CONVEYOR: Bill Gallagher heads Gallagher Group; Mark Eglinton, former CEO of Tenon, has just returned to New Zealand to head NDA, designers and manufacturers of stainless steel process vessels for the likes of the dairy, wine, and beer industries. After their wins for leadership at the International Business Awards, we asked them about their approach.
MARK EGLINTON: Obviously, you've got to clearly articulate where you want the business to be, and that is ultimately your responsibility. Engagement is all the things you need to do to get – take people with you, because if you get to where you want to be and you're by yourself, you haven't really succeeded, have you? So, that'd be the two attributes that I'd put down to successful leadership.
BILL GALLAGHER: It's very easy to, if somebody comes to you with a problem, just to blurt out the answer. But if you do that you'll finish up always having to make the answer, you'd always have to be there. Whereas if you're going to ask them; what do you think the problems is? Or, how would you fix this solution? And if you get enough right answers you don't have to be there. And it really – and then the next thing is, teaching that next level down. And if you can get your managers to do that as well, you know, the place, there's not a lot of limit to how big you get.
MARK EGLINTON: If I had one piece of advice for a chief executive it'd be to listen. And having just gone through a transition from one company which I knew very well to another company that I don't know anything about, listening's a critical capability. And then, from that, everything can flow because you can set-up, get the right people in the right place, and set the company on the right course. But clearly, without listening you're going in there assuming you know what to do.
BILL GALLAGHER: Monitoring performance is very important. And even though you let them make the decision, you don't - there's a difference between delegation and advocation. And I've seen it because I guess we have experience around the world where deleg... you know, they call it delegation but it was advocation, and they wonder why they had a mess. So, I guess I get copied a lot of information and I really monitor what's going on. And then you're in a position to give advice or, when you're having their suggestion, you know whether you're getting the right answer or not.
MARK EGLINTON: My approach to running the business has evolved a lot over the last 10 or so years, which is probably 50 years, it's less than Bill's, but I think it's shaped very much by the people, and the - you do work with good people and you work with bad people, and fortunately for me I've had more good people and – but you learn from both.
BILL GALLAGHER: Went through a Harvard program. Harvard run a Owner/President manager program which is designed for people in $50 to $100 million type companies, mostly privately held companies. And they were - that's a three-week course times three years, and that was quite transformational. We had a game, conjugate(*) I think it was called, where you start off with five businesses, all the – and a 20 percent market share and you're making a wedge at this quarter and you're selling at next quarter. And then we had five different – and about six different groups doing this. And the difference between the most profitable group and the least profitable group was really strategy. Some of them had a strategy to be mean and miserable, I'll run the other guy off the road. And those were the groups that made very little money. And the expansionary group, where you focus on customer, or you spend on R&D, you spend on promotion. And those groups made two or three times the total money of the ones at the bottom end.
MARK EGLINTON: I do think it is our collective responsibility to keep New Zealand relevant on the world stage. So, you know, anyone that's - can contribute to that discussion, and anyone that can con... you know, provide the wisdom of the things that Bill's done is critical to that process because the biggest challenge for New Zealand is we become irrelevant. We are isolated so we do need to, you know, fight above our weight. And we have to do that through innovation or through, you know, management capabilities. So, I actually think it is a collective responsibility to make sure that we're competitive internationally.
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