Johannesburg, 16 Mar 2022
Many of us tend to see life as a series of milestones, or destinations, such as finishing school, graduating from university, attaining promotions and enjoying career successes, having children, and more.
While there’s certainly nothing wrong, and everything right, with celebrating and investing energy into milestones, without disciplined focus we risk missing out on the “now”, on life, on the small or large daily decisions and actions that dot our journey between life’s big events.
My son recently turned 18. What an exciting milestone! From the days of being deeply concerned with figurines and toy trucks to standing on the verge of serious decisions that will affect the start and early course of his adult life. Reflecting on my trial and error experiences in life, I decided - in a joint decision with my son - to host an orientation weekend, an initiation for lack of a better word.
We would go away with a group of six people that he identified as people he admired and respected, and over the course of the weekend, he would be able to distil life lessons from these mentors and use their wisdom as he plots the next phase of his life. While my intentions were to create an environment that would have an impact on him, it just so turned out to have a similarly profound effect on me.
We went away for two nights. On the first night, each chosen mentor shared what they believed were important life lessons based on their own journeys. On the second day, he distilled the lessons and plotted how he would use this wisdom to guide him into his future.
What started as a rite of passage for my son became a source of healing for everyone involved. Ever proud dad, and fallible human, I wept. I wept tears of joy, awe, relief and release. One common theme in each mentor’s nuggets of wisdom was that life is hard and you must develop mental, physical and emotional preparedness for when things go wrong, which they inevitably will. The good times will be great, but no matter how difficult life’s challenges become, you must remain grounded, with solid values and coping mechanisms to identify hope and find solutions.
One mentor took the exercise further and committed to share a new lesson with my son every week for a year, and then work with him to bind the lessons into a book - a resource available for him when he needed it. A golden gift of leadership.
It got me thinking about my role as a father and as a leader at Altron Karabina. I reflected on this world of beauty and hardship alike, how leaders react, how we impart lessons and make available mechanisms for our teams to navigate, cope, thrive and succeed. I looked at the management principles I have formed over the years. It became apparent that I hold a deep belief in maintaining momentum in the face of challenges. When the going is good, it’s easy to congratulate each other and pursue excellence; when teams encounter challenges - as they surely will - it’s another ball game altogether.
And so, I too distilled my lessons and learnings. Here are my five pillars to maintain momentum in a team, a company, a country, no matter the weather. These five core principles have played a large role in the impressive turnaround at Altron Karabina, to high double-digit growth and taking 30% market share from our competitors.
1. Seek counsel
There’s always someone better or more experienced than you in different fields. Lean on them. Have people around you that you trust, that you look up to, and gain from their wisdom. Listen, learn, distil and commit to apply these lessons in your life and work. There are treasure troves of experience all around us, not just among the super-elite crop leaders, but also in people who aren’t in the spotlight.
2. Build a structure and commit to it
When a crisis occurs, accept that it is happening. There is no place for denial in failure. Make a principled decision there and then accept the failure and face the consequences. This includes how you deal with these consequences and who you involve, but the key focus is on how you craft a way out of the challenging situation. This can only happen with structure: acknowledge the failure, analyse the lessons learnt, make changes in how things are done to ensure the same failure does not happen again. This requires discipline, which speaks to the next principle.
3. Execute and track
Sometimes people lose track of the focus they need when the going gets tough. Every now and then people need to be reminded of their responsibilities to execute against a structure and system, and that this performance is tracked. A tactic I use is to identify an area that is proving to be a challenge and embed myself for weeks - a deep dive so involved it irritates me and everyone else involved. Once we’ve reached a rhythm, I exit. When I return a quarter or two later, there has been a shift in discipline so as to avoid the deep dive and pressure encountered before.
This is not about developing a fear-based approach. On the contrary, it is a reminder that a system can come under pressure from anywhere, at any time, and the team must be in a position to respond to this pressure. Discipline is built by tracking execution, and then it becomes muscle memory. When the challenge reoccurs, the muscle memory ensures a team fires properly and the same mistakes aren’t repeated.
4. Cultivate hope
When challenges stretch the goodwill of everyone involved it takes courage to find and nourish hope. We can become clinical and caught up in the actions of execution, but it is vital to celebrate the good, find the people performing exceptionally despite the circumstances, and celebrate them. The alternative is a team that becomes a pariah to the organisation, and this situation will become a self-fulfilling prophecy. Humans respond to hope. I respond to hope. We all respond to hope, and so when times are tough, make an effort to celebrate people and quality work.
5. Keep the vision alive
Continue to talk about your vision. In our case, it's delivering innovation that matters, making a meaningful impact for customers, having a societal impact and creating opportunities for people to grow in the business, making a difference in the country by building up skills and creating opportunities for people to participate in the economy. Make sure everyone around you buys into the vision, believes the vision. It becomes a compass for the organisation, a North Star if you will.
My son’s initiation weekend taught me that we all need a reminder of the fundamentals that underpin growth. An 18-year-old boy’s initiation taught me that failure is certain, but so is growth and success.
The key to overcoming failure and growing lies in maintaining momentum when the walls cave in. This isn’t easy; it requires preparedness - physically, mentally, emotionally and spiritually. This preparedness arrives as a result of counsel, structure, discipline, hope and clear vision.
Altron Karabina is back. To get here we needed a governance overhaul, from how we ran projects, to how we dealt with challenges, to how we engaged underperforming teams. Today we enjoy a new culture of hyper-transparency and agility, and this culture has made a very tangible difference in the business’s performance.
This is how we went from a loss-making position to where we are today. Yes, the stellar turnaround will be reflected in the high double-digit growth numbers that will be published. But in many ways, financials are a lagging indicator. We look at NPS scores with our customers, our employee engagement scores - in fact any indicator that addresses the real, lived experience of day-to-day operations, and they’re also up in double digits, an indicator of a healthy ecosystem that produced great financial results which come from taking 30% market share from competitors.
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