Shoulders of Giants is a smart business thinking website, showcasing various leadership experts and business giants spanning a variety of business related topics. This include business thought leaders, consultants and experts such as Martin Glenn, a leadership thought leader.
Great leaders do great things. It was Steve Jobs, Apple co-founder and CEO who said “innovation distinguishes between a leader and a follower”.
Leaders are the people who make a difference in their workplace and excel at what they do, inspiring others as they go. Great leaders do not necessarily follow the prescriptive rules laid out by management or best-practise guidelines - great business leaders are trailblazers whose fresh and innovative ideas, experience and adaptability bring a new dimension to their roles.
Great business leadership is that which inspires and motivates teams. It is results focussed, goal and vision oriented in a way that attains sustainable growth for all stakeholders.
If you are looking for a case study of a great leader in business who embodies all of these characteristics, there could be no better example than Martin Glenn.
He is widely regarded as one of the most important people in marketing in the UK and was Marketing Week’s Chief Executive of the Year in 2003 as well as being voted the UK’s most influential marketer by Marketing Magazine in July 2004.
Martin Glenn is a leadership expert for a number of reasons; his most notable achievement to date (in an already very distinguished resumé) is his work as the President of Walkers Snack Foods in the UK, the brand equivalent of Lays in the USA.
Walkers crisps started life as a porkpie shop in Leister, England, some 50 years ago. Today, it is Britain’s biggest supermarket brand taking a 45% share of the £2-billion salty snacks market in the UK. Six out of ten households purchase Walkers crisps at a rate of 12-million packets a day, everyday.
To take a local success and expand its dominance to a national level, while doubling profitability in just five years is admirable. The Walkers success story, and that of Martin Glenn, is more than just the quality of product, sales, distribution and brand marketing which are the dominant themes in this turnaround. The success of this company is also hinged on the successful business leadership executed by Glenn and the team at Walkers.
Martin Glenn is now the Chief Executive of PepsiCo UK (the parent company of Walkers) and has been tasked with making Pepsi more appealing to the British public than Coca-Cola, which currently outsells Pepsi by about four cans to one. A daunting task indeed, but undoubtedly Martin Glenn has a plan.
What makes Martin Glenn a great business leader is demonstrably his success and the impressive results he’s achieved in his career. The acid test is always the bottom line. Other traits that make his business leadership excel are his willingness to learn and his quest to innovate.
Martin Glenn has written an eBook entitled ‘Successful Leadership in Practice’. In it he tells the story of Walkers' rise to greatness in his own words. How the company planned for growth instead of profits and how they approached problems and opportunities. He sets out the important features of leadership and the characteristics required to build a better business today.
Some of the attributes of a great leader, according to Martin Glenn, are a strong emphasis on building and developing the skills within a great team. He advises against micro-managing high performance teams - if they know what they’re doing, let them get on with it.
Performance should always be visible and success should be rewarded. Focus and benchmarking are important practices that Glenn ascribes to.
Great leaders are focussed on quality and impart this fixation to their teams. Glenn talks about the role of the leader of a business in nurturing a restless pursuit of perfection in product quality. As he states, “It may just be a potato chip to you but it is what we do and we do it to the very best of our ability, never satisfied that there is not some better way just around the corner if we work hard enough”. Easy for leaders to spout the words, but what is more impressive is what Glenns’s team say about him. His VP of Sales, Tom Cuzeo, said in an interview that everyone knew that if there was the smallest problem with a batch of chips they would throw away the lot and start again - they did not need to ask Glenn, because they knew what his standards were.
Other leadership strategies include building relationships, engagement with employees and of course - to keep your product fresh and moving forward.
At the very core of great leadership is an ability to inspire and motivate people. This is undoubtedly the best way to get the most focussed and innovative, creative work from them despite the challenges one will face in an increasingly complex business world.
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