{audio:00:00:09} In your experience, how would you define excellence in leadership?

{audio:00:00:35} The starting point is, “What is leadership?” I had the joy of being on a training course, and they said, “The first thing about being a leader is you need followers.” You can’t force people to follow you, so I think the first thing is people’s free will to follow you. A lot of people get that wrong — that leadership is given to them. It’s something you earn.
I guess “greatness” is the fact you can keep it and continue to add to it, so people want to stay around. I’d say that’s the definition — you can inherit a team, but if they don’t want to stay with you, you’re not really a leader because they always want to go and do different things.
If they can learn from you, they feel supported by you — it’s the protection, support, continued development, and that people get behind the vision you’re building. They see what you’re trying to achieve and say, “This is the person I want to be behind and build this thing with.”

You talk about books like Good to Great, which I probably misquote so often. You get into a level-five leader, and you start talking about the humility and all the ways it’s not about celebrating your own success but your team’s success — but recognising your own failures.

So, you start getting into the core of the person. “The cause before your own reward,” and all those great things I’ve seen in terms of real, good-quality leadership, most notably at Amazon.

Amazon often gets hurt in the press for its leadership style when there’s actually a lot of very humble people there and genuine, big leaders. You can’t build an organisation to that scale without having many leaders — not just one.

{audio:00:02:28} How did [Amazon] look at developing that leadership on a distributed basis? How is the business structured?

{audio:00:02:35} It’s a great question. I’d love to say they had this brilliant machine of boot camps and fun stuff. One of the businesses I work with, AND Digital, is renowned for its training programme, boot camps, and all that kind of stuff.

At Amazon, you’re constantly learning how to do this by being surrounded by great people. There’s a quote that you’re the average of the five people you spend the most time with. If you’re surrounded by brilliant people, it’s very hard not to improve. You’ll self-select. If you can’t keep up, you’ll decide it’s too hard and leave. If you’re always winning, you’ll get bored and decide to go and find a different group to play with. A working environment isn’t so different.

If you’re surrounded by great people, it’s hard not to be great if you stay around long enough. It’s intentional by its design and focus on culture, but it’s not, “Let’s go and sit in a classroom and learn this.” It’s every single meeting you’re in, the interactions you’re watching, the questions people are asking, the way they’re answering the questions. It’s everything — not something you spend 5 per cent of your time on but 100 per cent of your time.

{audio:00:03:49} What role did [Amazon’s leadership] principles play in creating [a learning] environment?

{audio:00:03:56} I think the deciding point is feedback. Amazon was super-interesting. It was the first interview I’d ever been to where I was interviewed by people who were going to be on my team, which was very surprising for me. I’ve normally gone through interview processes where it was only either your boss or peer-set that was going to be interviewing you.
That’s important. People don’t immediately respect you because you got the job; you have to earn that respect. The principle of setting that framework of the right cultures and behaviours, but also, everything then aligned around, “Are those behaviours something you’re doing every single day?”
Liverpool FC is having an amazing season — which is crushing me as a [Manchester] United fan. They lost their first game at the weekend, and I was just reading an article where Klopp said he couldn’t go in and be angry at the players because he’d be an idiot. They’ve had a phenomenal season so far, and one game doesn’t mean he doesn’t trust them anymore. They’ve just had an off day.

He said, “It wasn’t me coming out of that meeting feeling better and just shouting at them. It’s me walking out of the meeting, recognising the brilliance they’ve done and the fact I still trust them. You go back to a level-five leader, the humility. It’s not about him; it’s about the team.
That article is a great example of leadership. People on your team will have bad days, bad moments, but it’s picking up on those consistent things they’re doing and saying you can course-correct them. Leadership is also patience. You can’t flip somebody’s behaviour in a day, but you can if you continually give them feedback, help them, encourage them, and make them feel safe.

Safety is the first thing. People will do better if they feel safe. That is the first job of a leader.

{audio:00:06:11} How did Amazon look at developing a leadership pipeline or talent pool?

{audio:00:06:16} I think in the early days, the rigour around recruitment was probably the most important thing. I defined it as a straitjacket when I first arrived; interviewing people on competency and being very focused on, “You have a job to play in this interview, and you’re interviewing on two competencies.” That’s your job, being incredibly focused and saying, “This is what I’m here to do, and if I don’t do it well, I’m letting the entire team down.”

When you’re interviewing somebody, you’re part of a team. That was a real, first sense of commitment. I’ve got to represent the team properly and do a good job on the competencies. I’ll get called out if I haven’t. I’m going to have to sit down and present my feedback on the competencies, and people will question my feedback, why I came to that decision based on the questions I asked.

There’s even a lot of audit mechanisms around that recruitment process. You go back to, “How do I create greatness?” If you’re not doing good interviews, people will stop asking you to interview people. If you’re doing great interviews, you’ll get asked to do more of them.

Having people who are great at interviews doing more of them, they get better, and the people around them will realise what good looks like as well. You’re constantly improving the quality of the organisation, and that should lead you to better recruitment decisions.

Attitude and experience matter, but then you get away from traditional things. People often mislead experience for a CV. Experience is never written on a CV; it’s just where you worked and how long. Experience is through conversation and getting into examples of what people actually did. That’s where we dive into what experiences people have had.

{audio:00:08:16} I’m getting the sense this focus on people is the wellspring from which almost everything else emerges?

{audio:00:08:28} Leadership is only about leading people. People are the foundation of leadership. Without people, there’s nothing to lead. It’s probably that straightforward.

{audio:00:08:43} What prevents people from progressing to higher levels of leadership, in your experience?

{audio:00:08:48} Multiple things. The most interesting one is choice. There are many, many people I’ve met who are brilliant individuals, but they just don’t want to lead large teams.

Some of the most brilliant minds want to be every day, sitting there, coding or in a research mode. They don’t want to be distracted by this thing called leadership. They know that’s not the thing that excites them. They want to be bunkered down, getting on and inventing or building things on their own. They don’t want the distraction of large teams.

They’re super-interesting ones because if you look at all the abilities they’ve got, you’d say they’d be great, but not everyone can be a great leader in that sense because they’re not wired that way, they don’t want to be wired that way. They’d rather be heads down at a screen, in a book, or in a lab somewhere on their own. Strangely, their leadership maybe comes from the journals they write or the publications they make — they can lead through more written pieces as opposed to a physical job title. Leadership and influence can happen in many ways.

If you take the more organisational side of it and people, sometimes it’s culture. If you take the same person, different organisations or different time in organisations, some people might rise to the top and others wouldn’t. But that same person who doesn’t succeed in one organisation, you take them to a different organisation, and they’ll be very successful. There’s this myth that there’s one type of personality will lead. It’s a personality within a culture, and an organisation is a culture.

{audio:00:10:40} Aptitudes and environment have to align.

{audio:00:10:44} Yes, I think you’re right. It’s like a relationship — if you have one bad relationship, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a relationship. It just means you haven’t found the right partner. When you start looking at organisations like a relationship, you can look and say, “Do I want to be a successful leader here, given what that’s going to ask of me?”

It may be that you push up against some of your values and say, “I’m okay to work here, but do I want to be a public figure in this organisation?” I listened to the news on the way here this morning, and the conversation around Barclays and the environment was popping up.
You start thinking about these things and the cultural values of the organisation. On day one, they might not be that important because you’re more junior. At a certain point, you say, “I see different values in the organisation. I’m not sure this is the right organisation for me anymore.”
People change, and organisations change. There isn’t one skill set that says people can’t lead.

{audio:00:11:45} What I’m hearing is this emphasis in people. You opened your comments on choice; why people make choices and why some people may not be suitable for higher levels of leadership.

{audio:00:12:13} Yeah. And even potentially a cause as well. I’m sure many people have gone through life to a certain point, and there’s a moment where they say, “The time to act becomes now,” and they take a stance. They thought they’d never go and do this. You hear many of these stories where they say, “All of a sudden, I felt compelled to go and do something.”
There can be things that kick you out of that orbit, and you say, “Okay, now there’s some critical mass that pulls me to a direction.” Different moments in peoples’ lives can trigger them into different actions. I don’t think it’s a DNA thing.

{audio:00:12:56} You’ve had a number of CFO or finance roles in fast-growing businesses. Could we talk a little bit about the relationship between the CFO and CEO in the context of leadership and support and what one needs from the other?

{audio:00:13:16} It’s a dance. There’s a leader and a follower, in that sense. It depends whether you’ve got a founder-led CEO or a management type of CEO because I do think there are slight differences between the two.
A core view of a CEO: I think you’re slightly more willing to take risks, drive the companies forward, very commercially minded, and willing to take those risks. You almost need that handbrake of a CFO who is a little bit more, “Let’s start with no and then convince me”  — a bit more risk-averse.
In the end, it’s a relationship, so it is about that balance. You can’t have two people who are like, “I want to go and jump off this cliff,” “Well, there’s a higher one over there; let’s go and do that.” You want somebody to say, “Why would you jump off a cliff?”

You do need that balance, the yin and yang of that relationship. It’s a critical relationship to get right, and like anything, it takes time, work, and patience. The best partnerships are when a CEO and CFO have worked together for long periods. You can see, fundamentally, they trust each other and recognise where each person’s coming from.

They value each other’s opinion, they’ve learned how to be receptive to the other person’s experiences and thought processes, and those things take time. Also, an awareness of where your blind spots are and how the other person is complementing those.

At the most senior levels, that’s so important because it sets the tone of the organisation.

{audio:00:15:24} How do you cultivate self-awareness?

{audio:00:15:32} Failure is far and away the best and most humbling experience, revisiting what went wrong and why. You rarely fail from a lack of effort; it’s more skill or not being open-minded and aware enough of what’s happening around you. Those moments of failure and course-correcting are the best ways of doing that. Again, it comes down to experience.

{audio:00:16:16} In terms of frameworks to harness the lessons of failure, are there any patterns or general approaches you’ve been exposed to that you value?

{audio:00:16:26} Yeah, the conversation around, “Fail often, fail fast.” Don’t start with a mindset of, “I’m going to fail.” That’s absolutely the wrong mindset. You want to start with a mindset of success and cultivate a culture where failure is okay and expected.

If you’re trying hard things, you will fail. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed a child that is born and starts walking immediately and has not fallen over. Walking is a skill, and you have to learn how to do it. Before you learn how to do it, you’re going to fall over many times. If we also got discouraged by a child falling, most people wouldn’t walk. As a race, we’d stay crawling.

Organisations are the same. If you’ve got an environment where you can’t fail, you’re going to build a crawling organisation, not one that can get on its feet, run, and keep developing. Thinking about these organisations that create this fear of failure — you’re holding your people down, keeping them on their hands and knees. Don’t be surprised if they don’t move very fast.
Again, it’s down to protection. If people feel safe, they’ll take risks. Not company risks. You don’t want to take too many of those. What you’re doing is taking measured risks. Then you can reinvest, and when you see things are working, dial it up a little bit and say, “Okay, at five per cent, this is working — what about fifteen per cent? This is still working. What about twenty-five per cent, thirty per cent?” Don’t always go straight to a hundred and realise, “Oh, wait a minute, we just bankrupted the company.” That’s the bad form of risk.

{audio:00:18:28} How do you make people feel safe?

{audio:00:18:30} It’s very easy to create a blame culture. “What went wrong? Who made the mistake? Why did you do that?” When you start asking people why, they’ll just make something up because they feel obliged to give the why. What’s more interesting is understanding the situation, the things you did, and the inputs that didn’t deliver the output you were expecting.
Did you do all the right things, and therefore, the output just wasn’t as expected? Are there different things we can try? If you start with the principle that people are trying to achieve success, and you work on the belief of human nature, that people are trying to do things well, you go back to, “They tried to succeed; these are all the things they tried.” Either the timing was just wrong, or they missed one or two pieces in there. And then, what did you do to help them? Did you give them the skills, the support, the time, the right environment?

The starting point as a leader is, “What was my role in their failure?” Did they have the right equipment? Everything to do with the environment. Were they well-rested? Were they getting distracted by emails at 11 p.m. that weren’t relevant to the thing they were doing? Did you create that environment for them to succeed? When you start with yourself and your environment, you’re more forgiving of the outcome. Again, it’s back to, “Okay, it’s not the individual.” They didn’t go from being great to then fail. Something probably went wrong in the process.

{audio:00:20:27} There’s a quote I just came across from Robert Greenleaf who writes a book called Servant Leadership. He talks about the great leader looking at their own responsibility with respect for the problem first before looking at anyone else.

{audio:00:20:46} Yeah. It’s very true. You’re the senior person, the person creating the environment, the person supporting and managing prioritisations. If something fails, you have to start with yourself, where you say, “Have I done everything to give this person, this group of people, this organisation the best chance of success?” That’s where it has to start.

{audio:00:21:38} What separates leaders who can learn from failure versus those that don’t?

{audio:00:21:51} In the end, it comes down to ego. Unfortunately, ego is the thing that gets in the way. You can have belief in your abilities, that confidence — that’s great, you need that. You can’t be a leader and doubt yourself; people will see that.

But when you go too far, there’s just the ego, which might be based on successful results but not necessarily successful inputs. Sometimes you get the right result, but it’s nothing you did; it’s circumstantial. When you’re not reflecting on the successes, you’re also not likely to reflect on the failures. It comes down to that ego, where you believe you’re on this different plane and everything’s going to be great because you’re there.
That’s not great leadership over the long term. Short term, you can have those purely charismatic leaders, but they don’t build long-term success. By that, I mean you can get maybe three, five years in, but ten, fifteen, twenty years — that’s where that type of leadership will struggle.

{audio:00:23:45} In your experience at Amazon, were there any practices that struck you as really effective in learning from failure?

{audio:00:24:05} One is that the company openly talks about it. That’s the starting point. The worst thing is being ashamed by failure. You failed as well. That shouldn’t be a big discovery. Again, it’s that recognition — “I messed up, I made a mistake, and here’s what I’ve learned as a result. Here’s what I could do better next time.”

It’s creating that open dialogue and awareness around it, but you can only do that if you feel safe to share. “I did fail; I made a mistake here, I made a mistake there, and I’ve learned from it.” That’s growth and development. Dismissing and hiding it, nobody can learn from that.
That’s at the forefront of how Amazon specifically did very well. “Things went wrong.” And asking the question, “What could we do better?” Having spent some time in the operations business, as soon as we finished Q4, we’d say, “Let’s go back and do a post-mortem — what happened? What went well, what didn’t work?” You focus on the stuff that went well, to say, “Let’s do that again.”

But very quickly, you move on to, “What didn’t go well? What can we do to improve it?” Eight months later, when you’re getting ready for the next big period, you dust off that document and say, “Are we ready? Let’s start with the things we learned last time. What went well? Let’s make sure we do those again. What went badly? Have we done enough to avoid those things happening again?”

You build that into the organisational DNA. There’s nothing embarrassing or shameful around it. It helps the organisation grow, no different to an individual. If you ask me for feedback and I give you feedback, it’s great, you’ve got the feedback, and you can use it to try and improve.

{audio:00:26:29} You were involved in the buildout of Amazon in Europe at a very interesting time — what were the defining challenges you faced in scaling that business as quickly as you did?

{audio:00:26:52} There was a very early lesson, which was, “Are you building things that will work at scale?” That question itself seems easy, but actually, it’s very hard to embed in the things you do every single day because most people — and I include myself in that category — focus on the task at hand. It’s hard to consider if this thing you’re building today will be relevant in 12 or 18 months.

That shift of mindset is I’m willing to spend more time on the things I’m building today because I know they’ll serve me for the next two or three years, as opposed to just getting this thing done but then having to revisit it in three, four, six months because it’s no longer fit for purpose.
Shift into that long-term thinking, when things are moving so quickly, but you’re still prepared to say, “I know today’s happening, but if I only focus on today, tomorrow probably won’t,” or, “Tomorrow will happen, but I’ll need five times as many people.”

Then you get into this ever-increasing headcount challenge, and strangely, the more people you add, the more challenges you face because everyone’s doing their own things. Then you get into different leadership challenges, trying to coordinate multiple people doing different things.
The challenge is being patient because you know, over time, that’s actually going to pay back — and very quickly. It’s a hard thing to do when you’re busy and somebody’s saying, “I need this today.”

{audio:00:28:33} So, that mindset came from the top? How is that driven into your behaviour?

{audio:00:28:39} The mindset coming from the top is build for scale. That doesn’t distract from the fact we’re all human. “I need this today.” “Well, you can have this today, but it’s going to be a bit of a hack,” or, “You can have it in a week or two weeks, but it’ll be fit for scale.”

You have that doubt. Sometimes, the right answer might be, “I need a hack, I need it today. I know it’s not the most efficient way of doing this, but we just need it.” There are always trade-offs. To believe it always happens one way and it’s always perfect — that would be a lie.

Mostly, you’re building towards a scale and occasionally, you’ll just need to get busy on something, as opposed to mostly being busy and occasionally trying to do something for scale.

Unfortunately, most organisations fall into the latter and are then surprised when three years down the line, they haven’t implemented this new system or made this change. It’s because you kept everybody busy on routine tasks and daily activities; you’ve not created that breakthrough. You’ve not created that time or that culture to create that breakthrough. That’s something Amazon did very well. But the onus is also on the individual. Everyone sits at their desk every day and says, “What am I doing? Is this what I want to be doing in 12 months?”

I often ask that question. Most goal setting is messed up. People will ask, “What are your goals for the next year?” If you ask somebody where you are today and project forward, their line of sight will give you their to-do list. If you flip the question and say, “12 months from now, what are you going to be proud that you’ve done? What have you achieved? You’ve given a year of your life to this job, and we’re a year further on. What have you changed? What’s different? What are you proud about? What are you telling your friends and family about? What are you celebrating?”

With that future-backwards approach, you get way more interesting things that people will talk about. Applying that in the way of work, it’s like, “Okay, I’ve got this job to do, cool,” but a year from now, when you don’t like doing this job, when you’re not doing it, what have you changed? “Well, I’ve done this and that.” “Great — so how are you going to get there?” And then work backwards.

It’s a more interesting approach, and it’s very nuanced, but it completely changes somebody’s mindset around thinking about their own achievements and what’s possible.

{audio:00:31:41} What role did incentives play in supporting this longer-term mindset?

{audio:00:31:48} I’m massive on incentives. I had the pleasure of being on stage at a large finance event, and anybody who’s worked in finance always talks about bonuses. The amount of energy and effort that goes into managing bonus schemes, KPIs, all the organisational effort and the emotion that goes into it is a huge tax on the organisation and normally, a burden on finance teams.

I remember sitting on stage and saying, “Fundamentally, I don’t like bonus schemes because if you’re trying to get people aligned around putting the organisation first and thinking long-term, then you incentivise the individual on short-term deliverables and cash. How does that align them to thinking long term and building the company first?” It’s a misalignment. I asked this question on stage, and the finance committee all agreed with these statements, which was great.

My follow-up question was, “How many of you guys have a bonus?” The majority of the hands in the room went up. “So, if you agree with the principle, I urge you all to go into the office tomorrow and say, ‘I don’t want my bonus.’ Now you’re saying you believe this doesn’t work; you have to take a stance. Feel free to send me an email, all you guys who walk in tomorrow and say, ‘I don’t want my bonus. You can find a different way of compensating me, but this bonus structure doesn’t work for me. It’s not aligned with the organisation. I don’t think it fits with the right values.’”

I didn’t get one email. That’s the challenge. “Fundamentally, I believe this stuff, but I’m not willing to act on it.” In the end, we get into this selfish mindset of, “I’m better because I want my cash. I’m not willing to change the organisation, fight for it, and say, ‘I don’t want this.’”
At Amazon, there’s no bonus scheme; you’re invested in the equity of the organisation. Therefore, over the long term, the organisation does well, you do well. You also don’t get into, “I’ve got my sales target or my cost centre,” so you get out of this silo mentality. It’s about, “Is this better for the organisation?” It encourages collaboration and teamwork. “Is this better for the organisation? Then I’ll go and do it,” as opposed to, “But if I do that, I won’t hit my bonus.”

Then you get into this negotiation of, “You need to adjust my target down because now, I’m helping this guy out.” That is way too much energy invested in all the wrong places. We’ve seen it in so many organisations. “I can’t afford to travel because I don’t have the budget.” “But is it the right thing to do?” “Yes.” “Well, why don’t you just go and do it?” “Because it’s going to hit my cost centre and my bonus.” That’s the worst thing. Then you hire a finance team to move that from one cost centre to another. You’re building an organisational overhead just to do the right thing. It’s a mess.
Once you get rid of all that stuff, you’ve saved the organisation a lot of overhead and back-and-forth, and decision-making becomes a lot faster and more aligned.

{audio:00:35:13} I assume it’s a longer-term vesting schedule. The equity compensation at Amazon — was that over a period of multiple years?

{audio:00:35:22} Yeah. An interesting scheme. If I look at my scenario, it’s a four-year cycle. You’ve got line of sight of how your compensation will play out over four years, and yes, it goes up or down depending on the share price, but if you believe in the company, you know over the long term, it likely will go up. There will always be moments where it’s a different scenario, but long term, it will go up if you’re doing the right thing, if you’re working with your colleagues to do the right things. If you start getting into that mindset, “I’ll take it as an article of faith that this is going to be successful,” you dial compensation towards the company’s success, rather than short-term cash.

The logic’s very simple. The more cash you take out of an organisation, the less cash it’s got to grow. Strangely, if you want higher equity, lower cash, you’re helping the organisation be more successful, so the value of the equity should go up, as long as you’re making the right decisions.
Having that personal vesting in the company, to say most of my value is in the success of the company, not the cash I’m taking out of it — it’s more of a start-up kind of mindset.

{audio:00:36:45} Absolutely. I think what’s fascinating is that these principles have held with an organisation that’s scaled and got big pretty quickly. The business was able to maintain these principles that, in a start-up, are very effective.

{audio:00:37:05} Yeah. That’s probably why Amazon and Jeff say, “It’s still day one.” Everyone’s got this idea that start-ups are scrappy, but start-up’s a mindset. You’re building something, and it’s growing. That can be true because even if you’re a large organisation, you can still be relatively small on a global scale, or you can be relatively small compared to the things you can do.

Why does size stop you being a start-up? Everyone thinks start-ups are under-resourced and messy. It doesn’t have to be. It’s just a mindset. If you’re starting something up, you’re still new in that space. If I take Amazon, retail’s been around for a long time, so they are still relatively early into the retail space — at a global scale as well. So, why not?

{audio:00:38:12} That’s really interesting. Hiring for fast growth — how do you get that right?

{audio:00:38:20} Absolutely, people first, not roles. Find good people, and they’ll figure out their role in the organisation. It’s one of those things where if you’re in high growth, you don’t exactly know how things are going to play out. But what you do need is good people, so go get the good people first, and they’ll figure out what to do.

If you’re drawing lines on organisation charts, you can have the most perfect lines, but if you don’t have the right people, you’re not going to be successful anyway. Whereas you could have no organisation chart, but if you have the right people, you’ll probably be okay.

{audio:00:38:59} You’ve been involved in business success stories in organisations that have grown exponentially — how do you maintain culture in a fast-growing organisation?

{audio:00:39:25} Every day. Culture has to be managed. You can’t just let it happen because otherwise, at critical mass, if you keep hiring more people, they’ll naturally build a culture, which might not be the one you want in your organisation.

I would say, Amazon is the only company I’ve worked for that has actively managed that culture. My very first week at Amazon, based out in Munich, I get into the lift with Ralph, the MD of the Amazon business in Germany, wonderful guy. I get in the lift with a very experienced leader, and we’d just done our metrics review, this 120-page document, all the metrics. As a typical numbers guy, I’m super-excited, and Ralph asked me, “How did you find that meeting?”

It was my first week. This was my opportunity to give a balanced view but also try and get some airtime. This is my elevator pitch, quite literally. I go through diligently how the metrics could be better, how they could be linked. How I thought the team were on top of certain parts but other parts, I didn’t think they were. I thought, “I’ve just given this perfect answer.” So proud of myself.

And Ralph said, “Yeah, you’ve just completely missed the point of what that meeting’s about.” That was the fall-to-earth moment. I was like, “Oh, what just happened?” He said, “The reason for that meeting, it’s audit. It’s to make sure people keep their noses in the details of their business. Stay connected to the details because that’s where you really find out what’s going on.”

So, it’s a forcing function to stay connected, and the second thing is to teach culture. It’s about behaviour. What is it like to work here? It’s a teaching moment, a reinforcement of culture. That meeting happened in every single country, every single week, for an hour. Going through those metrics, but it’s not a metrics review. It’s a behavioural setting of how the organisation works.

If you take a massive step back, in the life of an organisation, that one week of metrics in itself isn’t going to change the organisation’s success. It’s like Liverpool losing the game last week; that one week doesn’t change it. But that moment to teach culture reinforces — or can destroy — an organisation. That repetitiveness of teaching culture is huge.

It’s every meeting you’re in, how you behave in that meeting, the language you’re using. It’s the one constant in an organisation; what is the culture you’re building? Reinforcing the behaviours. It’s hard to do, but if you do it, it just becomes the thing you do.

{audio:00:42:56} What really drives high-performing teams?

{audio:00:43:16} Play to people’s strengths, at the highest level. If you play to strengths and you want a successful team, you need diversity. Going back to the sports analogy, you can’t have everybody who wants to be a striker. If that’s their strength and you build a team of strikers, you probably won’t win. You need to ask, “What does this team need?” and then make sure you’ve got the diversity of skill sets where people are strong. That’s probably at the core of it.

Ultimately, as a leader, you’re a conductor more than anything. You’re making sure you’re getting the best out of people; when to bring them in and when they need to step back; when you need to dial up the volume, the intensity; that’s your job as a leader. It’s not to do the stuff. It’s to set the tone of that and having good people who are capable of delivering.
The worst is when you get them to play against their weaknesses. If you’ve got everyone working on their weak areas, how are you ever going to be high performing? You’ve got to be able to course-correct very quickly. That’s the leadership role. If you see somebody struggling, the question is, “Why?” Maybe they’re not getting the time to do the things they’re strong at because they’re covering something else for somebody else. You have to look at the whole picture.

{audio:00:44:42} What contrast would you draw between your experience at Amazon and Deliveroo, scaling those organisations?

{audio:00:44:52} A lot of people talk about Deliveroo because it was a much earlier business when I joined. It was three years old. When I joined Amazon, it was about 13 years old. Amazon was on a much bigger scale at that point. Some of the things were embedded, but I think the scale journey Amazon went on was equally as challenging as it was for Deliveroo, from that perspective.

Deliveroo was celebrating success more than Amazon. When I joined Amazon, it was, “Nobody’s talking about us; that’s great. We can go about our work. We don’t want to be anywhere near any external press. We’re happy to be behind the scenes, gradually building the business.” Deliveroo wasn’t necessarily trying to seek this press, but because it’s a consumer product and a big UK success story, it very quickly found itself in the headlines.
That’s hard for an organisation. Overnight, it was getting involved in policymaking around the gig economy, in the press every single day, and it was incredibly challenged by a lot of external pressure when it was still, essentially, a baby. That was incredibly hard on the organisation.
It very quickly gets you into, unfortunately, more short-term thinking about, “What’s going to be in the press?” That can be a big distraction to the organisation.

{audio:00:46:39} You hire good people to deal with it. You take a portion of the organisation that needs to focus on that and leave the rest to get back down, focus on their day job, and not worry about that stuff. It’s also a moment where you can very quickly identify high-ego people. As soon as there’s an opportunity to get out and build that profile, they can be drawn to that opportunity and building their own profile versus focusing on the organisation and getting good stuff done.
In some ways, it’s a wonderful magnet because it pulls those people out; you can identify them very quickly. These are people who won’t be the level-five leaders we’ll need to build this for long-term scale. If you go back through Amazon’s history, Amazon had those challenges as well. I wasn’t there at the time, but I believe they had some similar challenges.
Very similar in terms of growth, success. I think the maturity is certainly very different. Deliveroo is a less mature organisation, and therefore, having to go through, “What is the culture? What are our values? Let’s get those things locked in,” even before you can say, “We’ve got a culture because we’ve been growing it. Now we actively have to start thinking about it and managing it. What is our culture?” which Amazon had already gone through. I think it’s just staging development.

Lessons from Eight Years at Amazon, Inc.

How Amazon deals with failure and encourages intelligent risk taking (why talking about failure is important, the role of the post-mortem)

Principles for creating a learning environment and a learning culture 

Factors that prevent people from ascending to higher levels of management

Cultivating self-awareness and learning from failure

What gets in the way of learning from failure

Lessons from scaling Amazon's European business 

How Amazon drives long-term oriented behavior through incentives

How Amazon maintained culture while scaling operations aggressively

Lessons from Eight Years at Amazon, Inc.

Former CFO at Deliveroo & Finance Director, EMEA, Amazon

inpractise.com/articles/lessons-from-eight-years-at-AMZN

Why is this interview interesting?

Executive Bio

Philip Green

Former CFO at Deliveroo & Finance Director, EMEA, Amazon

Interview Transcript

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Lessons from Eight Years at Amazon, Inc.(March 3, 2020)

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