Andy's February Message

The Icehouse CEO, Andrew Hamilton, shares his February message to The Icehouse Network. Read about his tips on setting up for a successful year and how to establish strong work performance throughout your business. 

2016 is here and, we wish each of you all the best for the year ahead may you have a successful year.

As I said in December, Christmas provides a wonderful opportunity to rest, reflect and plan for the year ahead. When you actually get back to work there is the chance to turn this thinking into your concrete priorities for the year ahead. Our Founder, David Irving has been legendary with this. His holiday would be spent in Taupo with his notepad and he would develop his ‘plan’ for the year ahead. He would arrive back charging in February, while the rest of us reeled in shock at the focus and clarity he had!

My reflections over the first month back were focused on how The Icehouse can meet one of our Big 4 Objectives for the year – attracting, engaging and empowering a world-class team. If we get this right, then we are well positioned to help our customers grow – not the other way around. Too often we are seduced into believing what we read in books; that it is all about the leadership quotient as opposed to the hard stuff around people, systems and processes – which, the latter, truly creates the ability to change the trajectory of growth in the business as you look to run to the next base camp.

So what we are working on? Imbedding a stronger sense of accountability at an individual level while providing support to each person. This means insuring we all understand what success in 2016 looks like for The Icehouse and how this translates into each person’s own role and critically what are the key must-do activities each person must do to achieve this success. For our customer engagement team members, like Michael Mason, that means having a target number of conversations every day, week, month, quarter and year which are high quality with a split between on the phone and in-person culminating in a conversion rate that turns into business. What comes next is that Michael is supported by his manager and that he is not just ‘left’ to do it.  As a manager, we must ensure he is doing what he needs to do and that we are listening to his own development needs to enable him to be the best support for our customers on their journey.

We are holding our people accountable to four key aspects of their performance:

1. The results against their key objectives – their KPIs
   
   
2. How well are they managing their team, their people and themselves. How well do they hire, induct and train their people and how engaged are the team. Are they completing quarterly development conversations with their team members and holding more-regular one-on-ones?
   
   
3. What activities are they undertaking to take The Icehouse into the future, beyond 2016. What are they doing to innovate and create a better future for the organisation?
   
   
4. How well do they relate to others in the team and outside the organisation? What are they doing beyond their day job in their engagement with others?  After you have owned your business for a long-time, you come to the realisation that people are the greatest opportunity and the greatest challenge. What you also realise is that you have to create the environment, systems and engagement to enable them to be the best for themselves, for you, and for the organisation.

So, have a think about what you are doing to invest in your people? What opportunities are you creating for team members to be better? What systems do you have in place to ensure you know they are doing what needs to be done and what feedback mechanisms are in place for them to tell the business what could be better? With that framework, you can identify development opportunities such as our Leadership Development Programme for those key managers in your business with lots of potential so they can be more valuable to you.

Ok, enough. Go well, go hard at the first quarter and see you next month.