FACE TO FACE
Two pluses & a minus When it comes to leading other people, Tait Communications managing director Frank Owen says he’s learnt a lot from being on the receiving end of other leaders’ actions. “Whether they be positive or negative, you seek to learn from these experiences and try to model good leadership behaviour from them,” he says.
table in front of the customer – and being comfortable that these early notions may be very left field, very far away from a finished idea. “Not everything will fly,” says Owen. “You need to be bold and then move on to the next thing if one is not appropriate. You haven’t bet the farm.” The concept, he says, can carry wider significance for New Zealand as a whole. “We often talk about how, as a nation, we come up with great products or ideas but we’re not good at commercialising them. We need to peel that concept back a bit to understand it. What we mean is that customers aren’t actually buying what we’ve thought of or done. And that’s not a surprise if the idea or product isn’t well-tuned to their need: whether that be a latent or a true need.” For Owen, the key to business success today is to invite and enable customers to co-craft their product. “Then you know you’ve got something that will sell, be useful and add value to the customer.” It all comes back to the importance of interconnectedness, he says. Great 44 | management.co.nz | APRIL 2012
I learnt a great deal from working with one Raychem general manager who had a high level of integrity and was very straightforward. He taught me the principle of clarity over certainty. When you’re in a leadership role it’s very important that you’re comfortable in an uncertain world. The critical thing is to provide clarity in any given situation. When I worked at Philips, the then MD of communications systems empowered me to do what I thought was right. He provided guidance but fundamentally allowed me to make and correct my own mistakes, and achieve an outcome. You can’t ask for more than that. Working for some poor bosses over the years has helped me clarify what not to do. I’ve learnt to try not to micromanage, reach too deep down into an organisation or be directive in a way that disempowers others. People are not going to feel valued and understood if I do those things.
business is about leveraging the linkages that we have as individuals and organisations. All of which suggests it’s time for Kiwis to ditch the drama around failure. “New Zealanders’ expectations, typically, can be a bit staid,” says Owen. “If something doesn’t work, there’s a stigma associated with it which is far from the case at all.” Owen concedes he may have picked up on some of the freshness and optimism that is often characteristic of American thinking. He counters, however, that
while he thoroughly enjoyed seeing the world through American eyes while in the US, many expat Kiwis find top spots on the senior management teams of very big global companies. “The reason for that is Kiwis have this ‘get it done’ attitude. There’s experience that comes from being in New Zealand where you develop confidence quickly. It’s a very open environment where you can be yourself and then go out on to the world stage. So you get well-rounded personality characteristics