Harmonics

Building a strong performing leadership team can take time. However, for a private equity-backed business, they often don’t have the luxury of time. In this guest blog, Kevin Murphy sets out four guiding principles to building a senior leadership team for a PE backed business. At the speed at which larger and more established organisations are changing, I believe some of the principles would serve many CEO’s who are under pressure to deliver immediate results. Finally, as a member of Ireland Smart Ageing Exchange (ISAX), I’m delighted to see Kevin highlighting the ‘reverse ageism principle’. Hope you enjoy the read, John.

 

When looking at building a senior leadership team for a PE backed business, it’s hugely different from that of a plc or large corporate. From my experience, a PE backed business typically has a timeline of 3 to 5 years to deliver significant results for the PE fund. Accordingly the leadership team, and the hiring CEO, must develop and deliver strong business results quickly.

Whenever I joined as CEO of a business, one of the first things I would do is assess the existing management structure to ascertain if adjustments were necessary to turn the performance of the business around, or to push a successful business to achieve greater returns. I generally use a few firm principles to guide me and these are broadly as follows:

Don’t compromise and be ruthless if necessary

There can be no hesitation or compromise to ensure you build the strongest performing teams. I believe it’s crucial to wait for the right person; it’s all about getting the right people you need to achieve business goals. If not, it will come back to haunt you and cause you unnecessary issues later on.

If you inherit a team, then it may be the case that this team is not structured or built with the right skills to enable you to carry out the activities required by the business. The growth of the business simply requires bringing in fresh team members who have the necessary vision and skills.

In this situation, you need to make the hard calls. If people lack the right skills or cannot do the job, then they must go. There is no scope for compromise. With the demands and pace of a PE backed business, there really is no room for passengers. This is frequently a difficult part of the job to exit people, however I believe that the wider business understands that difficult decisions need to be made. They will acknowledge where a CEO has made a difficult leadership decision.

Experience is essential

On that basis, there are certain things I always look for in building a leadership team, namely people who have 25-30 years of experience under their belt. I call it my “grey hair” principle. It’s a great support to me as CEO to have a mature, experienced team sitting around the leadership table who will not be fazed by the various business challenges. They will pretty much have seen it all before. This reverse ageism principle has always served me well and I have had great, older colleagues who have done great jobs for me. The other big advantage of this is that they tend to speak their minds more and can contribute strongly to the growth of a business.

As CEO, I don’t have the time to wait through a long adjustment period for management to find its footing or develop into their roles. With the right leadership in place, I can be more confident of delivering the annual return and ongoing growth that investors expect.

Once or twice however I’ve made mistakes, hired someone who wasn’t ready, or wasn’t right for the role. This is when the 6-month probation period is crucial as this allows a get-out for both parties. I believe that setting clear goals for the first 6 months, and giving regular performance feedback, is crucial to letting a new hire know he / she is performing. If they are not hitting the required standard in these first 6 months, I have at times exited people at this stage. This is tough to do but is better in the long run for me as CEO and for the business.

Let them get on with it

When you have experienced people in place, who know more than you do frequently, it aids in the overall momentum of the business. You can give them clear goals, get out of their way and simply let them do their jobs. By identifying situations where strong existing leadership just needs greater independence and rewards, this makes it easier to push the business forward. A good friend of mine uses the 3D rule of management – Decide, Delegate & Disappear! I don’t quite do the “disappear” bit but I do like to actively delegate and let my experienced team work away on delivery.

I also strongly encourage people to have different opinions to me. This challenges me, and ultimately provokes more valuable discussions with respect to business issues. Tapping into the reservoir of others’ experience can lead to far greater returns than having to pull people along with you.

So, in summary, when you hire people that have been around the block, they can handle themselves and the demands required of them leaving you to focus on strategy, direction and other issues.

Consider your Succession Plan

Lastly, as CEO, I believe that it is imperative that you think about your succession plans and how to develop more junior colleagues so that they can potentially step up to more senior leadership roles in due course. Ideally the skillsets and experience is there for every team member to move upwards in the chain but it’s up to the CEO to ensure that smooth transition and to create opportunities for it to happen. Keeping an eye on the future line-up is part of maintaining a strong leadership team.

Hopefully you have enjoyed this short read about the few key principles that I have used in building leadership teams, particularly in demanding PE backed businesses. Perhaps in different types of businesses a CEO may have a longer development time line or may not be under such intense pressure for results each month or quarter. Certainly when I worked as CEO in a plc business, there were always options to move people to other parts of the wider Group so the need to exit people was not as intense. However PE backed business have a particularly demanding dynamic I believe and hence why, as CEO, I adhered strongly to these principles. They have served me well to date!

 

Kevin Murphy is an independent leader in the payments industry, working with domestic and multinational clients to shape their business strategies and improve business performance. With more than 30 years of experience in the financial services industry across Ireland, UK and the US, he is skilled in all aspects of the global payments business, cards and payment systems and in consumer finance issues, including consumer protection, banking regulation and marketing strategies. Kevin now uses his depth of Consumer Finance and Payments knowledge and experience to assist organisations with strategy and execution, advising clients on EU and domestic payments strategies. He is also highly experienced in working with Private Equity businesses in this market. His niche consultancy Colthurst Card & Payment Solutions offers consumer finance and payments solutions to businesses across Ireland, the UK and the USA. You can follow Kevin on @kevinmurphyIE, connect with him on uk.linkedin.com/in/kevindmurphy1 or contact him at kevin@colthurst.ie

 

 

To learn more about Harmonics Leadership Development programmes, please contact Harmonics on 01 8942616, 061 336136 or 021 7319604 or email info@harmonics.ie

 

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“It’s the first time you’ve driven me to school Dad!”

As part of an Executive Outplacement Programme Harmonics is delivering for an organisation, I am currently coaching a Senior Executive who has decided to take a voluntary severance package. He is a driven go-getter and always has been. Keen to look to the future, he has quickly put his previous employer behind him and wants to move on. He only finished up in the past month with his former employer and already has a job offer on the table which he was keen to accept and get back to work.

He loves being busy, achieving goals and ‘driving on’, as he says himself. He is a talented executive who will do well in his next position for the employer lucky enough to get him. He is in his late forties now and the change in career is coming at the right time for him to reposition himself into a different industry sector.

On the rebound

In our sessions, I noticed this rush to get to the next job. It’s fairly common, especially before people have finished up in their previous roles. There’s a mad dash to bank the severance package and make a seamless transition to the next role. The mad dash is derived from the fear of not being busy and that life would not have the regular routine structure. Getting another job as soon as possible also seems the perfect remedy to get over a relationship that ended not so well. If we were speaking about relationships, we might call it “on the rebound”.

Time to himself

In the last few weeks my client has found himself with more time on his hands than ever before in his life. He doesn’t have a structure, meetings, deadlines, emails or teleconference calls. So this week he did the school runs. His eldest, who is 15 years old (the same age as my own daughter), surprised him by saying “Do you know it’s the first time you have driven me to school Dad?” He was dumbstruck.

It dawned on him for the first time just how consumed he had been by work, striving to achieve more and more year after year. He was never around to do the school runs. He has always been busy at work. Busy making sure his family have everything they want. But the simple things in life can be overlooked in the chase to be successful. He spoke of the blindness that extreme work brought to other parts of his life.

It happens. Aspects in your life suffer that you don’t even notice, because you have been blinded by what you think is important. It is not until you take the time to stand back that you can see how consumed you have been by it all.

Time passes swiftly

Following my coaching session, I went for lunch and bumped into a former work colleague who was having lunch with his 17 year old daughter. He had spent the last six months recovering from a health scare. He couldn’t drive because of an eye disease that turned serious. He had to stop work but his scare has been averted and he’s looking to get back to work again early in the New Year. The illness, he said (as he looked at his daughter), made him realize the really important things in life are those closest to you, your big rocks.

It is only two months ago that I lost a big rock in my life. I buried a great friend who passed away after a two year battle with cancer. He was only 48 years old and a role model to so many who knew him. He was hugely successful in business, but always had time for a coffee and a chat. He exercised daily, was a non-smoker, non-drinker and left behind a loving wife and two teenage kids. He even wrote a moving message to be read out at his funeral. In the note he had written “I have no regrets”. He had balanced a successful business life with spending lots of time with his kids and family. He always spoke about having time for family. He has been taken too early but his words “I have no regrets” lead me to think, how many of us can say the same?

Time to think

In the last couple of weeks, my coaching client has been able to get some time to think and reflect. He has begun to notice the things he has missed for so long because he has been distracted by being busy. He has time to think.

We are coming up to the Christmas break when many of us get time to think. The break gives us time off the roller coaster we call work. We let go of emails for a while and catch up with family and friends. We get time to indulge ourselves and have some fun. We take time to read for leisure or go for long walks. Our days lack discipline and are unstructured. It takes a bit of getting used to recalibrating to just being. The technology enabled world wants us to stay connected and prompts us to keep engaging, read the latest tweet or social media post.

Time to be

One of the key lessons I have learned from coaching is not to miss out on our own daughters growing up. I was coaching another busy exec that had lost their job around the time she was born and what he said changed my perspective on parenting for life. He told me that he had invested the past 27 years of his life in a corporate and they had just cut the umbilical cord. He admitted, crying openly to me, that work had taken hold of his life and he had not only lost his job, he had lost his marriage and his relationship with his teenage daughters. He had been distracted by work and missed out on all the important things in their growing up. This served as a timely message to me; don’t lose your family and your daughter however busy life gets.

I am busy like many others. Yes, I am often away mid-week, but what is key is to make the time to chat, to be and if possible to do the school runs every so often. Time to connect, to listen, to think together, to share fresh insights, to laugh heartedly, to spend doing stuff that is just pure fun and to create memories. I can look back at 2017 and say we have created great memories. This blog earlier in the year speaks about our fun trip to London. https://www.harmonics.ie/what-i-learned-from-seeing-kinky-boots/

Time to reflect

In our business we receive many calls from people who have had time to think over Christmas and want a career or job change. So it’s that time of year for us all to reflect. Here are some questions that may help you to think about what’s really important for 2018 and beyond.

• What were your standout memories for 2017?
• Did they include the really important people in your life?
• What didn’t you get the time to do that you would have wanted if you had more time?
• What memories do you want to create in 2018?

If something needs changing, stop saying I’m too busy, change yourself or change the situation. Take time to think, be and most important of all, have no regrets!

  “This time like all times is a good time if we knew what to with it” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

John Fitzgerald – Founder Harmonics