The chief executive of North East-based software giant Sage has told how he uses the "waitress test" to see who will be good team player for his firm.
Steve Hare featured on Jake Humphrey's and Damian Hughes' High Performance podcast, which focuses on life lessons from high achieving people. The qualified accountant, who refers to himself as an introvert, talked about the formative points of his career, including a significant high in the early 2000s when he found himself as one of the country's youngest chief financial officers - but one that promptly turned to a low.
At just 39, Mr Hare became CFO at the £10bn revenue telecoms firm Marconi - a FTSE20 company at the time. Two profit warnings and a clutch of senior leadership departures all happened within six months of him taking the role, amid the "dot-com bubble crash".
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Mr Hare negotiated and delivered a successful restructuring of the firm - a debt for equity swap that gave banks and bond holders equity in the business. But the process, according to Mr Hare, fostered resentment and he was asked to leave, 18 months after he had started in the role.
He admitted to podcast listeners that the experience was bruising, despite agreeing with the rationale. He said: "Of course, it's not personal, it's not about you. It's about the bigger team and the bigger organisation.
"When the chairman sat me down, it wasn't like 'Steve, you've done a terrible job here, we need to get rid of you', it was very much: 'Steve, you've absolutely done the right thing, you've negotiated a really great outcome for the company, but the right thing for the company now is for you to leave'. To be honest, that probably took me a few years for that to fully compute."
The experience, he said, taught him the importance of pursuing goals with other people in mind - and has shaped his leadership style at Sage. He said the culture he has tried to create as CEO is "high performing but in a respectful way".
In the four years since he took the helm at Sage, Mr Hare said he has built up trust among employees and customers. He referred to the "waitress test" - a yardstick by which he measures people's suitability as team players based on how they treat waiting staff in a restaurant.
He explained: "Do we all play together nicely every minute of the day? No, because when the pressure's on, when you're driving hard to get stuff done, it can be difficult sometimes not to have slightly sharp elbows. This was something I wasn't very good at when I was younger. I was good at getting stuff done, but when I look back, the way I got stuff done sometimes left collateral damage."
Mr Hare also told listeners that not even the highest achieving individuals - in everything from sport to business - see brilliance all the time. He said: "I've never met anyone who is consistently achieving high performance who doesn't put a huge amount of effort in and who doesn't have highs and lows. Because in order to achieve that outcome you have to be prepared to experiment. And I think when you're younger you probably worry to much about outcomes or how you are perceived and it's actually probably getting worse with social media."
