Four steps to lifting management team

BY FIONA ROTHERHAM

Creating a sustainable company is a journey. Some are well down the path and some just starting out.

The Independent wouldn't normally write about what its owner is doing, but in launching the Fairfax/PricewaterhouseCoopers Sustainable 60 Series, designed to share and reward sustainable business practice in New Zealand, the company will inevitably be asked: "Well, what are you doing on sustainability?'"

We thought we'd pre-empt the question.

Incoming chief executive Allen Williams has hardly got his feet under the desk  he took over in New Zealand  from Joan Withers this month  but he says work is under way on the environmental front on measuring the Australasian media group's carbon footprint.

The company is already doing the basics: energy-efficient lighting, low-energy monitors and computers, recycling aluminium plates off the printing process  that type of thing. 

Fairfax has also invested  heavily  in new technology that helps cut waste  take the new printing plant  of The Press in Christchurch, which comes on line later this year.

The new press has variable-width web capability which allows many different paper-size configurations and provides flexibility and savings in newsprint usage.

The new site also has significantly reduced noise emissions and greater energy savings through compressed air reticulation and variable-speed drives on the heating, ventilation and air conditioning system.

It's a start and further work on the company's carbon footprint continues. But green is just one element of a sustainable business, and the priority for Williams is  people.

He is a strong advocate of staff training, particularly management training, and views it as his key sustainability initiative. Williams plans to introduce a management development  programme in New Zealand  that has proved successful in Fairfax's Australian and United States  operations. 

"Part of that is having shared business values across the different business units. I want to bring to the business that capability, that skill base of training within the wider company and expose the business here to that."

The internal leadership development programme was launched in 1995 within the Rural Press Group in Australia by then managing director Brian McCarthy (now chief executive of the Fairfax Media group) and staff development manager Frank Reed.

Before that, the company had used various outsourced models. 

The principle was, and still is, to unify managers within the company and provide a practical and industry-relevant course that builds a team culture  to break down barriers and a silo mentality.

Several months after the merger between Fairfax Media and Rural Press in 2007, the decision was made to spread the  courses across the combined group.

So far, more than 400 staff have embarked on the four-stage course and Reed, now group general manager, staff development, says the internal training is proving more successful than out-sourced programmes:  "We don't want to be like mushrooms, and all training is good, but we just found having our own internal training for staff was more effective in bringing the company together. "

Williams says: "You can go to an external course within any of the academic institutions and, really, that focuses on the individual and building individual skills to adapt to, no matter what business they work for. Management training to me is about training our managers to run our businesses with the shared values so they can actually move anywhere within our business and take those skills and have a shared understanding of what we need to do."

The most recent survey of first-stage management development graduates, conducted in May, should silence any sceptics, Reed says.

The survey showed more than half of the delegates improved their time/efficiency and 45 per cent felt they now had a more effective leadership approach.

Some 85.7 per cent said the training had helped them reach  goals set at the course  including 98 per cent increasing productivity and 72 per cent having a better understanding of others. 

When asked what content they would like included or reviewed in future courses, most wanted more on performance discussions (difficult conversations), finance and strategic thinking.

As you would expect, the training programme progressively tackles "bigger picture"  issues and, by stage four, managers face 360-degree feedback from peers and direct reports on their management style. 

The fourth stage teaches staff how to adapt and change their style to get the best out of people. 

Williams introduced the management development training to many of Fairfax's 160 US staff when sent to run the 22 publications there.   "It was done at a time we were relaunching our publications in the US and, strategically, the market had changed around us and we needed to redirect the business.

"Big organisations can become very siloed and one of the challenges we had was to break those silos down and get people to work more closely."

McCarthy has made a personal commitment to attend every training course and talk to staff about where the business is headed.

He went to the US and did the same thing there, Williams says. "It's about treating everyone the same, whether they're the DomPost [Dominion Post] or a small suburban newspaper.''

Williams plans to bring Reed  to New Zealand next month to plan the training and identify which people would benefit from doing it earlier rather than later.

Most  funding for the  training is likely to be diverted from other courses within the existing training budget, Williams says. "Then it becomes a case of scale and speed to implement it. It is a key sustainability initiative that then extends into succession planning  sitting down as an organisation and offering our managers that training and offering it to those we identify as our managers of the future.'' The Australian-born chief executive, who has worked for Rural Press and now Fairfax since he left school, is  aware he is opening himself to  criticism that he is trying to "Australianise" the New Zealand business, but says that is not the case.

"Do we have to reinvent the wheel when the wheel has already been invented in other parts of the business? I'm conscious that New Zealand is a unique marketplace and will have its own business solutions.''

Reed reckons there is relatively little difference between those working in the media industry in New Zealand, Australia or the US.

"By bringing people together as one they have a shared set of values and beliefs. They understand what makes a good business.''

The four stages of the management development training typically take four to five years to complete, with gaps between each stage so the manager can take lessons learnt back into his or her business unit.  "If you start at the top and you have the shared-value process, you drive that down into the organisation; you empower the people as you go deeper into the organisation. I hate to use the word 'culture' because we can have different cultures in different business units and probably in an organisation this size [2400 staff in New Zealand], you never get one culture. But it is about the shared values around, 'Yes, you can operate like that but let's have a shared skill base that invests in our workforce','' Williams says. 

He is talking from experience, having done the training himself. ''I probably wouldn't have got where I am today without having been through stage four. As an individual it gave me a sense of understanding what my role was within the organisation and what the expectations were of me in relation to managing people.''

One  side benefit  is it makes it easier  to integrate into other parts of the business offshore. "I see no reason why one of our senior managers or editors or salespeople can't expand their career across the wider network,'' Williams says.

"It can be two-way in the scheme of things  I'm an example of that.''

 

 

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