northland chamber

ADVOCATE COLUMN 3rd WEEK NOVEMBER 2010
Recently I was lucky to attend two entirely different presentations addressing aspects of leadership and organisational change. What was interesting about these two events was that although the businesses concerned came from opposite ends of the spectrum in regards to the scale, they both grappled with the same issues.

The first of these events was a BNZ hosted seminar where the facilitator Adam Isa from Whangarei Paper Plus spoke of the challenges he encountered when he took over his business 3 years ago and the strategies he has used to overcome them. Adam’s business won this year’s More FM Customer Choice Award at the Westpac Northland Business Excellence Awards. He spoke of the various methods and material he used to provide guidance on how to implement this change. This even included the use of book call “Fish!: A Remarkable Way to Boost Morale and Improve Results” by Stephen Lunden et al which applies the simple but effective lessons of the Pike Place fishmongers to the corporate environment as it explains how to transform the workplace.

The second event was a business at the other end of the spectrum. At a lunch hosted by Northtec, Scott Carr New Zealand GM of Air New Zealand spoke of his organisations journey from the brink of disaster to winner of the Air Transport World Global Airline Awards “Airline of the year”. He related how they first identified that they were about flying people and not planes. He then outlined four key values they had implemented for all members of their organisation to adopt so they could express their truly unique New Zealand character.

What was common with both these examples was that the change was not initiated by accident but by deliberate and conscious action on behalf of their management teams. This was accompanied by a clear understanding by all of those involved with the business as to what the end goal was and what was expected from them as individuals. It was the desired end goal in both cases that is most telling in the level of their success. These businesses have set incredibly high standards for themselves at an aspirational level which near to unachievable. Both also recognised that change is constant and when a company achieves what it aspires to it is time to reset the goals. In doing this they have implemented real organisational change accompanied by economic benefit.