“The Unipart Way is in harmony with the human spirit.”
John Neill joined Unipart from General Motors in 1974 and set out to establish a more independent and broadly based role for what was then British Leyland’s Parts Division. In 1987 he led the successful management buyout of the company and began the process of changing not only the culture of the company but also the whole philosophy by which the business is run. During his tenure as CEO, John created a strong leadership team that enabled the Group to develop in three major areas: logistics, manufacturing, and consultancy. The Group has a wide range of blue-chip clients including Vodafone, Jaguar Land Rover, BMW Mini, First Group and many others. In 2012, he was appointed Chairman of the Unipart Group as well as Group Chief Executive.
I was honoured to play a part in the evolution of the Unipart Way while I was a principal with Time Manager International™. I delivered a whole series of large group communications events (Putting People First) for thousands of their employees during the late 80s’ and 90’s in Cowley in Oxford. This was a pivotal part of a wider strategy to transform the very working culture of the company.
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So, my first question, John, is what does the word soul mean to you?
I guess it’s the existential force that guides your values and behaviour.
What role would you say it can play in driving up business performance?
I think it depends on how you think about the people in the business. Whether you think about them as a commodity that you pay to carry out a specific task. Then, if the bucket’s too full, you throw some of them out and then when you need it, just fill them up again. And then it’s a commodity. Or whether you believe that your responsibility is to help to grow and develop your people so they can create exciting solutions for your current and potential customers, so all your stakeholders ultimately benefit and prosper. And if you believe the latter, then you need to think about how you inspire people to want to continuously develop their skills and their capabilities to serve the business needs. Because that’s what you’re paying them to do, but also it can serve their own growth aspirations.
How can leaders bring the soul of an organisation to life?
Most people want to achieve things in life. Everybody has aspiration. You’re born with that existential motivation to grow and develop and for some people it’s extremely focused. They may want to be the best Formula One racing driver, for example, like Nigel Mansell. I remember when I was talking to Nigel, he told me would have done whatever it took, he would have sold his house, or mortgaged his house to fund his ambition. He was determined to be Formula One World Champion, that was what drove him harder than anything else.
In an organisation like ours, we need to keep on challenging and inspiring people to find their creativity and harness it, for their own benefit as well as for the customers. I think one of the most impactful things that really supported my views about that and some of the stuff that you did for us with Putting People First, was when I read Colvin’s book, Talent is Overrated. And then also Matthew Syed’s book Bounce. It provides compelling evidence that anybody can be great: it takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice with a great coach. When you come to work at Unipart you will see a big sign in our company University (The Unipart “U”) that says: “Anybody can be great, it just takes 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, under a great coach.” If you have that existential motivation, then you can become great.
How do you do this at Unipart?
So, you’ll know from your experience of Unipart that we distil, comprehensive, well-researched academic thinking into ideas that can be grasped by everybody easily. At the Unipart “U”, the principle is that you: “Learn in the morning, do in the afternoon”. With the Faculty’s on The Floor which we have in all our global operations the imperative is to “Learn at 10, do at 11.” These aren’t simplistic slogans, instead they go to the heart of the way people really learn. If you can learn something at 10 and then go and do it at 11, you start to embed it, you get the satisfaction, from the achievement out of applying your learning, and that creates the desire in you to learn more so you can do more and get better.
Currently we’re trying to teach people to learn to code so they can automate the boring stuff in their jobs. Well, to start, it’s quite difficult. First, you’ve got to want to do it, then you’ve got to start, and you will need to be coached a little. Some people just keep going on that journey and they start to use the tools and do things for themselves. They’ll start automating some of their processes. And for many that will be thrilling, exciting, and rewarding and they’ll get a sense of achievement and go on and do more and more. And others will get to a certain point and say: “Okay I know enough now, it’s not really for me, somebody else will do that for me, it’s not what I really want to do.”
And if you go back to when we built the Teaching Factory, the Teaching Office and the Teaching Distribution Centre we were saying to people: “Stop thinking about your job as picking and packing parts, because candidly, that is not the most exciting, rewarding, motivating, intellectually challenging thing that you’ll do in your life.” I learnt this personally when I was packing biscuits. The time dragged and when I wanted to improve things I was told: “No, no, no, you’re not allowed to do that son, don’t you dare.” Some jobs are mundane and repetitive. So how can you make them more interesting for the people doing them?
And that’s what the Unipart Way is all about. We give people the Unipart Way tools to apply to the job to make it faster, better, more efficient, more productive. You’re using your intelligence and your creativity to apply to your job to make it better. But it also makes life more interesting.
“The Unipart Way is in harmony with the human spirit.”
People don’t like doing repetitive, mundane things. They may have to, but they don’t like doing it. So if you can take that mundane, repetitive job and surround it with a body of knowledge, which people can learn and develop and get better and better at, they can apply it to their jobs to make them more interesting. That way, they can make the business more efficient, more competitive and improve the customer experience. You make sure you grow and secure the future of the business because you can compete. Well that’s in harmony with the human spirit. It’s in the interest of all the stakeholders. There are no trade-offs, it’s better for everyone.
Can you apply that now to coding? Coding could sound dull, putting zeros and ones or hypertext into an application, but if you’re learning about it and you’re seeing what it can do, the power of it is amazing. The ability to access libraries of incredibly powerful code that has been developed by other people over hundreds and thousands of man years. You can stitch it all together and you can change the job you do or create a new solution. Suddenly, your job becomes more interesting and rewarding and some people take to it like a duck to water.
So, I think, is it soul? It is a philosophy about how you want to run a business and how you want to develop and grow your people. But understanding that in doing so people get more satisfaction out of their jobs, they’re more engaged, but you’re also making sure you’re competitive, as opposed to just ‘learning for stock’. Which might be interesting, but it is expensive, and it often doesn’t produce a return.
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.
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