Lessons from leaders

How do you take your company global? What’s the key to hiring the right people? And why do you need to be paranoid?

These are some of the questions that have been addressed at the Dean’s Leaders Forum at Melbourne Business School. Each year, we invite some of the best Australian and international business leaders to share their expertise with the Melbourne Business School alumni, students and corporate partners.

We like to hire

“smart people with good intentions who get stuff done”. This was inspired by a quote from Sue Desmond-Hellmann, who is CEO of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation: “Progress happens when smart, dedicated people translate good intentions into concrete realities.” We’ve taken that and we’ve fleshed it out. You don’t get a ticket to the game until you’ve got those three qualities in development and we can see the potential.

SMART PEOPLE

For us, smart is not something you’re born with. Smart is something you develop: you build better frameworks; you go to a great university; you read books; you study. You understand the way to get better is with a growth mindset. We choose people who have a curiosity and chase it. We work hard on what we call calibration or calibrated standards – people who understand what the right level of execution is and when good is good enough. We look for people who understand things from someone else’s perspective. They build trust and they look after each other so you have an environment where you’re willing to take risks. These are the sorts of things we build out that then that go into what we call our “crew flourishing”. This forms a basis of training and development. We do learning plans for our staff, training and mentoring and really meaty challenges that keep you growing and keep stoking your curiosity.

GOOD INTENTIONS

We’re a for-purpose business. Our team knows we’re here to make a profit and the better we do, the greater the impact we can have through using that profit. We encourage our staff to volunteer for the world’s most effective charities and non-profits. We work with the premier environmental initiative in leather and we’re now working with the biggest brands in the world to get them to face issues with animal welfare standards – it’s getting incredible traction. The Centre for Effective Altruism is helping us achieve this; they do all these incredible things so you can get the biggest bang for your buck when you want to make the world a better place.

GET STUFF DONE

We try really hard to define clear objectives for the company. We use technology to support that, such as [communication tool] Slack. We try to give the staff good spaces with sleep pods and separated mindful zones, quiet zones and collaborative zones. At our Bells Beach office [in Victoria], there are surfboard racks and people will go for a surf before work or at lunch but then they knuckle down. If you’re going to ask your people to care more about things and go deeper, you have to give them something back. And so you give them the freedom to disappear for an hour and a half if the surf’s cranking. What you get in return is that when they’re at work, they’re engaged, they’re going. I think it’s important that you’re not just asking for things from your staff and personally I think it’s important you’re not just using money as a reward because really, when everything is in place for people, money starts to come down that hierarchy list pretty quickly.

They are the three themes that drive us. Essentially, that’s how we’re going to make progress to define what great business looks like, to translate it into real, concrete realities and differences. And to enjoy doing it, to really feel like we’re making tangible steps towards meaningful goals. When that happens, all of a sudden you just try a bit harder. You give it a bit more and that’s what we think the benefit is. You use business as a force for good.