Jim Shaw’s legacy of leadership

A trustworthy competitor who inspired loyalty

Canada’s largest-ever telecommunications swap with Rogers, leaving Rogers with most of eastern Englishspeaking Canada and Shaw with the west. All of this while rolling out internet and telephone units.

What does his legacy and leadership teach Canadian employees and employers?

Phil Lind, longtime vice-chair of Rogers, himself one of Canada’s most respected executives, spoke of Shaw as a tough competitor but one he could trust to work with co-operatively and honour his commitments.

Shaw’s many corporate deals could never have occurred without underlying trust and respect between the principals. Trust underlies employment relationships. If employees trust their employer, there will seldom be misconduct. Concomitantly, those employees who get fired are those the employer does not trust.

In a clip from an earlier video from Jim, he quoted his father, JR, telling him, “You are not always right. But you are not always wrong. As long as you keep batting away, you’re going to win most of the time.” Few employers will begrudge an employee’s mistakes if they are trying and putting their mind to the problem. More to the point, courts never consider honest errors cause for discharge. Shaw shook up formerly sleepy CRTC hearings, held in what he characterized at the time as “the town that fun forgot,” by rolling on to the Ottawa convention stage on his Harley, bedecked in full leathers. Unless you breach material company rules, originality is never cause for discharge. Indeed it is what usually leads to progress. No new union ever certified a Shaw system. In fact, during his regime, a number of inherited unionized systems applied to decertify. Why? Because the tone from the top was such that employees knew they would be taken care of, that they would do better by dealing directly with the company and there would be no repercussions from decertifying.

Shaw did countless, usually unannounced, favours to alleviate employees’ personal difficulties. Others who never required that help knew it would be available if they ever did. That type of loyalty to employees creates a rubber-band effect, returning your beneficence in spades. When JR arrived at his son’s tribute on Friday, he walked straight to the cable technicians, shaking their hands and thanking them for turning up. It is what his son would’ve done.

Most employee misconduct would be avoided if only employees had been made to feel loyalty towards their employer.

Canadian business has lost a great leader and I, a friend and mentor.