Jonathan Breeze (Jet Republic): "This Is About Performance and if You Can Get That in People's Heads, if They Realize that It's About the End Goal Doing It as a Team, Doing what They Meant to Do and Caring about It – You've Won, in Any Business"
We are talking with Jonathan Breeze, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Jet Republic, who believes that not a single business can survive without clear defined levels of authority, passion about what you’re doing, precision, unity within your company and good performance. He also implies how to avoid bad choices of the rewards for the employees, and believes that it is better to promote his people in accordance with their behavioral skills rather than technical.
1. How do you energize your team?
You have to define your authority that people have to act within the business, and I don’t just mean the top of the business. In some respects, that’s self-evident: in my world: I’m the CEO and I founded the company, I am an investor in the business. I have clear levels of authority, and, so that’s relatively easy. What we should do as businesses, as we do in the military, is to define the level of authority and control that the others have, so that we have clear lines, clear delineation about authority and what we expect people to achieve with that authority. I believe, because I see at work, that a structural hierarchy, hierarchical system seems to work. You know, the Romans did a reasonably good job with it a few thousand years ago. It lets me know what I am supposed to do for the guy above me and it lets him know what he is supposed to do for the person above him or her. So, that’s the first thing. Then, we’ve got to decide what sort of business we are, and for us – we defined it. Initially, we talked about passion. First thing we talked about with people was passion. We described the business. We’ve said, look, we’ve voted one and a half billion dollars worth of aircraft. This is the biggest order in European history. We are going to be flying a hundred and ten Learjet 60s. We’re going to have Europe’s leading entrepreneurs as customers – these are driven enthusiastic passionate successful people. We have to reflect that. We have to be running at their level. So, come in and do it but you’ve got to love it. You’ve got to want to be here. If you don’t want to be here – it’s the wrong job. Go and find one where you are happy. So, first thing was passion. The sort of counterpoint to that was precision. You see this in the world of sport, you see this in the world of performance arts, we see this in the military world. Just because you want to be there and you are enthusiastic – great, but do it properly. It’s like the footballer – sure, great that you run the length of the pitch to make the tackle but get the ball, don’t kick the guy’s legs and score a penalty. With passion you have to have the precision. You’ve got to get it right.
2. Is there anything else beyond it?
Beyond passion and precision then there is unity – we absolutely have to do this together. From time to time, you might disagree with the direction – I don’t care. The point about unity is that we are doing this together because if we start doing things differently, if we end up breaking up – we will not deliver, we will fail as a business. Finally, the hardest part is performance. You’ve got to get it right. You have to perform. The customers don’t care that you had a bad day. They don’t care that your car broke down. They don’t care that you were sick yesterday – they don’t care. Again, if we go back to sports – it’s about winning, it’s about giving something to your supporters. It’s about a restaurant where I don’t care what went on in the kitchen – I want to see the meal in front of me. In the hotel I want the room to be perfect; I want the room to be clean. It is remembering that ultimately comes down to a performance. You have to imbed this in your team. They have to realize that there is no reward for following procedure. This is about performance and if you can get that in people’s heads, if they realize that it’s about the end goal doing it as a team, doing what they meant to do and caring about it – you’ve won, in any business. The difficulty is running that level of energy through the whole business and guaranteed – if you don’t run it at the senior team, it never goes down. If you’re running a pyramid structure, individuals can block so much bellow them. That’s why the selection of your senior team and your middle management is absolutely critical. And if they are not feeling it – move them away, get rid of them.
3. Military Orders.
In the military world there are always orders that will inevitably cause injury or even death but that’s not every single day. You don’t get to have that level of authority within your team unless you’ve earned that respect by running that team in a way where you don’t really need to place an order – your team almost running ahead of you. Again, it’s back to the whole philosophy of performance management. None of that is original; this has been done throughout business and throughout military for hundreds and thousands of years. Get the best people, motivate them, give them clear and enthusiastic direction and promote the best ones. Promote the good and lucky generals.
4. Do you think it is possible to teach a person how to lead?
It’s hard to teach people to lead. It’s hard to do it. Some people are just naturally good at this. Again, no original thought - we know this because we run selection for leadership skills, qualities, attributes in most military organizations and in many companies. But not everyone does, and, so, you end up seeing in many companies individuals who have high technical competency and is very good at their job being promoted in to a leadership role because of a technical skill rather than a behavioral skill. And that’s sort of where the world melts for me. That’s where my eyebrows raise and I say: “why would you do that?” Why would you promote someone into a leadership role when they have shown no competency, no desire, no skill to lead but are just good at their job? And many, many businesses miss this, entirely. They put people into leadership roles without having either assess their skill or even given them the opportunity to train. So, when that happens that’s where you get those people who block and can kill an entire team or side of a business. Not deliberately. No malice. It’s just that they are not very good at it. Never were, never will be, have never been trained but technically they are very good as being an engineer or being an accountant or being a pilot. But for goodness sake, don’t give them a team of people to look after.
5. Some companies promote people to leadership positions as a reward without even considering whether the given person has enough competencies for it or not. What do you think about it?
Business that promotes in this way deserves failure. Again, lets go back to our sports field: the best paid person on the pitch is very rarely the captain. The captain is someone who can lead the team. Often, the best paid person on the pitch is the center forward who scores the goals and he’s, probably, being paid more than the captain. So, again, businesses have the opportunity to enhance paying conditions whilst retaining that person in a specialist role without giving them positions of leadership. The best football managers in the world have rarely been the best players. It’s very, very, very rare to be brilliant at both. And we can see this; it’s a great meeting point to watch performance management in place is the world of sports. It’s difficult to beat the system. It’s very easy to compare and contrast: I have eleven players either side; they are following the same rules. Now, who is going to be champion of Europe, who is going to be champion of the world, etc., etc. The best managers, generally, haven’t played at a very high level if at all. Jose Mourinho can barely kick a foot ball but, my goodness me, is he a good manager.
6. Can you recall any examples from your own experience?
This was what we did in the military. This was the way we ran things. There were people who wanted to lead and wanted to run teams, and others wanted to be technical specialists. So, we paid those technical specialists nearly as much as we were paying the leaders but it was beautiful because they didn’t want to lead. They didn’t want to run a squadron or run a station. They could see the level of work required. They could see the skills required to do it, the behaviors that they would need. So, arguably, it’s about giving different career paths. The company you talk about sounds as though the only way to achieve enhanced reward and status is through promotion into management. So, they are destined for failure. They have to fail. I own half of White Concierge. It’s a global concierge company in the UK. Our staff there, many of whom would like the additional pay of a supervisor, don’t, necessarily, have the skills to run a team but technically they are brilliant. And, so, we have an advancement scheme for them where, as they increase their technical proficiency, they can earn similar rewards as if they had increased their management capacity. If you see a business who does this – normally, there is a room for optimism. The world of city trading, foreign exchange trading, etc. – you see this as well. The best performing traders – leave them alone, let them keep trading, let them keep making money, reward them, but they don’t need to go in to management. Every now and again you’ve got someone who’s brilliant at both – great, promote them.
Prepared by Katia Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on July 7, 2009
