-on-one basis. It cannot just be “here is the plan or the process that we want you to implement”; that just creates an understanding of what is going to happen, not alignment.
For true alignment you will need to create a belief that I understand what I do, what you do and what we need to do together. I cannot stress enough how important this is. Many leaders do not follow up or look to regularly repeat this process to ensure success.
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Brett Ashley, author of The Key to Unlocking Your Potential.
Too often senior leaders will run a one-off company conference or a few senior leadership meetings and have an expectation that they have delivered alignment on all the business strategies. They may have asked for questions and thoughts in those meetings or in surveys afterwards, but they will neglect to verify that all their leaders have effectively dispersed their key messages at all levels of the organisation.
Measure
With any strategy you need to establish measures that determine whether your strategy will be successful or not. Being a large multinational business we had plenty of hard measures already established, so it was more an issue of making sure we did not overcomplicate things by adding too many more. The secret here was to get the team to understand that we had to be more alert to the softer measures that in my view truly determine what the culture of any business is. We called it the way we do things around here measure.
Hard measures are important, especially voice of team (VOT) and voice of customer (VOC), but they are still only indicators. You cannot beat the experience of entering a store or any environment that has this positive vibe about it (like The Castle’s infamous Mabo vibe). Where the team is actively engaged with both their customers and peers. Where they are proud of their craft, and are genuinely happy and having fun.
We decided it was what they say, how they act and what they do that really matters, and we trained ourselves to use these measures to determine our success. Yes, evaluations of them can be subjective, but you can train yourself to truly observe what people do and say, and have quality conversations with as many people as possible. You will not be looking through rose-tinted glasses, and you will get a much better understanding of your culture than any VOC or VOT survey.
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The real challenge for a successful culture is not its establishment but its longevity.
Communicate
The last step in the model was to establish the right level and quality of communication. Although I do value written forms of communication, we decided that sending emails and writing business action plans were not going to help us create our new environment. We had to find ways to make our operations support leaders more visible, and engaged with our team.
This shift to more regular, and more personalised, visits enabled us to move from a directive leadership style to better coach and guide the team. We were also able to have more quality conversations and observe more of our team’s beliefs and behaviours. We established specific levels of communication to help us gather and disperse our communication. To do that we implemented a purposeful structure which we called the operational spine.
The advantage of this structure is that you can set up proper communication meetings at all levels, which means you can effectively disperse communication and also more effectively receive communication back. We established weekly and monthly forums at all levels to do exactly that, and we really started to make progress when we actively listened and then acted on the great feedback from our store teams.
Summary
What we found was that these processes definitely work, and you can create a successful culture in any organisation – but only if you deliver on all six steps within the Creating the Environment model. There are no short-cuts. The key is that you have to keep delivering a number of specific actions to change the way people believe and behave in an environment. It is not just words but actions that change beliefs, in turn producing behaviours that create an environment which enables a culture to deliver on a purpose.
Having said this, the real challenge for a successful culture is not its establishment but its longevity. There will always be change occurring within any environment, with many internal and external factors playing their part, and this can threaten a culture. The most significant factor will always be any senior leadership change: if new senior leaders fail to understand how important the process is, then a successful culture will quickly start to unravel.
