Leadership: Cultivating Humility

How do you cultivate that humility, in willing to be wrong?

I think it’s easy. It’s certainly easy for me. From my perspective, I’m comfortable enough in myself. I know I’ve gone on some phenomenal journeys and I’ve learnt so much. But I also know that I am not the finished product. Any single person, whether they be at board level or customer experience, the way I think about things is, I’m never going to be better than a customer service person, at their job. They’re better than me. A product manager, engineer, marketing, they are all better at their job than I would be. Each one of them, I can learn something from. I will always quiz and question it and, sometimes, I will throw a curveball in there, just to see their justifications. But my mind set is, everybody I hire is better than me and that’s why they’re hired, in that specific role.

When I hire an exec team, whether it be a CMO, CTO, CPO, you are here to lead that function. You have to educate me in this area. I’ve got to support you. That’s my mind set and, ultimately, I’m very vocal about my opinions, but if somebody comes with something logical, backs it up with data, for me, it’s the only way things can work. That is how great businesses are grown, in my view.

That point on, you are hired to educate me, is interesting, in that the hires are serving the business.

Exactly; it’s your business. Everywhere I’ve worked, and I’ve done it at Push Doctor too, you’re all shareholders of the business. It’s your business. You are responsible for your area. You are responsible for getting this business to where it needs to go. You talk to a customer every single day, in a call center. You should know what the next level is, for the consumer experience. The medical team, the clinicians that we have, you know the pain point that is felt in the industry. We have a lot of NHS workers in the organization; you know what the NHS wants; we’ve got to bring it to the table. Giving them that responsibility, I think, not only grows the business and makes the business a phenomenal success, but also makes people feel as if they are driving change. That’s really powerful and very much needed.