Leadership: You Can’t Force Followship

Let’s move on. What does leadership mean to you, Rowan?

It’s like, what does breathing mean. It’s a very hard question. Maybe the best way to answer it is, I started Naked Wines, Naked Wines was bought by Majestic. So there are two contrasting experiences. One is, you start a company, everyone is very much at the same level and the culture gets formed, influenced very heavily, by the fact it’s a start-up and you’ve all got to work hard to make the thing work. If you contrast that with Majestic, it was a very hierarchical company. Very few people had been there from the beginning. One form of leadership at Naked was just effortless, because I was just myself and I didn’t need to think about it, at all. Then when I went to Majestic and, all of a sudden, I had to lead 1,000 people, with a very different culture and a pretty inbuilt, deep cynicism about the leadership. That was a real shock to the system, because it never occurred to me that people would doubt my sincerity.

At Naked, if we were going to have some major change in direction, we’d just get everyone in together, open up a few bottles of beer and say, we were doing something in a particular way and we think we should be doing it in a different way. Here are the reasons why and, practically, from tomorrow, this is what this means. Here are the difficulties it’s going to cause for you and we appreciate your help in all pulling together to make this work. The next day, everyone would take off at a 90-degree tangent and there was an inbuilt belief that, if we were taking difficult decisions, that it was because we felt that was the right thing to do.

The big surprise at Majestic was, I would announce that things were, obviously and patently, in the interests of the employees, and at most, you’d get about 30% of people going along with it. One of the things we implemented, right at the beginning was, the senior executives all used to get free shares. I gave up my free shares, to make them available so that every single member of staff would get free shares. About 30% of people took up the free shares. You literally said to people, here’s some money for nothing. Here’s free money and about 30% of people go, okay, I’ll take your free money, thank you.

When I said to the other people, tell me why you aren’t taking the free money, what’s going on? The response would be, well, I’m not really sure what’s involved. It’s free money; I don’t know how much harder you need to make that. There is some very deep, inbuilt cynicism about management’s motives for doing things and a belief that, somewhere, there was a catch. Therefore, if you could see a worm, you needed to look for a hook, because there would be one.

So for the first time, I had to stop and think about leadership. In a sense, I think, the biggest mistake I made was in thinking, I just need to stick to my principles and stick to my guns and, over time, people will come to see that I am sincere and that, if I say red is red and blue is blue, I’m telling the truth and I will win them round. Actually, in the end, I don’t think it was true; I don’t think I succeeded in doing that. I think, by the time I left, probably the degree of buy-in to the management team’s actions was no higher than it was at the beginning. That’s after a lot of hard work and a lot of changes that we thought were positive, significantly improving the lot of the people who worked there. But it was still a very difficult thing to do.

I think what that taught me about leadership is, sometimes you have to change your people. Sometimes just doing your job isn’t good enough. You can only be a leader if people want to follow you. You can’t force people to follow you. When the psychologists have tried to understand what would make apparently sane people jump up from behind a trench, run into an enemy machine gun, it’s not the promise of a medal; it’s not the promise of being jailed if you don’t. It is the fact that, if you don’t do that, someone else is going to have to do it. It is fellowship with your comrades. If a company doesn’t have that, it’s almost impossible to lead them.

So I think the way I think about leadership is, you’re not appointed a leader, you earn leadership and you can only earn leadership from the right people.