Active at Active VMA
After more than 17 years I still get a great buzz out of working directly with clients. I had to scale it back a few years ago for personal and business reasons, but we made a decision that I should run an Active Manager Programme (AMP) Co-lab to keep tabs on how the programme was running in real time and where it could be improved. It’s been my good fortune to work with Active VMA for the last 18 months or so. MD Ross Schultz and I have had a lot of fun. He mocks my choice in shirts and I’m a great fan of his year-round attire – jean shorts, work socks, work boots; practical and yet so stylish.
Ross is a great investor in his people. He’s loyal to them, sometimes more loyal than the business requires, but the people at Active VMA are genuinely like family to him. And he is deeply open-minded, almost to his surprise. He did say “if you’d told me 8 years ago, I’d be taking advice from a bloody Aucklander who wears weird shirts and funny glasses I’d have laughed in your face”. He still laughs in my face, but then I do save my most outrageous shirts for my visits to Rotorua. He almost liked the one I wore last but only because it could almost have passed for camo.
In the AMP Co-lab discussions, I’ve watched his team – Greg, James and Troy – develop self-awareness and use that to improve their management skill. I’ve seen them face up squarely to their limitations and set about working on them. In the last few months their supervisors have been doing the Active Team Leader programme. They are lapping it up too, and we’re seeing the results in the P&L (despite a tough market). In our most recent meeting we had a conversation about the impact of coronavirus and the way everyone contributed to the discussion and developed the options was at a level we could not have imagined twelve months ago.
At the same time, the supervisors are moving further and faster than we anticipated on the Active Team Leader programme. Their willingness to build on their strengths and front up to their mistakes to each other is creating a culture of trust and driving their continuous improvement programme. They’re on the road to becoming a self-regulating performance culture, and AMP has been one of the vehicles.
But what is even more interesting is the impact on the organisation. Lots of businesses get siloed once they get above 50 people, and the silos just multiply with size – vertical and horizontal. Because managers in most smaller businesses are focused on getting their job done, co-operation between the silos is pretty hard to achieve. It’s very hard to get people to work on working together when they’re so busy working on their own stuff and with their own team. Organisations get quite stressed and a leading indicator of stress is conflict.
The truly enlightened leader knows how to use conflict to deepen a relationship, but it’s hard. At Active VMA, the leaders have led the way. They’ve been open about themselves and each other, and in being willing to be vulnerable they’ve built trust amongst themselves (straight out of the Brene Brown playbook). Trust is the oil in the relationship engine. That trust is rapidly working its way through the organisation, and as a consequence, Active VMA as a whole is a lot less stressed. There is less conflict between the different parts of the organisation, people across departments work together to get product out the door as quickly and profitably as they can (what Troy calls getting shit out the door faster than ever – check out his testimonial here. There is a genuine sense of team and collaboration that didn’t exist before.
Ross could not be more pleased. And on that we agree. I share his pleasure and his pride.