Matt Crockett: To win, lift the goalposts higher

All Black head coach Steve Hansen has no problem setting unreasonable goals. Photo / Mark Mitchell

Last year, All Black coach Steve Hansen set what many thought were unreasonable goals. Not only does he want the All Blacks to keep getting better and win back-to-back World Cups, he wants to get there without any losses - "history tells us you get better when you lose, but why can't we change history and get better when we win?"

It was a typically forthright call from Hansen, one of New Zealand's more direct communicators. Time will tell if the All Blacks can achieve this goal, but aiming that high is the first step in getting there, and there's a lesson in this for all New Zealand companies, including Spark NZ.

Around New Zealand, companies are grappling with how to rapidly improve the performance of their businesses. Consumers are becoming more demanding, competition is intensifying and disruption is endemic. And investors don't accept these as valid reasons for poor returns.

Spark New Zealand (then Telecom) faced this challenge - a combination of technological and regulatory disruption meant financial performance had been declining for the best part of 10 years. To improve our market performance we committed to giving customers great value, which meant lowering our prices and increasing investment in new areas like 4G mobile, digital services and cloud computing. That dynamic of reducing earnings and increasing investment couldn't continue forever, though, so we committed to a major cross-company business improvement programme to literally "turn around" the company.

The reality is, most turnaround/transformation programmes fail, and it wasn't the first time we had tried to do it. This time, however, we are confident our turnaround programme has worked. This financial year we are on track to increase earnings and free cashflows after 10 years of declining financial performance, while at the same time we have tightened capital spend and improved organisational health and culture.

It's not been a case of slashing and burning; in fact we are now reinvesting many of the programme's benefits in growth investments like data centres, Lightbox TV, and the Spark rebrand itself.

So what was different this time around? The All Blacks' approach offers some clues as to how we went about it.

1. Set unreasonable goals
We set out to achieve improvements more than five times the scale of all existing improvement plans within three years. It was viewed internally at the time as insane, however we are on track to deliver these targeted benefits in two, not three years.

2. Execute relentless
lyIt's not rocket science but it does mean a much sharper degree of accountability and performance management than many, if not most, New Zealand companies are used to. Central to this is a weekly performance management cycle and seriously frank performance conversations across the company.

3. Address mindsets and behaviours
At its heart this is about resetting performance expectations and building the management culture and capabilities to deliver them, or hold to account those who don't.

Needless to say this hasn't been easy. As chief turnaround officer, the core of my job has been to constantly push our leaders outside their comfort zone while supporting them with the coaching to build the mind-sets and skills needed to deliver.

I fear many New Zealanders, including many senior business leaders, have a belief that it's not very Kiwi to have the challenging conversations needed to keep pushing performance to the next level and leaders all too often gravitate back to comfort zones ... which is a sure-fire way to maintain pretty ordinary levels of performance. I certainly rebut this belief. Instead, I would suggest the best role model for the behaviours needed to achieve world-class business performance is that most New Zealand of institutions, the All Blacks.

Why the All Blacks? Performance expectations are always rising, feedback is constant and relentless, and people are held sharply to account - a player who is late for an international flight after a big night is off the whole tour. No debate. No matter who they are.

Compare this with our rugby friends across the Ditch. If anyone wonders why the Wallabies have been an ordinary side of late, one only has to look at how recent player transgressions have been treated there - their players are not held sharply to account and poor behaviour is tolerated in a way that would never fly in the current All Black environment.

Many New Zealand companies aspire to and can perform much better than they do today.

If we as senior leaders can channel a bit more of the All Black mind-set into running our companies we can rapidly drive much higher performance for our customers, our people and our investors.

• Matt Crockett is chief turnaround officer at Spark New Zealand and mid-year will join Fletcher Building as chief executive of the heavy building products division.