The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (17 page)

Recognising the potential Chris and Xikis at the interview stage takes time and a healthy dose of curiosity. You need to meet a lot of people, ask them about themselves and their careers, and tell them about yourself and your company in turn. So relax and be yourself – the people you eventually choose are, after all, going to play big parts in your shared adventure of building a business.

As important as it is to look at what a candidate has achieved elsewhere, I have always believed that the single most important thing to consider is ‘personality fit’. By that I mean, is this someone whose way of being, sense of humour and general demeanour will dovetail easily with your company’s culture? Ramming a square peg into a round hole may work well for carpenters but it seldom works with people. While the majority of skills can be learned, when it comes to personality what you see tends to be what you get – with the caveat, of course, that what you’ll see on a ‘best behaviour’ interview showing is not always what you’ll get when they’re installed on the payroll.

YOU CAN NEVER TELL

Just as it takes many different types of CEOs and top managers to lead Virgin’s 50,000-plus employees and keep our businesses purposeful and profitable, you never can tell where your next leaders are going to come from. We find great leaders everywhere: some working hard inside our companies, others working for large competitors, or sometimes they just walk in on us right out of the blue.

Such was the case when Matthew Bucknall and Frank Reed arrived in my Holland Park office in 1997. The two of them had just sold their own fitness club, Living Well, and were looking to do it all over again – but better – and this time with the Virgin brand as a key part of their plan. I talk elsewhere about the value of short presentations: well, their business plan for Virgin Active was about the most concise I have ever seen. It simply read: ‘We want to create the first global comprehensive consumer-led branded health and fitness facility – readily accessible to a wide socio-demographic group at a price consumers are willing and able to pay.’ I liked the idea right off the bat. Health clubs that would be fun, innovative and inclusive – rather than exclusive – and represent true value for money while enriching the lives of members. What was not to like about such a vision? When they then added the promise that they would turn Virgin Active into our ninth billion-dollar business, what could I say other than, ‘Screw it, let’s get active and do it’?

I dispatched the two of them with the simple brief to go out and take a year to look at what was happening in the sector all around the world and then come back and make their dream a reality. In 1998 the first club opened in the perhaps unlikely location of Preston, Lancashire and we were on our way. By 2012 they had not only fulfilled their ambition of producing the world’s finest health and fitness clubs, but had also reached the promised billion dollars in revenue. As of last count, Virgin Active had almost 300 global clubs, around 1.25 million members and is still ‘actively’ expanding into new markets.   

As an example of ‘home-grown’ leaders, there’s the (now) husband and wife team of Leesa and Kenton (Keny) Jones.  Leesa started out as an in-flight beauty therapist on Virgin Atlantic before coming to Necker Island to work as a spa therapist, while Keny began as a junior water-sports instructor on the island. While working together the two of them managed to find the time to fall in love and as a couple became an even stronger team with Keny moving up to activities director and Leesa to front-of-house manager where both became hugely popular with all of the island's (sometimes quite demanding) guests. Their next stop was to spend two years in the Kasbah – as general managers of Necker’s sister property Kasbah Kamadot in Morocco – where their continued success set them up for a return to the Virgin Islands – this time running the whole show as Necker’s general managers. They also now have two beautiful island children running around – Theo and Zara.

Leesa and Keny live and breathe the Virgin way. They both possess a seemingly never-ending supply of the magical ingredients that has always worked so well for Virgin: a youthful joie de vivre and great people skills, combined with a relentless focus on great service and succeeding at each and every task they take on. Oh yes, and lest I forget, their never-failing sense of humour is especially important when you have a nit-picky ‘boss’ (that would be me) who not only works but also lives on your patch!

While Keny and Leesa grew up in-house with Virgin Limited Edition, by contrast, some of our leaders have come to us from some pretty huge competitors.

David Cush was an executive at American Airlines for more than twenty-two years before joining Virgin America, where he really took to heart the opportunity to work in a smaller company where every voice could be heard. David pioneered the airline’s ‘Refresh’ training programme which brings employees back to the San Francisco headquarters for an annual two-day session to share their experiences in maintaining the best customer service in the skies, and if my last visit to one was anything to go by – to party up a storm! Attended by every employee, senior management included, the refresher course emphasises communication, recognition and teamwork. David joins in as often as he can and recently sat in on a session where teammates brainstormed improvements to the (always a sensitive area) staff travel policy. He then made sure that the group’s best suggestion was implemented, delighting all who’d contributed. David’s leadership has turned the first US domestic airline to start up after 9/11 into a critically acclaimed, award-winning and profitable business.

LET MY PEOPLE GO

As I said right up front, we all tend to be products of our upbringing, our home and, for many, our work environments. So when you’re interviewing someone who might have been working for years in a straightjacketed, by-the-book, authoritative environment (IBM used to be the favourite example for such regimes), it is important to remember that it can have its pros and cons. Let me explain what I mean. I have always liked to compare the workplace environment at each of the Virgin companies to being like open zoos. This is not meant to conjure up an image of wild animals scaring the visitors but more a place that, though still with perimeters, is totally devoid of cages. Most tradition-bound large corporate environments feature a lot of cage dwellers. The higher up the pecking order you go, the bigger the cage and vice versa. Unlike zoo cages, however, which are to lock the occupant in, the corporate versions tend much more to be used to keep people out – where a perpetually closed door sends a clear ‘do not disturb’ message and an open door means ‘out to lunch’.

At the interview stage, candidates coming out of caged environments will predictably find the prospect of moving into a free-ranging open zoo tremendously appealing. They will usually be quick to point out how their entrepreneurial zeal and creativity was never able to truly take flight within their current (or previous) employer’s tight parameters. And while they probably mean every word of it, there is one inherent danger that you must really dig into before you get swept away by their overtures of ‘Set me free and watch me soar.’ This not insignificant issue is, ‘You can take the person out of the cage, but can you take the cage out of the person?’ As much as long-time caged executives can crave their freedom, when suddenly stripped of the security that the cage also afforded, some simply cannot handle it. And when that happens the first thing they will start to do is to quietly begin building cages in their new workplace, at first as maybe just a place to run and hide from the unfamiliar and threatening wide-open spaces, but over time there is a clear danger of proliferation.

So, how does one go about the task of separating those who can adjust to and thrive in your culture from those who may never be able to shrug off their old hierarchical habits? In my experience the key is focusing on personality rather than anything that you might see in their CV. It is not something that always comes out in interview – people can be shy. But you have to trust your own judgement. If you’re confronted with a slightly introverted person but you detect a great underlying personality, use your own personality and experience to pull it out of them. For a few moments try and find some non-business common ground to discuss, which may be kids or sports – anything that’s going to loosen them up. It is easier with an extrovert, but be wary of people becoming overexcited in the pressure cooker of an interview. It’s very much the same thing as in school, where certain kids that perform really well in class can be utterly incapable of doing the same thing in a written test. So too some people just don’t interview well because of a hugely complex mix of emotions, anxiety and often just trying too hard in a way that masks the real them.

Once you are comfortable with the personality fit, then delve into their experience and expertise and ask them to take you through some of the highlights. If it’s a marketing job and they say they headed up a hugely successful campaign at their last job, don’t just nod approvingly – ask them to tell you about the strategy behind it and why it worked. Then ask them about some of the ones that never made it off the drawing board or that didn’t work out as well as planned and why.

If you hire the wrong person at the top of a company, they can destroy it in no time at all – the same applies equally to external and internal appointments. So if the company is flourishing and the outgoing CEO has it firing on all cylinders, then maintaining that kind of status quo with an internal hire may be the smartest move – assuming there is a natural successor. If on the other hand the company is just plodding along and has done nothing particularly special for some time you might want to make a point of looking outside to see what fresh thinking you may be able to find. Letting your internal candidates get an early sneak peek at the official head-hunter job spec doesn’t do any harm either. Their input on any requirements and qualities the spec is missing or that are understated will tell you a lot about their readiness to assume the role. Questions like ‘So do you think we got it right? Is this really the kind of person we need in this job?’ can lead to some very interesting places.

Quantity often conflicts with quality and it’s no different when it comes to hiring standards. When companies go through growth spurts, they often hire in bulk and such massive influxes can put a real strain on the company’s culture. While it may seem necessary to get new bodies through the door as quickly as possible to help share the expansion-generated load, it is always worth being patient. A hasty hiring is seldom a good one and the wrong person being thrust into your team can be very damaging. And if it means you have to operate shorthanded for a spell, so be it.

SO WHEN YOU’VE GOT THEM HOW DO YOU KEEP THEM?

I am sure there have been thousands of books written on the subject of employee retention, so I am not going to bore you with what I suspect you know already. It is perhaps worth mentioning, however, the reasons why people typically quit their jobs. In a huge leadership study dubbed ‘Project Oxygen’, Google recently found that the three principle reasons were:

1 They didn’t feel enough of a connection to the company’s mission, and/or their individual contribution was not considered important.

2 They didn’t get along with or respect their co-workers.

3 They thought they had a terrible boss.

Conspicuous by its absence is ‘not being paid enough’ – so often considered the biggest reason people move on. All three of these issues are very tightly interwoven: for instance, bosses have bosses too, so the ‘terrible boss’ in item 3 might also be suffering from a terrible boss who doesn’t appreciate their contributions. Similarly, the failure to get along with colleagues can also be a symptom of a non-inclusive culture, or what I’d call a lack of engagement.

BUSY DOESN’T MEAN ENGAGED

A lot of companies make the mistake of failing to understand the difference between keeping their people busy and keeping them engaged. I was always a fan of the
I Love Lucy
shows with Lucille Ball. There was one hilarious episode in which Lucy and her friend Ethel were making a futile attempt to wrap chocolates on a fast-moving production line – the resulting hilarious chaos was assuredly ‘busy’ but certainly had nothing to do with engagement. In real life, many an employee has mastered the art of appearing to be perpetually busy, but it is no metric to judge either their productivity or their true engagement level, if any.

Similarly, employees who consistently work twelve-hour days – often to mimic the behaviour and hours of their bosses – don’t necessarily demonstrate any real level of engagement. It’s more a sign that the boss is not managing his/her own time terribly well and is also blind to how it is affecting the lives of their staff. Such patterns if sustained for any length of time will usually become not only counter-productive but will also result in burned-out, disaffected and unhappy employees. As my father used to say, ‘It’s not the hours you put in that matter, it’s what you put into the hours.’ And when engagement levels drop it’s not only productivity that goes south, customer service will inevitably also decline: the only things that increase are absenteeism and, off the back of it, turnover.

So what does it take to generate a healthy level of engagement? In my opinion it comes down to strong leadership and developing a culture in which your employees feel valued, empowered and trusted. All three of these things take time and work and require a lot of listening and dialogue. Leaders who have the ability to demonstrate genuine interest in their employees’ interests, goals and objectives and let them air their opinions will build the kind of levels of trust and confidence that, over time, translate to real engagement.

And engagement is very much a two-way street in terms of both personal and corporate upsides. One study done by Towers Watson, the international professional services firm, showed that companies with the highest levels of employee engagement averaged operating margins of around twenty-seven per cent. Meanwhile those at the bottom end of the engagement scale were producing margins below ten per cent. As an integral part of the same equation, the study concluded that at the ‘disengaged’ companies almost forty per cent of employees were likely to quit their jobs in the next twenty-four months, while at those companies with the highest engagement levels that number dropped by more than half to around eighteen per cent. If those numbers don’t get you engaged, they should do!