Published on the 26/10/2022 | Written by Heather Wright

Two execs share navigational tips for high inflation…

Be vulnerable. Think differently.

That’s the message from two Kiwi execs who say combating high inflation, staff attrition and changing employee expectations requires a shakeup to the ways companies are doing things.

David Kennedy, a board member and executive with more than two decades of experience in cyber and 10 years in global CISO, CIO and COO roles, says the combination of a high inflation environment never seen by most of us before, changing employee expectations and the ongoing training shortage – Kennedy doesn’t use the term skills shortage saying there are plenty of people available, they’re just not trained to do the job – means businesses need to be more innovative in their thinking.

Kennedy, who now works as a ‘river guide’ – helping companies plot the path to success – says it’s time to think ‘a little broader and a little more intuitively’.

With the battle on to attract staff, many companies turned to remuneration to attract talent.

In hindsight, Kennedy says, that’s been a bad move, and instead companies should look at offering different value experiences to attract and retain staff.

“Thinking about the way you offer value to your employees and being vulnerable and personable with your employees is an important way to attack inflation,” he says.

“Which is a quite radical way of thinking, because everyone is going let’s boost prices and pay rates.

“At the moment companies are not paying for it. They’re just throwing muffins at it.”

“I think companies should also be taking advantage of inflation by offering long term incentives for both employees and customers. They’re trying to do this around the world, especially with energy prices – long term incentives to lock in energy costs and things like that. It’s a good idea to do so if you can help stabilise pricing,” he says.

“When you look at the working week, we need to rethink the way each one of those hours is being used because if we use them all for grinding work we are going to lose all our talent,” Kennedy says.

“We need to bring more innovative ideas inside that working envelope and then companies need to accept the fact that a portion of their budget, their effort, is actually being spent on important things like employee mental health and employee happiness. That has a dollar value and at the moment companies are not paying for it. They’re just throwing muffins at it.”

He believes companies should also be training employees to identify wasted activities which add little or no value for customers.

“Too many don’t have the accountability provided to them by leadership to say if something is adding no value, you can come and talk to us about dropping that part of the job. And if you drop that part of the job, we’ll give you something exciting to do to help develop your skills.

“If we fundamentally trained everyone to spot waste and remove waste from business processes, jeez imagine that! We’d have super slick business processes and staff doing things they want to do because they’ve got more time to experiment in different areas.”

Being open and modest enough to let teams know you don’t have the answers is his number one tip on how companies can cultivate a culture of growth, productivity and innovation.

Dianna Taylor, board chair at Nuka Ora (previously Sport Wellington), who along with Kennedy is on the leadership panel discussing risk, governance and leadership culture at the CIO Summit in November, agrees more vulnerability is required in business.

“If you want to adapt your business to drive forward, be agile, increase cadence, then you actually need to engage your employees around what the problem you’re trying to solve is,” she says.

She worries that companies are too quick to idealise other companies who appear to be innovating and attempt to replicate their perceived success.

Instead, to become an adaptable, future-proofed organisation and an employer of choice, she says organisations should look at what is already working for them.

“And then you look at what areas are not working well and break it down to how many of those things are within your control,” Taylor says.

“Often a lot of the delays in doing things comes down to decisioning and commitment to decisions. We are really quick to say here are the top 10 things we’re working on, when we know the organisation can only cope with three or four, so already our ambition is greater than our ability to deliver and we are setting ourselves up to fail.

“It’s good to have your top 10 things, but commit to doing one, finishing it and doing another one, rather than trying to start 10 things and finish nothing.”

Both Taylor and Kennedy believe there’s a need for greater collaboration – be it across sectors or between business and education.

Kennedy is a big advocate for advisory boards and mentoring.

“If you look around the world, advisory boards are not formal governance boards. They’re people like me or other successful execs that can spend a bit of time with leadership teams and companies to impart some experience, because knowledge and experience are the key things people need as much as they can, especially in leadership positions.”

He’s keen to see a platform established to enable executives around New Zealand to give a couple of hours a month to mentoring, and for mentoring to be viewed as part of social responsibility.

“Remember how we had social responsibility of planting trees and we all went out planting trees and it was great – good for people, for mental health and for the environment. Making it perhaps an initiative that aligned with that sort of gravitas and to help the whole economy, that would be a way to do it.”

Taylor agrees but says it comes down to an approach people don’t like: Being vulnerable and accepting we don’t have all the answers.

“To be a leader nowadays you have to be compassionate, honest and really clear. And employees want to work for people who treat them with respect.”

CIO Summit New Zealand takes place 28-30 November at Te Pae, Christchurch. Register to attend here.