As we grow our own business and build our Steople brand and reputation across the globe, I’m finding that increasingly we have to deal with our own business growth issues as much as supporting our clients to do the same with their businesses.  In essence, we truly have to make every effort to walk the talk.  We don’t always get it right, however I was very proud of a recent Director’s off-site that we ran.  At Steople we now have a global leadership team of 7 Directors.  In July last year we all signed off on a strategic plan and a vision that will take us through to 2027.  In February this year we all travelled to a beautiful spot about an hour north of Sydney called Scotland Island where we spent 2 and a half days together.

There were 3 things that we focussed on:

1. Continuing to build deeper personal connections with each other so that we operate as a highly effective team;
2. Reviewing the business in detail and discussing what’s working and what’s not; and
3. Reflecting on ourselves and how we can improve and develop in order to help the business succeed.

So, to help with building deeper personal connections we simply allowed time for unstructured conversations in an idyllic setting on Scotland Island.

In terms of the business discussions, we had an entire day where we went through the business performance of each location around the globe. We developed a very clear and concise action plan to drive up performance across our business, with a particular emphasis the quality of our service delivery; our marketing plan; and sales effectiveness.

Following this intense business performance focussed day, we had a totally different day where we reflected on ourselves. We all shared 3 things we are most proud of in the last 6 months and the 1 thing that we are most concerned or worried about in relation to ourselves and its impact on the business. Each person had between 30-60 minutes of focus on themselves as we all listened, reflected and provided feedback. As you might imagine, this day was both uncomfortable and powerful for us all individually and collectively. There was some trepidation among our team and I definitely felt vulnerable. It’s much easier to do this with our clients than ourselves and yet I think we did this section extremely well and it was exactly what we needed and will stick in my memory as an extremely productive and incredible experience.

So, as we continue to grow, I feel extremely proud of the fact that we continue to try to walk the talk and do this type of work ourselves, as we would with our valued clients.