John Linton We had 'farewell drinks' for the person who is going to manage Exetel Sri Lanka yesterday evening, his last working day in Australia for some time as he flies out next Tuesday. On the previous day Annette and I took him out for a 'formal' final lunch to go over what we saw were the main issues to be addressed and the likely major problems to be encountered. After my brief goodbye 'address' he also said a few words and it was a little sad in some indefinable way.
The majority of Exetel employees in Australia are very young - more than half working in their first full time job - and an average age of less than 25 (excluding the working directors!). James, about to be the General Manager of Exetel Sri Lanka, is in his mid 20s and I couldn't help but envy him the adventure of going to a new country to set up a key business function at such a young age. I think it will be exciting as well as pretty scary and it's probably a plus rather than a minus to be that young.
Exetel is, of course, a very small company and, in common with all small companies, very young (comparatively) people get to do jobs and hold responsibilities that are not generally available in larger organizations. The other most noticeable aspect of being in a company where so many people are doing things for the first times in their working lives is the innovative ways they 'solve' problems and address issues and the easy acceptance they adopt to being asked to do very difficult things in very, very short timeframes.
In the case of the person we appointed to develop and manage Exetel Sri Lanka - he is very young for such a position and, before he came to Exetel had never been involved in support of communications services. In his two and a half years with Exetel he has, by demonstrated ability and hard work, taken responsibility for a very wide range of responsibilities and has consistently shown the ability to innovate and then carry out the implementation of quite complex, and truly new, processes. One of the main reasons that Exetel provides such an efficient level of support services to Australian customers is due to his coming up with good ideas and, rarer, being able to implement the good ideas other people come up with.
As I continue to get ever older, and more tired, I am perhaps more impressed than I once was with the fact that so many inexperienced people can develop so quickly and so innovatively in environments in which they have little, or often, absolutely no previous experience. I'm sure the same sort of experiences are common in all small companies but it's probably the first time I have really noticed just how much innovation people bring to their working lives - perhaps because I'm so grateful that what I see happening in the constant changes that occur produce such excellent overall results.
All but one or two of the companies with which I've been involved over a long business career have always had very good people and it's boringly common to see company 'blurbs' with some version of "our people are our greatest asset" prominent in their self appraisals. So maybe I'm simply being surprised at something I should take for granted. Perhaps all small companies are blessed with the same universal competence and dedication in every one of their personnel that Exetel appears to me to have.
I'm never really certain where to 'draw the line' when it comes to giving people the freedom to work things out for themselves. Long experience has seemed to indicate that giving inexperienced people too little supervision and direction is a major mistake - perhaps a bigger mistake than giving them too much. I've never met anyone who could find the right balance and I think that indicates how difficult it is to do, at any level of management.
There is, of course, a 'secret' to actually establishing and maintaining the right level of freedom versus direction but that has never been spelled out in any written material I have ever come across and, for a while, I read widely on this subject. I'm not saying that I' the only person in Australia that has this arcane knowledge but I think I know how to obtain it. I could well be wrong of course.
It will be interesting to see how closely the 'results' of Sri Lankan operation match the planned 'facts and figures' in our first venture in to truly remote management.