Dr Shaun Davis has enjoyed an outstanding career of progression gained within global organisations and household names in engineering, construction, waste management and global logistics. He is a visionary global leader of compliance, security, and sustainability with Royal Mail.
He has a wide ranging portfolio of corporate compliance, corporate security (intelligence and investigations) and sustainability; including safety, health, wellbeing and the environment.
An internationally regarded subject matter expert, a Chartered Director, business strategist and director of change management. Shaun is a mentor and coach to senior management teams.
With an MA, MBA, MA, MSc, MA, LLM, Professional Doctorate CDir, FIoD, CFIOSH, FCIPD, FIIRSM, FIC, Shaun is certainly a very well qualified professional executive. So I was keen to get his take on soul in business:
When you said soul, it immediately made me shift to a religious mindset. I suppose with my personal interest and good Catholic boy upbringing, the soul piece makes me immediately think about wholesome life, living, judgment day kind of… the heavy end really. But then I thought about it as you were talking, soul in terms for charisma, fun, life at work. So, I guess, to me, there’s two ends to the spectrum.
There’s what I class as the kind of serious and weighty end, which is the deep religious piece and, again, I’m a bit of a history buff so I’m thinking then about that. It made me think of the Book of the Dead. You know the Egyptian Book of the Dead; weighing your heart against a feather and the life you’ve had and your soul, but then also the soul piece of what’s the glue that holds an organization together or what’s the juice that oils the wheel, as it were, in terms of fun and partnership and teamwork and those qualities.
So, I guess the overriding conclusion for me is that it’s not one thing. It’s loads of different things. You know the kaleidoscope you had as a kid where you turn it, and you get different views. I suppose it depends on where you are at any point in your life, career, for instance, as to what it means to you.
I think if you work for a soulful, purpose-driven organization, I think it makes it sticky. By that I mean you feel… or I certainly feel part of something bigger, and you feel that your contribution is valued and that you’d be missed if you weren’t there. I also think other people feel like that. I also think this can be uncomfortable for some people because they don’t particularly want to be part of that. Some people want to be part of a team, some people want to be independent.
Can you share an example of a business that you have experienced that has soul?
We had a very charismatic leader in the company that I worked for at one point, which was a great company. Interestingly, lots of soul, all the things I described about fun and teamwork. Lots of charisma. Lots of ethics and moral at the heart of it. But it still went bust. I do think you need include some strong disciplines around financial controls. You do need your checks and balances because if not, people, for all the right intentions, can make the wrong decisions. And it can end up costing you a lot of money and even your business.
I think the people misunderstood allowing entrepreneurial flair with the need for compliance and controls. We talked about this idea of freedom in a gilded cage, and that idea was that we had standards and systems and procedures that people had to adhere to. You just couldn’t recruit anybody how you wanted, or you couldn’t procure things how you wanted. You had to follow a procedure and adhere to that. But it became very relaxed, too relaxed at times, and lost sight of some of the controls, which meant that it wasn’t a very compliant business in many ways, and some bad practice slipped in.
Timpson’s have got a strong model of employing ex-offenders. They seem to have a strong soul. I suppose in a commercial sense, my mind also goes to Apple. My immediate go-to is the experience you get in an Apple store, which is purpose-driven, people that always give you the impression that they’re invested in both the product and the company. But then when I think about them with my health and wellbeing hat on, what goes into manufacturing Apple products, if you read the literature around that, that’s a pretty soulless organization where you are a machine that has to produce. Their ways of managing suicide at work was to put nets up to catch people, not to stop them from doing it in the first place.
In my time, as you’d expect, I’ve had to do some pretty tough things around structures and headcounts and exit, and it’s always been, for me, can I look myself in the mirror and know that I have done that fairly and consistently and with some compassion? I guess at the heart of that is, how do I feel about that, which, to me, relates to how I am and what I do and why I do it.
But, to me, when I think about the Royal Mail, one of the things that really resonates with me is its history and its heritage and what I class as its Tudor soul. Now I’m a history fan. So, for me, my real big area of interest is the Tudors. So, the fact I work for a company that’s got its origin in Tudor England is another appeal for me.
But then you look at its culture and in one sense its biggest strength is its discipline and its rigor, but also its biggest weakness because it can slow you down, it can be cumbersome. It’s built on a militaristic structure. Up until quite recently, you had a postmaster general. If you’re a manager, you wear a white shirt. If you’re a supervisor, you wear a blue shirt. If you’re frontline, you wear a red t-shirt. You’re automatically identifiable by the clothes that you wear. All the artefacts that go with it. The language.
You’re still the new kid if you’ve been here 25 years. We’ve got people here that have done 60 years’ service. 60 years. So, they started as cadets or telegram boys, but they’re part of the community. They just don’t want to leave. Amazing.
This interview is one of 60 I’ve completed this year with a mix of past customers and other leading industry figures. Do connect with me on Linked in or get in touch via our website if you’d like to know more about the research findings and/or explore how to drive your business forward…with soul.
For a charming ‘blast from the past’, take a look here at the history of the postcard from Royal Mail.
