Allan Leighton Speaker | How to be a Successful Business Leader | Contact Agent

At the moment I'm chairman of Pace, I'm chairman of Pandora, I'm chairman of Office, I'm chairman of Matalan, I'm chairman of E1 and chairman of Charlie.

Largely I'm chairman, so that's a big difference. Somebody always says to me, if you're the chairman, what is the most important thing that you do? I always say the same thing: get a great CEO. At the moment I'm blessed, I have very, very good CEOs in the company. The thing is, everybody thinks that everything about running companies and being on boards has become governance, and they forget that governance is not box ticking. Governance is understanding the business and actually the business doing well. That's what real governance is. It's all business driven. My rule of thumb is if you get a great CEO, he gets a great team, she gets a great team, the business does really well, and they're very easy to govern. Never forget that in the end, it's how the business does and how it's run that creates good governance, not a load of rules that people then have to tick boxes. Governance comes from within a business, not from without.

Well, I think it is through my eyes, but my eyes in those appointments are the business's eyes. I am the eyes of the business in that appointment. Everybody wants to be a CEO, it's the best job in the world, but it's also the toughest and the loneliest job in the world. So if you want to be prepared to do it, you have to remember it's really, really tough and really, really lonely. I can't subscribe to this idea that you can go away for two weeks on holiday and everything's fine. You live and breathe the business every minute that you're the CEO of it. As soon as you don't, you've got a problem. So you need people who have the resilience to do that. Resilience is a really big part of it. The Mars brothers would always say to me, 'I'm going to tell you this, never forget it.' One of the things they told me never to forget was: 'You have to remember, Allan, in business only two things are important: people and products. Forget about everything else.' People is two fronts: first of all, the people you work with. 'Work with' is a really important thing. The Mars culture was and is: you don't work for anybody, you have different roles and different levels of responsibility, nobody works for anybody, we all work together. We work with people. That type of workplace where everybody thinks they're working with each other, as opposed to 'I work for him, I work for them,' is really important.

Well, because people don't think that way. Part of the problem is that career becomes very important, so it's really all about how do you get up the ladder. Part of your measure of success is the number of stripes you've got. It kills me, which is why I hate the word 'staff.' 'Staff' for me is demeaning in a strange way. Part of your success is how many stripes you've got, and your stripes are driven by how many people you've got working for you, not working with you. Great CEOs create a culture and a context in the business that you don't need to do that. You get paid more and get more responsibility because you're really good, not for how many people report to you. Remember, you're only as good as the people you have working with you, and they are a major proponent in your success. So you have to have that sort of equality in it.

Very good CEOs are generally very good with people. Secondly, they understand people and products, and they understand that the big piece of the product piece is the people piece, which is about customers. So it's all about people. Another thing the Mars brother told me: 'Remember, businesses don't die, people kill them.' That's how it is in business. That's why people are really important. The people that kill them, the people who run them, and the customers who go away from them. So great CEOs understand that people thing is the fundamental thing, and everything else spins off the back of that.

Well, the last ones I found a lot of them in Mars. I took a load of generation two, generations out of Mars with me in different places. You have to have been brought up in the right way, in organizations that think like that. That's one place. Secondly, generally in a lot of the companies, there's always one or two people in there. You just have to find them and shape them a little bit and push them through. Often people think that's a bit risky, but it's the least risky. The most important thing is get the right person. It doesn't matter how long they've been there, what color they are, if they're male or female, or what experience they've got. Experience is the most important thing. I used to say I know people who are my age who are very experienced but have no experiences, and then I know people much younger, 25, 26, who've got great experiences and are very capable of running things. Take the age out of it. The Mars culture is very young. It's all about how good you are, not how many years you've been in it or how many people report to you.

Well, I was fortunate because I was in marketing and sales, and I think that's quite a good combo. One is a lot of the thinking of how do you do something, how do you build a brand, how do you go to market, and the other one is you have to go and do it. There's the brand piece and then the customer piece. If you have knowledge of both, I think it's pretty good. When I did sales as well, I was made a sales manager really quick and ran regions.

I honestly have no idea. I was sort of wondering around, and then somebody obviously thought they might have something. I got a phone call, this was before mobile phones, to phone this guy called Don Reed, who was the sales director at the time. Don said to me, 'Look, we've got this thing from America, it's called management development.' He said it's a really good thing, we're going to put a few people in the company in it. So I went on it. What it meant was I was in Slough on Monday, working in manufacturing. I ran the M&Ms line, I had no clue what I was doing. It was this sort of investment where people moved you around the organization. They said we're going to try to get you to do every job in the company in the next two years. That's a really big thing to do because frankly I was useless at 90% of them. I kept saying to them, 'I'm just not very good at this.' They said, 'That's not the point, you'll understand all this stuff.'

Hindsight, it was all about the people thing. It got me big time. We were all taught that the most important thing is how you manage people, how you recruit people, how you develop people. I think about it now, it was much more. I told a story yesterday, another one of the brothers came and said, 'Look, you have to understand one thing: 50% of the brains in the world are female, and brains have no color. Just remember that. Your job is to get us more brains than anybody else. Nobody else has worked this out yet, so we'll get more brains, and because we've got more brains, we'll be better.' It's true. Now when I read all this about diversity, everybody's trying to have a reason why we have to have a split between male and female. Step back, it's obvious. They always said to me, 'Allan, don't worry about head count, worry about brain count. Don't count the heads, count the brains. Go in the meetings, look at the people, count the brains.' It's a bit scary from time to time, but it's a different way of thinking. It's so obvious. If you want to be successful and you want your business to be successful, that's what you have to do. It all goes back to the people you get, and the diversity of people, male and female. It's just common sense.

I never thought I'd leave actually, because I loved it so much. I was getting on really well. I did try to leave about three years before. I was headhunted by Grand Met actually. I didn't know what a bloody headhunter was because we just lived in our own world. So many people phoned me up one day and said we'd like to talk to you about another job. I thought it must have been the HR department in Mars. I said, 'Well, whereabouts are you in the office?' They said, 'We're not, we're a different organization.' I felt terrible because I thought this is like treachery. So I went to see Grand Met and they offered me a job. My thing in all these things is when you change job and you're in a great company and you love it and you're doing quite well, it's always a 51-49 call. It is not an easy call. When it is an easy call, it may not be the right thing. So I went and I thought I have to tell the brothers because I was working for them. I said, 'Look, I just need to let you know I'm going to resign, I've got another job somewhere else.' They said, 'Really?' I said, 'Yeah.' They said, 'Okay, well you better have a think about it.' They went out and they locked the door and left me in the room for eight hours. They came back eight hours later, about six, and opened the door. They said, 'So you made your mind up?' I said, 'Yeah.' They said, 'So you're going to stay, aren't you?' I said, 'Yeah.' They said, 'Well now you tell us why you're going to stay.' I said, 'Because you locked me in this room because you didn't want me to go.' That's simple. Sometimes loyalty works both ways.