Focus on the People, Care for Yourself

I met Tim Creed at Mars. Tim has since moved on and is doing very exciting stuff. He recently co-founded Creed UnCo, an unconventional consulting firm focusing on culture & leadership, brand building, and franchising.. Listen to or read what Tim has to say about lessons learned on leading teams.

I'm a native Australian, although with the accent, you'll probably pick up a bit of a mutt accent. I've spent the last 10 years officially living in the US, but a handful of years prior to that in other parts of the world. I was born in Sydney to Australian parents. We quickly moved from Sydney to London when I was a boy to spend a few years in London. From London, we moved to New York and spent about six years just outside of New York City where my dad was working for Unilever at the time. Then we made our way back to Australia. I spent the rest of my childhood and teenage years in Australia.

When my Dad got a job offer in the US, I elected to stay in Australia and my parents moved off to the US with my younger sister. I finished high school and went to university in Australia, joined Mars, which is obviously a great company. I spent sort of the early parts of my years with Mars in HR in Australia, working out a couple of the factory environments, just outstanding opportunities. 

About 10 years ago, I took an opportunity to join one of Mars’s new ventures in the US at that time. That's what brought me to Nashville, Tennessee. One of the great things about Mars is the opportunity to jump around the business and get some really broad business experiences. While my early experience was in HR I then gravitated across into sales, took on a sales team lead role on the west coast of the US for a few years, then eventually made my way back to Nashville where my now wife, my then girlfriend is from and we decided to settle back down in Nashville.  

I spent three years in traditional sales selling to brick-and-mortar retail customers. At that point, I had a team of 10 reps that worked underneath me on the west coast. But then I was lucky to jump into the e-commerce space which is sort of a debate whether that's really a sales role or a marketing role or some hybrid role, and while it officially sat in the sales organization at Mars, it's a little bit more broad than that. I would say I've spent the last seven or eight years in sales in some form, and in the last five or six years I've been in the digital space. I joined Bridgestone about 18 months ago now, which is quite a shift in industry, in culture and all the rest.

The first time leading a team

It was about seven or eight years ago now. That was the role that I took on when I jumped out of HR and into sales. While there was the shift in function, there was a shift more dramatically from individual contributor to team leader. And geographically as well. First my wife and I married, then we moved to the West Coast.

Did you play any sports? Were you a member of any clubs in high school or college where you would have been a part of a team?

Yeah, I played rugby, cricket, a bit of soccer, golf. My biggest passions were rugby and cricket, which are obviously pretty prominent sports in Australia, not so much in the US. 

Let's go back to your first role as a leader. It was the move into the field sales role, and that you're changing, as you said, functions and going from individual contributor to a team leader. What was your learning curve when you did that?

It was extremely steep for a number of reasons. I felt on the one hand the move from HR to sales is a pretty uncommon one. But I was  pretty aware that our organization had a point of view about HR, which was at times positive, but also at times quite negative in the sense that they probably felt like HR was often driving a business agenda that had repercussions for them. So I was pretty mindful of that going in and trying to think through how do I make this shift, a genuine shift, which it was, but a shift that didn't come across like I'm here as sort of a spy from the organization in any way or, or trying to bring my HR experiences to a world that they probably weren't used to seeing every day, right? 

Just to give some context, the team was a team of 10 sales reps, pretty much all of them with with significant experience, aside from one relatively young guy who was probably two or three years out of college, but the other nine were 20 to 30+ year sales veterans, and most of them actually had spent that amount of time with Mars. So a lot of longevity, a lot of experience. And I felt quite humbled to jump into that and recognize that I clearly didn't have the functional expertise. So with the experiences that they had, in a lot of ways it was confronting to figure out how to  step in and figure out where I'm really gonna help? How do I create a mark as leader, given I'm making all these shifts?  It was generally a very big learning curve in those first handful of months, for sure.

LISTENING AND LEARNING

That's daunting. Nine people with more experience than you in a whole new function. What did you do to get up to speed?

I reflected back on my very first job at Mars, which was in a factory environment in Australia at the Bathurst factory, which is a really small town, about two or three hours west of Sydney. A factory where we produced dog food. I wasn't a team lead, obviously. At that time I was in an HR support role. The majority of the workforce was working on the manufacturing floor. Their priority was having a solid safe day of work, making money to provide for their family: really fundamental stuff. My lessons from that experience were that they just wanted to be heard. They wanted people around them, especially the corporate associates, to spend time just making connections. And I took a lot out of that experience and tried to play it into that shift I made when I was becoming a team lead for sales. 

It took me a while to recognize I didn't have to try and be an expert in any way or prove functional worth. In fact, if anything, it was more about teasing out and bringing out the capabilities of the team. That's how I approached it. I spent really solid time, the first three or four months with each of the team members out on the road, spending time in the car with them, driving around, doing sales calls, really taking a backseat, observing them, getting to know them, and vice versa. Helping them to get to know me. So we really just built a relationship first and foremost. And it wasn't so much about having to make a mark, in terms of what my functional expectations of them were as it was a chance to learn and let them take the front seat, probably the biggest lesson of all.

The importance oF humility

How long were you in that role, and how long did it take for you to win over the team?

All in, about two and a half, three years. I'd say probably for half the team, it was a matter of weeks to a month. And for maybe two or three team members in particular, it was the good part of a year to 18 months to really, truly get that level of trust with each other. And there's plenty of reasons for it. Some of them aligned with my approach, while I had to adapt my approach to those couple of people with very different styles and backgrounds and understanding the history they had been through. There was also a group of teammates that had been working together for a number of years on a couple of brands that Mars had acquired. They had worked in a very distinctly different culture for a large part of their career, and when Mars took over the business, they felt quite a dramatic shift. I think despite all the great efforts to assimilate, they were lost along the way. 

I came in as a long term Mars associate, and I think there was always a level of skepticism for a few of them just based on their own experiences and their change journey. Through all that acquisition, what I learned is you've got to acknowledge that for some people change does take more time. And even if you think you've got a solid approach, where you're really trying to build the same level of respect and understanding for each member of your team, some people just take longer to get there than others.

what IS “HIRING FOR fit,” really?

So that's another complexity in this, isn't it? The fact that this was a fairly recently acquired piece of the pet care portfolio, and they were going through a cultural adjustment. I'm picturing you in this job, Tim, and I'm thinking there are just potholes, all kinds of opportunities to trip up. 

Do you remember any notable misstep you made and what you learned from it?

The lesson about managing people and leading is one that really stands out. There were 10 roles on the team, 10 sales positions. When I joined, one of those positions was open, someone who recently retired, so we had an open sales position in Northern California. I gave it a few weeks but I was feeling pressure to fill the role. With one person out, other members of the team had to pick up the slack, they had to cover that territory, they had to meet more customers than they normally would. So, there was definitely some urgency to get that job filled. In my first couple of weeks I assessed that the team had tremendous experience and longevity with the organization. I felt like there was quite a lack of diversity in terms of thoughts coming into the team that would probably be best fit from outside the industry. Probably eight of the nine members of the team had spent a long time in the pet industry. One was a couple of years out of college. I felt like there was sort of a myopic thinking within the team that everything had to be done the way it was done in the pet industry for so long. So I kind of made the choice in my head that when I was going to build this role externally, I would go outside the industry and look for someone with a different set of experiences than probably traditional sales reps would have had. The problem I had was I built the job so quickly and brought in someone that I thought checked those boxes, and I really didn't do a thorough assessment of how they were going to integrate with the team, and when they're under pressure, how they would really behave. That person just became a real misfit. So while I acted with good intent but really bad execution, it created a real issue where there was friction between that person and a number of legacy team members. They probably thought, “Well, this guy came from HR and should know how to recruit people pretty well.” So in my first job of recruiting as a team lead I made the wrong decision. That was a really big lesson: not jumping to conclusions in terms of what I thought has to take place, but more importantly, really take the time to hire for fit, to hire for true learning agility. It's not so much the background experiences that matter. It's more the ability to be agile in whatever environment that you're in and trying to create as a team. That was my lesson. So, unfortunately we had to take some time to move on through that process of exiting that person from the business and eventually we made a great hire after that. But that was definitely a big lesson in terms of putting us back as a team.

Obviously the team wasn't feeling great about this, to understate the matter. I imagine there was probably some frustration, maybe even some resentment. Just to get a sense of scale, how long was it before you were able to manage the person out of that role?

It was about five months, I'd say from when they first came on to when eventually they left. 

The balance of careful and candid communications

Pretty quickly, then. How did you deal with the team on this one, Tim? How honest were you with them about realizing you made a misstep? Talk to me about how you worked through it with the team.

To be candid, the impact was much more on a couple of people that had territory right next to this rep's territory. And they heard from customers that they had previously managed that this person was really just having a bad impact. So for a couple of team members, I was more upfront and candid with them. There was also the reality that this person wasn't a fit in part because they had some personal stuff to deal with. I was addressing those issues on the side with them with the best intent to really make sure they put themselves in a good position. That kind of personal stuff, obviously, I didn't share. But certainly the reality was that this was a misfit, and it was my decision. I took full ownership of it, and was really upfront with a couple of those team members who felt the impact the most. I think that honesty was what was refreshing for them. 

Now, obviously, I still had to deal with the situation, we had to sort of work around things for those five months. I couldn't disclose everything. In the end, I think it was good for us as a team and good for that person who found something else for their career. My actions demonstrated that I can make a mistake and address it as quickly as possible for the benefit of everyone. That eventually was meaningful to the rest of the team. 

I'm a believer in just telling the truth. When we've dropped the ball, to use a sports analogy, it’s best when we own up to it. It builds credibility. 

Diversity of thought

I want to go back to the notion of fit for a second. I've had a conversation with at least one, maybe two of my guests about diversity in teams. And diversity crosses a range of dimensions, gender, race, LGBTQ+, styles, etc. There are lots of ways to be different.  And hiring for fit can sometimes sound like, “I just want to make sure this person is like everybody else so they all get along.” It can therefore undermine you in a sense, because you're not bringing a difference of thought and difference of culture to bear on the work of the team. Do you still try to hire thinking about both fit and diversity?

Absolutely. I think you're touching on what's obviously a challenging topic, but critical. I think where leaders and companies get short sighted is defining diversity by any of those things - gender, age, sexuality, whatever it is. And while that's certainly critical, diverse groups will have typically diverse experiences. 

To me, it is about the diversity of thought which is most critical: recognizing that diversity of thought tends to lead to better discussions; avoiding the status quo that can stymie a team. Yes, I do think it's necessary, absolutely necessary. But you’ve got to be really mindful about how you go about it. It's not a checkbox exercise, or forcing myself to find this in order to deliver some level of diversity. It's more nuanced than that, so it's a challenging topic. 

Every time I hire, I try to understand how we can make the team as a whole more diverse in some form or fashion. I think that's what creates better thinking amongst the team, what challenges the status quo. And the reality is, for most businesses, that consumer base is diverse, right? That's what matters: if most people buying your products or services have various experiences, then you have to deliver that to them. I don't think you can get that by not being diverse. 

It's that tension between diversity and fit, because we need both. And by fit, maybe we need a new word for that. 

I don't know of any really super clear way to make that determination. It's why I guess we do things like assessments and interviews. Although I would say one thing: this is where company values or team values become really important, and not just the values that are on a wall, but the actual values. If an organization has defined values that are consistently lived, they tell you what it takes to succeed here, at a high level. So if I go back to my time at Mars, the Five Principles were incredibly well ingrained, anywhere you go around the world, any Mars associate will tell you the Five Principles, and they are non-negotiable. You know, when I was hiring for external roles into Mars, that was the framework for me, that was the fit. It had to be someone that could at least live those five values, the norms that just weren't going to change within Mars. It was things like an openness to collaborate with people, to certainly think mutually - what's good for us, and what's good for the industry as a whole. That had to be a non-negotiable. If someone came in and was so selfish, that it was all about them and delivering results for the business regardless of the costs. They could be diverse on so many fronts, but it clearly wasn't going to be a fit. So I do think values that are well defined, well understood, well lived become a good framework for helping the fit question while still looking for diversity of thought,

Values: more than buzz words, tHEY ARE WHAT’S TRULY Important to associates

Great point. I think clear values, a clear sense of purpose, actions and words aligned with what we believe, is the right thing to do. I was just talking to someone recently about their organization and the values that they have. And it was a laundry list. This is an organization that said, “We’ve got values, we got values.” But to your point, they weren't lived, weren’t the basis for day-to-day decision making as they were at Mars. They were just something somebody had told the organization they needed to have. If I'm leading a team in an organization like that, what do I do? What could a leader do when there aren't clearly articulated values to anchor his or her decisions?

You’re right. Mars is incredibly well defined in this space. Bridgestone, to their credit, also has really strong values that are well articulated and I think well understood. As a team leader, I do think you can really make a massive impact on culture more broadly, just through your own team. You can be a role model for your team to live and behave in ways that are very constructive, and can have a flow-on impact throughout the organization. I go back to my time when I led that sales team at Mars, a really well grounded context around us. But we still had a lot of dysfunction, like any team or any business. I thought what was probably true for our sales organization across the board at the time, and certainly my team, was that the norm for the team was to deliver results through hard work; to basically do as many calls as you could do a day; put up as many displays as you could do. And really try and grow your business through just hard work. Now, that's certainly warranted to a degree. One thing we did was kind of take a step back and assess what's really important here. Is it about the number of displays that we put up? Is it about the number of calls that we make? Or is it something more than that, and I think it took a while. But we did get ourselves to a place where the team recognized that the end result was more important than the inputs in a lot of cases. So sales calls, display units: do they always deliver the right result at the end of the day? If you spend more substantial time with fewer customers, the bigger negotiations can provide category insights to retailers they may not have seen and which can help them reorganize their entire pet food category to drive more substantial growth. Then you can tweak things and make a bigger difference. It's one living example. It was still in the context of a very healthy culture overall, but we did things differently that had a bit of a ripple effect. Other sales teams picked up on some of the behaviors. Ultimately some of the metrics that we were held accountable to as a sales organization reflected how critical it was to focus on outcomes instead of inputs, if that makes sense.

So it wasn't about how busy everybody was, it was about the quality of the effort they were making, to get to the final results that really mattered. As a friend of mine at IBM used to say, “Activity does not equal results.”

Exactly. And we can feel good about working hard. But if it's not getting us more revenue, more sales, stronger, deeper relationships, is its value necessarily worth focusing on? 

Lessons from a mentor

Did you have a boss who was really special and from whom you learned something about leading teams?

I've got to say, I worked for a manager a couple of different times named Malcolm Armstrong. He's a classic Brit that spends time in Australia who claims to be Australian. Other than that, he's a good guy. Now, I worked with Malcolm in Australia for a few years.  I worked for him in Nashville as well: two different settings, same company. 

I'll forever be grateful to Malcolm for a few reasons. He is a leader that really empowers his team. And I know that's probably a buzzword, but he would spend a long time to think through building his team, and by doing so he trusted the people that he had on his team. He would get stuff that would hit his desk, and typically speaking as the head of HR, would be the one resolving it. But he trusted the competence in his team and would push that back down to us to tackle and resolve. 

There were plenty of examples, but one really stands out to me. We were trying to launch our brand over in Japan, which as you can imagine, was a big challenge. Malcolm had obviously built enough trust in what I was capable of doing to say to me, “Hey, look, this is a big issue. I know you don't speak Japanese. But I want you to take it on.” It wasn't even a negotiation. Talk about empowerment, trust. But I think on top of that he is a leader that gives not just honest feedback, but really constructive feedback. 

While it was intimidating to take on some of those projects, like the Japan one, he would always give me constructive feedback along the way to get through it, even if I was struggling. That's just an incredible situation to be in where your boss really believes in you and has your back along the way. They're not going to throw you out there to the wolves, despite the fact that the work is a real stretch, and a real learning opportunity. So yes, Malcolm stands out for numerous reasons. 

I'm struck by the number of times you've talked about people saying, “Tim Creed, go do this thing you've never done before.” Whether it's lead a field sales team or fix a problem and a culture in a place where you don’t speak the language. Obviously, you bring something to the table where people believe you have learning agility, the ability to figure it out as you go and to ask for help when you need it. That's pretty impressive. Right? 

Recommendations for new team leaderS

If you had to turn around and offer a piece of wisdom to somebody who's their taking the first people leadership job, what one or two things would you say to this person?

I would say, number one, be real. Don't try and be someone you think you need to be or fit into the mold of other leaders that you may have seen, but really be yourself. And that's so much easier said than done. It's gonna take time, I would be hard pressed to think of anyone stepping into that role to just automatically achieve that. But I would give them that advice to think that over those first 6 - 12 months, when they really are likely to come across those challenges like the ones I faced, that they just cannot try and become someone else. It'll take its toll and it won't work in the long run. So, that's the first thing: really be real, be yourself. 

The second thing is just take it as a learning opportunity. What's the worst case scenario? I'm sure there are bad scenarios, but it's all about people and behavior. Go in there and be incredibly humble and recognize that leadership is about the people you lead. It's not about you. It's all learning. You're learning about the people that work for you. You're hopefully giving them a chance to be better than what they are today. And you're gonna learn a lot about yourself along the way. Recognize it's a learning journey. It's not that you have to perfect it straight away. That was probably my biggest challenge. I've always been someone that sort of prided myself on getting it right quickly, whether doing well in school or competing and trying to win rugby games. And it's okay to lose. Sometimes it's okay to not always be perfect. That would be my advice. It's gonna be tough because of the nature of the job. It's not about delivering the results. The people underneath you should be the ones delivering the results. It's still a learning journey in terms of human behavior and bringing the best out of people.

I love what you said, “Remember, it's about them. It's not about you.” Oh, and take care of yourself along the way. Would your advice change at all in a world where we're still being forced to work apart so much? Or is it still basically those two same principles?

Same two principles. But I think you touched on a great point, which is the last 12 months have been tough for everyone, because you lose the connection we were probably experiencing before the pandemic. And I think you're right about taking care of yourself. I've found myself and certainly people around me this last 12 months have struggled a lot with the fact that you lose community. You're spending time on zoom calls all day long, and you need to really take care of yourself. Nothing changes whether this has to linger on longer, or we go to some kind of hybrid working model, or if companies go back to the office. I think always be yourself, and take every day as a learning opportunity. 

Tim, thank you so much. I'm sure my followers will be grateful to hear those simple messages from you. Take care of yourselves.