Shifting the Titanic
Mark Templeton has turned around three companies. Now he’s doing it again
MARK TEMPLETON IS an experienced fix-it CEO, who joined air quality monitoring company Aeroqual in 2012, when the 11-yearold company was in crisis. Aeroqual was lacking strong leadership and clear strategic direction. Oh, and it had never made a profit. But despite some obvious practical challenges (like having no cash), one of Templeton’s first actions was to think about the company’s culture. He told Nikki Mandow (and a room full of breakfasting executives) why.
WHAT IS YOUR DEFINITION OF COMPANY CULTURE? Two definitions I like are: “How it feels for people to work here.” And “How things really work around here.”
Not so good, are definitions like: “How management would like to imagine things are.” Or “What the internal marketing department writes and puts up on the wall.”
The trouble with these latter approaches is that they remove any personal sense of connection that employees might have with these statements – thus negating the whole point of the exercise.
IS CULTURE IMPORTANT? Yes, but it’s worth considering a salient anecdote here.
I have personal experience of two different cultures. One was toxic, restrictive, dis- engaged and de- energising. “Working here”, one colleague told me “is like having the life sucked out of you slowly.”
The other company culture was energising, challenging, supportive and stressful, in a positive way.
The negative one was very successful financially. The positive one ran out of cash and went out of business.
The moral of the story: Culture is only one reason companies fail. (Others factors include leadership, strategic planning and execution, recruitment, and performance and financial management.)
SO WHY BOTHER? Good question. Certainly culture is something you take on at your peril. And it is not something you impose wholesale onto a company – it’s something you adapt over time; you graft new attributes onto the healthy core of the current culture to better respond to a changing market.
Actually, a big part of it for me is about personal fulfillment. By this I mean, if I went back to a younger (non CEO) self, would I want to work in this company. Would I feel there was a greater purpose I was personally engaged with, would I feel both challenged and supported, would I feel connected with others around me?
Whatever the reasons, you need to be clear from the start why you want to change the culture. Too often I see culture change efforts launched without a clearly communicated rationale for change. For people to want to change, it is important for them to recognise both a burning platform and a worthwhile new destination.
WHERE DO YOU START? Be open and honest with staff. Management have a tendency to try to protect staff. Don’t. I nstead be transparent. If the company needs to be sold, work with staff to get the best outcome. People can manage change, but they can’t handle uncertainty.
Ask your staff what they think. Aeroqual was in crisis when I joined, not least because it had totally run out of money. One of the first things I did when I joined was have a 45-minute coffee with all 27 of the staff and with many customers and distributors. I asked three questions: What do you really like about the company? What do you struggle with at the moment? If you had the chance to change one thing, what would it be?
Then I put a list of all the suggestions for change up on the wall. There were about 40 of them. Four or five were simple things and I just gave people a budget and told them to go off and do it. For example, one involved changing the physical layout, so we knocked a few walls down. Others we worked on and ticked off over time. Some I said weren’t possible right now.
WHAT DOES A VISION STATEMENT LOOK LIKE? I’m a big fan of “provisional and scrappy”. Work with staff to get a “good enough” statement of
vision, purpose, and values, then try it out in the workplace to see if it sticks.
Put the statements up in chalk or marker pen on the walls. People then know (1) you’ve truly listened to their input, and (2) you want to test the vision, purpose and values to see if they work for them.
TOP DOWN, OR BOTTOM UP?
Bottom up. I personally don’t like authority; I don’t like being told what to do. Unexpectedly, I’ve found some of the most useful people in any change process are the disaffected people, the mavericks. The best thing to do is to harness them as change agents.
I have found if you challenge the mavericks to get involved in change there’s a 50: 50 split around what they do: they leave or they step up. Both are great solutions.
WHAT CAN GO WRONG?
One of the biggest mistakes I made was trying to get into culture change too early. You don’t have enough shared sense of reality, so you spin your wheels with endless workshops.
Purpose can’t be developed by the management team; it has to emerge from the grass roots.
HOW DO YOU TAKE PEOPLE WITH YOU?
There are four types of characters within an organisation, and people with different characteristics, or mix of characteristics need to be given information in different ways:
Visionary people. Give them the vision. Scientists. Give them the facts.
Process people. Give them the path (“This is what we are doing over the next 30-60 days and these are the targets”).
People’s emotional side. As a leader, you need to reveal yourself as a whole person, including your flaws and mistakes. Make your motives clear. That is how you build trust.
When I give a presentation, I keep these four in mind and change my pitch depending on who I’m talking to.
YOU'VE BEEN DOING THIS CULTURE CHANGE STUFF FOR A WHILE. WHAT’S YOUR NUMBER ONE TIP?
Learn to accept complexity and ambiguity. It’s going to be messy and confusing, but you have to believe it will happen and work with your team. Don’t fear failure – there are no guaranteed results.
Celebrate failing fast – we call them epic fails and we openly discuss them.
DID IT WORK?
As I said before, culture change isn’t the only factor, but yes, over the last three years we’ve turned Aero-qual around. We are cashflow positive, and after the first 90 days, we didn’t need to ask for any more money from shareholders. Revenue is up 35%.
Staff satisfaction has increased from 54% to 75% and we haven’t lost any key staff.
We have pulled $800,000 in costs out of the business. Most of this improvement initially was based on ideas that came from staff.