IQ Interview: How Bell VP Shawn Omstead Uses Core Values to Guide Success
By Bruce Powell
Bell Canada has seen a world of change in the past few years. Despite being one of Canada’s largest and most tenured corporate institutions, by the early part of this decade the company had become lethargic and bloated, and struggled with a legacy organizational structure that limited its success.
Change began in 2004 and accelerated through 2006 as the company prepared to go private. Every business unit was assessed and whole divisions were restructured or sold off. And even though the privatization deal fell through last year, the rationalization and momentum of change started to have a positive effect on the company. Now, a year later, there’s new energy and vitality evident across the company.
This hasn’t been without some pain. Thousands of people were laid off - and there are may be a few more to come – but in the face of increasing competition, Bell has become a smarter, leaner and far more nimble player.
Part of this was done through streamlining groups and combining teams, which is exactly what Shawn Omstead, VP Product Management, Residential Services was asked to do. When Shawn joined Bell TV in 2006, he was responsible for managing a single team of 17 people. Shortly thereafter, he was faced with the challenge of combining two separate business groups and finding a way to get them working as a successful team. How these teams came together to redefine their purpose and focus is a textbook best practice on how to move your team from good to great (i.e. Jim Collins would be proud!)
Shawn attributes the success of merging those two groups largely to the core values he and his team identified, defined and rallied around (and continue to operate by to this day.)
We sat down with Shawn recently to hear how these ‘core values’ have become the foundation for his team’s success. (Incidentally, Shawn now oversees a team of almost 80 people).
Questions:
IQP: Do you have an overriding people strategy?
SO: Definitely. Our strategy is to build a team of people around our core values – and to identify people that share and embrace them. We worked hard as a group to identify the values we felt would allow our team to be successful, and now we use these to measure if new additions ‘fit’ with our team. It sounds simple – but until we identified these core values we didn’t have a common evaluation measure.
The core values we identified for our team were:
- Passion
- Adventurous
- Challenge Status Quo
- Respect Differences
- Customer Focus
When we ask ourselves “why do we want to come to work?” we want people who feel like they’re working towards something bigger and making a real difference, not just coming into a ‘job’ every day. Part of that is my responsibility – to give people meaningful work and to make sure I have the proper people in the right roles, but part of that is also an inherent attitude, passion, and ambition in the person as well – a desire to “do more”.
IQP: How has clearly defining your core values allowed you to succeed?
SO: I think it’s important because your values are really the building blocks around which your business is built. If you can build a solid base like that, then even if the objectives change in business, the team can adapt because there’s a solid foundation and the core values are strong.
IQP: How did you come to define what your core values were?
SO: I actually enlisted the help of a friend, David Kincaid, who owns a strategic brand advisory firm called Level5. We organized a session and David spent a day with our team facilitating a process for the team itself to come up with the core values that really defined us as a group, and would be the basis for everything going forward. When we started, we really weren’t quite sure what our true core values as a team were, or if the ones we had identified were truly the ‘core’ values.
The process really asks the questions that define your business, and one thing just flows out of the next. It gets you to take a good look at what your purpose for being in business is and what principles you want to guide your business on a day-to-day basis if you’re looking to be successful and build something sustainable.
IQP: How did core values help in getting your separate teams working together?
SO: As mentioned, the process of defining them was actually a collaborative effort that involved both groups, and going through that process of creating them together actually helped illustrate how many similarities already existed between the teams even if they weren’t quite as obvious at first.
Once everyone saw that we were really all working towards the same goals, and placed a big importance on many of the same values, it was much easier to begin working together, and the “us vs. them” mentality started to disappear.
IQP: How do core values now factor into hiring and when you’re building up your team?
SO: When I’m looking to grow the team and we begin the interview process, what I’m really looking for in people are their core values and ‘core competencies’ – the inherent traits that reflect the business we’re in.
For my team I look for these core competencies:
- Visionary Leadership
- Perception Innovation
- Influential Communication
- Strategic Business Sense (Thinking)
- Passion for Results
We hire for core competencies because these are things that can’t really be taught – in most cases someone either has it or they don’t. Technical skills on the other hand can be taught but core competencies are part of someone’s make-up.
Ideally you want a person to have both core competencies as well as the required technical skills, but it’s difficult to find that perfect person who has everything you’re looking for. The way I look at it is if a person doesn’t have the inherent core competencies we need, or if they don’t align with your core values, then even if they have all the right technical skills they probably aren’t a good fit for your business.
The biggest mistake leaders make is that they hire a person for their technical skills – an example would be a person who is great with numbers, but they end up letting the person go six months later because the person they hired were not aligned with the core values and competencies.
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Bruce Powell, Managing Partner, established IQ PARTNERS as a leading recruitment firm to help entrepreneurial companies hire better, hire less, and retain more.
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