“Think everything’s going badly”

This next lesson is one that I think is very difficult to learn, unless you have worked at a young start-up business where all you are faced with every day is a huge number of things to fix. Many young people who start their working lives at a large, successful corporation never get exposure to this front line of numerous problems and therefore live in a false world where they think that all the systems and processes are working well. Not enough of our management today thinks like this, which is why, in our relatively new graduate program, we give them exposure as early as possible in their careers to the fact that not all our customers are happy and that we need to constantly strive to improve the way we work. Hopefully, this next example will add a little colour as to the way we try to get our people to think a bit differently.

Although the location, exact format, and number of people attending have changed a little each year, every June, I try to get away with my senior team for an off-site management meeting. These get-togethers are both to reflect on the previous twelve months’ performance and to look forward to where we want to go over the year ahead. I also try to include more relaxed team building to make it a fun few days.

Many of these have been in the Lake District, where we have been to Underscar Manor on the banks of Skiddaw, The Glenridding Hotel nestled along Ullswater, and The Burnside Hotel, located in the busy town of Bowness-on-Windermere. Alongside the normal two days of presentations, in which I always insisted on monthly graphs for every product line (in every country), there were always boozy nights at many of the nice local pubs, which consistently made the start of the second day a bit of a graveyard slot!

In the last fifteen years or so, the venue for these meetings has moved from the relatively local Lake District to the warmer climes of Majorca, where we have usually stayed at the fabulous Castillo Hotel Son Vida. Although the end-of-the-day pub crawls have changed to boat trips along the coast, the endless sets of graphs for all the countries and divisions remain a constant. This means that every year, we have to flick through an ever-growing number of slides even faster, especially as we now have six divisions, whereas we used to only have one. At least now everything is digital, which is very different from the old days when each sheet had to be photocopied onto an acetate for us to display using an old-style overhead projector, which was always a bit messy.

So what has all this got to do with the very important message of this lesson and a trait that I said is all too rare among my senior managers? Well, it was one of these annual management trips to Majorca that really highlighted the difference I described above about people who haven’t experienced a bootstrap culture.

I remember that at the start of the first day of the conference, we were running through the figures for the fuel division, with each of the country leaders talking about their individual volumes and margins. All of them were explaining the problems they were having, weak members of their management teams, difficulties in recruitment, not enough quality digital leads, competitor aggression, etc., followed by the associated changes they needed to make. This was despite the fact that in most cases, all their countries were either on or ahead of their budget numbers.

Then we came to one of the central services presentations, in which we had a new director who had only been with the group a couple of months. He proceeded to talk about how well everything was going in his department and how good his figures were, with not a single mention of any problems.

Well, at the end of the meeting, two things happened. The first was that he started talking to some of the other senior members of the team, saying he hadn’t realized how badly things were going in the business, which I think was probably making him question why he had given up his good corporate job to join us. This was followed by me speaking to him to tell him that I didn’t want to have another presentation like the one he had given and that I only wanted him to talk about the negative issues that he was having in his group, how he was planning to fix them, and what help he might therefore need from either me or other members of the team.

This mentality is one that has been with me since the outset of UK Fuels back in 1990, that I think about as I head to work every morning, and that determines what I spend my time on during the day. It is also one that I try to encourage in our new, younger generation of managers just starting out on their journeys.