Leading people

The person I'd talk about is a woman called Thandi. When I joined a mining group in Johannesburg as HR Director in 2015, she was a payroll analyst at one of our operations in Rustenburg. She'd been there six years, she was very good, and nobody had ever suggested she could do anything else.

I noticed her because she was the one who explained to me why our overtime costs were 30 per cent over budget, and her analysis was better than anything I'd had from the business partners. So I moved her into an HR business partner role supporting the mine manager. It was a big jump, and I told her honestly that she'd struggle at first.

I met her every two weeks for the first year. I paid for her to do a postgraduate diploma in labour relations, because that was the gap. And I brought her into the wage negotiations with the unions in 2017, first as an observer and then leading part of it.

Today she's HR Director of one of the group's subsidiaries, with about 4,000 people. We still have lunch a couple of times a year. What I'm proudest of is that she's now doing the same thing for two people in her own team.

The clearest example was between our head of sales and our head of operations, about two years into my time as COO of a building products distributor in Vancouver. Sales had been promising customers next-day delivery to win business, and operations couldn't deliver it outside the city. Every missed delivery turned into an argument by email, copying half the business. It had become personal.

I met each of them separately first. What came out was that both were right on their own terms. Sales was under pressure from a new growth target, and operations was measured on cost per delivery, which next-day runs were destroying. In effect, we were paying them to disagree.

So I got them in a room together with the data: every delivery promise from the last quarter, which ones we'd met and what each had cost. Then I asked them to agree a service map, which areas get next day and which get two or three days, and I told them I'd decide if they couldn't. They agreed it in two sessions.

I also changed both their targets so they were measured on on-time delivery against that map. Within six months on-time delivery went from 81 to 94 per cent, and the email wars stopped. They're not friends, but they work well together.

The one that stands out was early in my time as Finance Director of a family-owned retailer in Birmingham. At my second board meeting, the chair, who's the founder's son, told me in front of everyone that my forecast pack was unreadable. Forty pages, lots of tables, and he said he couldn't find the three things he actually needed to know.

My honest first reaction was to defend it. Everything in it was accurate, and it was the format my predecessor had used. But I held back, and afterwards I asked for half an hour with him to understand exactly what he wanted.

It turned out he wanted three things every month: cash headroom, the like-for-like sales trend and whether we'd hit the full-year profit number. Everything else was detail he'd ask for if he needed it.

So I rebuilt the pack. One page at the front with those three answers and a short commentary, then the detail in an appendix. It took about a month to get right.

The result was that board meetings got shorter and better, and the chair started asking more strategic questions because he wasn't wading through numbers. And I learned to ask what a reader needs before I build anything for them. It's a habit I've kept ever since.

The clearest one was about three years ago. I'm General Counsel of a telecoms infrastructure business in Nairobi, and we were running a tender for a five-year facilities management contract worth about KES 1.2 billion. One of the shortlisted bidders turned out to be partly owned by the brother-in-law of one of our non-executive directors.

The director hadn't declared it. I don't think he was hiding anything, he simply hadn't made the connection, but if it had come out later it would have been very damaging for him and for us.

I spoke to him privately first, because I respected him and didn't want him to hear it for the first time in a board meeting. I explained the position, and that he'd need to declare the interest and step out of any discussion on the contract. He was annoyed at first, mostly embarrassed, but he agreed.

Then I took it to the chair, made sure the declaration was minuted and checked that nobody on the evaluation panel reported to him. We also brought in an external reviewer to check the scoring.

That bidder didn't win in the end, on price. But because the process was clean, nobody could question the outcome, and the director thanked me afterwards. We then tightened the declarations process for the whole board.

I had a regional sales director, very experienced, who'd been a top performer for years before I joined as Commercial Director of a business services company in Dublin. By my first full year, his region was 18 per cent behind target and his team's pipeline was thin. The easy explanation was the market, but the other regions were growing.

I spent a week on the road with him and sat in on his team meetings. What I found was that he'd stopped coaching his people and was trying to close the biggest deals himself. His team felt sidelined, and two good people had already left.

I was straight with him. I told him what I'd seen and what I needed, a pipeline of a certain size and him back in a coaching role, and that we'd review it together in ninety days. I paid for an external coach and met him every two weeks.

He did improve, but not enough. After six months the region was still 12 per cent behind. So I had the harder conversation, and we agreed an exit with a fair package and a good reference.

His successor, promoted from within his own team, brought the region back to target within a year. My regret is that the business had let it drift for two years before I arrived.

The biggest one was centralising our finance and HR back office. I'm COO of a building materials group headquartered in Warsaw, with operations in six countries, and each country ran its own back office. We had nine payroll systems and more than 300 people doing transactional work.

The resistance came mainly from the country managing directors. They saw it as losing control, and in a couple of cases losing people they trusted. Two of them said openly that it wouldn't work.

So I did three things. First, I spent a month visiting every country and listening, which surfaced real concerns, mostly about local tax and labour rules, and we built those into the design. Second, I asked the most sceptical MD to co-chair the programme board with me. That was a risk, but once he was shaping it, he became its strongest supporter. Third, we moved in waves, starting with the two most willing countries, so the others could see it working before their turn came.

Where I held firm was the end state: everything would move to one centre in Kraków, with no exceptions.

It took 26 months, about four longer than planned. We reduced back-office headcount by around 110 roles, mostly through natural turnover and redeployment, and we're saving about €9 million a year.