Side Mirror: Fulfilling Performance 1 - The origin story of Aquilae’s vision and mission.

This episode focuses on the origin story of Aquilae's vision of Fulfilling Performance. I share where the idea came from and how it informs Aquilae's mission of Enabling Fulfilling Performance. 

I look forward to hearing what resonates with you. 

This episode of CAREER-VIEW MIRROR is brought to you by Aquilae. Aquilae is a Performance Management consultancy in the auto finance and mobility industry. We use our proprietary Performance Management diagnostic to help you identify what steps you need to take to realise Fulfilling Performance in your business.  Contact me directly if you’d like to know more.  

For details of our forthcoming guests follow us on Instagram @careerviewmirror 

Email: cvm@aquilae.co.uk 

Episode recorded on  14 April 2022 

Transcript

Ed Eppley: 0:00

I am sitting in lovely Siesta Key Florida.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 0:03

I'm coming from Bangkok in Thailand

Daniel van Treeck: 0:05

Prague in the Czech Republic

Osman: 0:07

Cairo in Egypt

Holger Drott: 0:08

Auckland, New Zealand

Shannon Faulkner: 0:09

London, England.

Andy: 0:10

Welcome to Career-view Mirror, the automotive podcast that goes behind the scenes with key players in the industry looking back over their careers so far, sharing insights to help you with your own jouney. I'm your host, Andy Follows He llo, listeners, and welcome to this episode of Career-view Mirror. It's a little bit different. It's another of our side mirrors. I wanted to share something with you. I want to keep it short. And I want to spread it over a few episodes over the coming weeks. The reason I want to do that is so that it can be short so that you can definitely listen to it, like there's no reason why you couldn't listen to it and give you time to think also in between each of these next episodes. And even reach out to me if you feel that way inclined if you want to. And hopefully it'll become clear why I'm doing it. It's called Fulfilling Performance. The topic is Fulfilling Performance. And I want to tell you a little bit about what that means to me and where it comes from. And I'll start with, go back a few years really, 2014 I was travelling from New Zealand to Munich, it was the beginning of the year, and I had a regional meeting in Munich. I was running the New Zealand market at that time, so quite a long trek. I broke it up with a stopover in China. I went to our offices in Beijing. And I delivered a half day session of the Authentic Leadership programme that I had created with Dr. Peter Dry who has been my guest for one of the episodes of Career-view Mirror, was a colleague of mine at the time and as a personal friend. We'd developed a programme, we'd rolled it out in Australia, we were offering it as an opportunity to other markets in the region, hence going to China and giving them a taster of it. And I was on my way to a regional meeting in Munich where my boss Alan Crookes, had asked me if I would spend a day of that meeting delivering the Authentic Leadership programme to my peers, to the other CEOs in the region, in the Asia Pacific region. And we'd convened in Munich, as we did at the beginning of every year, to have a conference to catch up with headquarter colleagues and to usually go through the annual portfolio process of reviewing our first line reports around the table. So I was on my way there and I was conscious I was a bit daunted by the idea of, for the first time delivering a programme that Peter and I had created, to my peers, to people who, in many cases, were more senior than me actually, they were peers in that they had a similar role, but they were more senior, had bigger markets they were responsible for. And this was a step up as far as I was concerned in terms of the ask on me, and I felt yeah, a bit nervous about it. And I was wondering, how was I going to make it work? How was I going to explain some of these ideas that we had and how would they land with my colleagues? And I was listening on the flight from Beijing to Munich, I was sort of half snoozing, and I had an audio book on, I was listening to the eighth habit by Stephen Covey. And usually, everyone knows I'm passionate about the Seven Habits and always talking about the Seven Habits and Stephen Covey. But people when they realise there's an eighth habit, they'll sort of laugh knowingly and make a joke about oh yeah, he knew he knew he was onto a good thing so he created an eighth habit and what is it? And in case you're wondering what it is, it is to find our voice and inspire others to find theirs. So I was listening to this book and drifting in and out of sleep. But what caught my ear was a passage actually right at the beginning, where Stephen Covey talks about speaking, travelling internationally and speaking to large audiences. And he says, I'm going to read it to you now. He says "I frequently ask large audiences how many agree that the vast majority of the workforce in your organisation possesses far more talent, intelligence, capability and creativity than their present jobs require, or even allow? The overwhelming majority of the people raise their hands. And this is with groups all over the world, about the same percentage acknowledge that they are under immense pressure to produce more for less. Just think about it, people face a new an increasing expectation to produce more for less in a terribly complex world. Yet, they're simply not allowed to use a significant portion of their talents and intelligence." And I heard that, and that just really had a massive impact on me, it has stayed with me ever since and become a guiding light or it is become the mission, the mission that I'm on, because I thought, well, what a wonderful dilemma, that's on the one hand terrible, that we're acknowledging that people are not able to bring what they already could contribute to their current role, we're not talking about what they could deliver it, if something else happened, if they, if they worked at it, or if they had more experience or anything that potentially they could do, we're talking about, they already can do this now. But their job doesn't require them to or maybe doesn't even allow them to. And I thought that's, that's really interesting. And also this idea that we have to deliver more, for less. I was on my way to a meeting where we would be talking about our targets for the next year. And you could be absolutely confident that those targets were going to be higher, and we will be expected to deliver them with the same or fewer resources. So this all made sense. And I thought, what a dilemma what a wonderful dilemma that you've got this requirement to deliver more from less each year. But at the same time, you've got people not able to bring to their role that which they're already capable of, that which they're already sitting on. Now, at a similar time, because we were we'd developed this Authentic Leadership programme, I'd read a book called How Will You Measure Your Life by Clayton Christensen and Clayton Christensen runs the MBA programme at Harvard Business School. And he talks about a class that he runs for his MBA students, it's really, really worth reading or there's a Harvard article about it, if you if you don't want to read the whole book, there's a Harvard article called How Will You Measure Your Life? So I had been exposed to this. And there's a passage in the in the Harvard article, where he's talking about management, and how to find happiness in our careers, and Frederick Hertzberg who, and I'm reading now, who asserts that the powerful motivator in our lives isn't money, it's the opportunity to learn, grow in responsibilities, contribute to others, and be recognised for achievements. And he says, I tell the students about a vision of sorts I had while I was running the company I founded before becoming an academic. In my mind's eye, I saw one of my managers leave for work one morning with a relatively strong level of self esteem. Then, I pictured her driving home to her family 10 hours later, feeling unappreciated, frustrated, underutilised and demeaned. I imagined how profoundly her lowered self esteem affected the way she interacted with her children. The vision in my mind then fast forwarded to another day, when she drove home with greater self esteem, feeling that she'd learned a lot been recognised for achieving valuable things, and played a significant role in the success of some important initiatives. I then imagined how positively that affected her as a spouse and a parent. My conclusion, management is the most noble of professions if it's practised well. No other occupation offers as many ways to help others learn and grow, take responsibility, and be recognised for achievement and contribute to the success of a team. More and more MBA students come to school thinking that a career in business means buying, selling and investing in companies. That's unfortunate. Doing deals doesn't yield the deep rewards that come from building up people. I want students to leave my classroom knowing that. So listeners I had that thought, in my mind, I'd been presented by Stephen Covey with this dilemma, if you like, and those two things combined, and there ultimately emerged from that this concept of Fulfilling Performance, and it's taken a while to arrive at those two words Fulfilling Performance. And I just want to explain a little bit about what our definition of that is. So what I mean by Fulfilling Performance is that we believe that individuals performing at a high level and feeling fulfilled go hand in hand. We believe those things go together really well. And we want to see individuals, teams and organisations performing at a really high level in the work that they do. And we want to see them then going home or shutting their laptop, whatever it is they do these days at the end of a day, and being fulfilled and energised by the day they've had and the work they've been doing so that they, they're not completely exhausted and drained and wasted when they get home, but they are actually fulfilled and energised and able to be great parents, great partners, and great all around human beings. So that became the vision, that became the vision. If you if you think of the vision as being, you know that which you can imagine, in the same way that Clayton Christensen, imagine that employee, well our vision became workplaces where that happens, workplaces where people leave at the end of the day, feeling so fulfilled, having performed at a high level, and go home to be great parents, great partners, and great human beings. And if that's the vision, if that's the that's the thought you're holding the picture you're holding in your imagination, then the mission became enabling that. So my mission became enabling that and in, it's taken years from that point, I mean, the flight I mentioned was seven, eight years ago. It's taken years from that point, to formulate all this into a business with a vision and a mission. But I'd say it was around that time that it came together. And it was sufficiently, it was enough for me, I thought that is enough. If I can spend the rest of my days working on that, I will find that working on solving that and creating, enabling Fulfilling Performance, I didn't know it was called Fulfilling Performance then, that came later but if I can spend the rest of my days working on enabling that I can be happy. And I can make my contribution that way. And I can leverage my skills to help others doing that. So that's great, isn't it? It's great for me. I hope you found that a little bit interesting. I want to talk more about what we did next next time, because it's all very well to have a vision. But okay, so what you're gonna do I understand that's what you want to achieve. And that's the mission you want to go on. But how are you going to do something about that? What are you going to do to enable Fulfilling Performance. So I want to talk about that next time. But thank you for staying with me if you have, if you've stayed the journey for this different conversation. And I hope you have and I look forward to next time sharing with you what we did, and how we the tools and the approach that we take to enabling Fulfilling Performance for the individuals, the teams and the organisations that we work with. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to Episode 60 of Career-view Mirror with me, Andy Follows. This episode focused on the topic of Fulfilling Performance, our definition of Fulfilling Performance, and how it came to represent the vision for Aquilae leading to our mission of Enabling Fulfilling Performance. We publish these episodes to celebrate my guests' careers, listen to their stories and learn from their experiences. And on this occasion, I've shared some of my own story. And I hope that something in it may have resonated with you. Our next two or three episodes will be more side mirrors as we call them, covering more on this topic, and then we'll get back to the regular Career-view Mirror interviews. This episode of Career-view Mirror is brought to you by Aquilae. Aquilae is a performance management consultancy in the Auto Finance and Mobility industry. We use our Proprietary Performance Management Diagnostic to help you identify what steps you need to take to realise Fulfilling Performance in your business. Contact me directly if you'd like to know more. My email is andy@aquilae.co.uk. And remember, folks, if you know people who benefit from hearing these stories, please show them how to find us. Thanks for listening.

Osman: 14:48

No matter how hard you try. No matter how hard working you are, you're never going to be able to do it on your own. It's just not possible.

Ed Eppley: 14:55

You know at the end of the day, you're steering your own destiny. So if it's not happening for you and you're seeing what you want out there, then go out there and connect.

Sherene Redelinghuys: 15:03

Don't rely on others. You have to do it yourself. You have to take control.

Rupert Pontin: 15:09

If you've got an idea if you've got a thought about something that might be successful, if you've got a passion to do something yourself, but you just haven't quite got, do it.

Tom Stepanchak: 15:19

dTake a risk. Take a chance stick your neck out what's the worst that can happen? You fall down, okay, you pick yourself up and you try again.