Case Study: SEEK Limited
Leadership Development - Preserving the entrepreneurial spirit
In less than 10 years SEEK Limited has transitioned from a small, entrepreneurial organisation to a successful listed company. A key to maintaining their stellar growth is to sustain the entrepreneurial culture through executive education.
When entrepreneurs Paul Bassat, Andrew Bassat (MBS Alumni- MBA 1994) and Matthew Rockman formed SEEK in November 1997, they were on the road to discovering how the relentless pursuit of an innovative business concept can pay big long-term dividends.
Using the Internet as a distribution channel, the founders launched seek.com.au in March 1998 which offered a more efficient way of bringing job seekers and employers together beyond traditional means.
As the company grew from strength to strength it had clearly found a market niche and today is the leader in the online employment and training market in Australia and New Zealand.
Now approaching its second decade, SEEK continues to grow rapidly.
The company sees the preservation of their entrepreneurial spirit as key to long term success.
Human Resources Director at SEEK, Meahan Callaghan (left), says: “As we grow we want to remain dynamic and flexible. Since listing on the ASX we’ve needed to become more sophisticated in our processes, but we aren’t bound by a typical corporate structure that would hinder our innovation.”
Rapid growth in the last two years, has meant significantly expanding SEEK’s management team. In bringing in new people it was imperative that all executives embraced the entrepreneurial spirit, and reinforced the company’s brand.
“Our aim was to bring our executives together to experience a new, shared learning and develop a common language. This helps them lead high performance teams that continually transform and evolve our company,” says Callaghan.
Tam Vu, CIO of SEEK was the initial driving force in SEEK’s leadership development with a series of customised programs by Mt Eliza executive education, part of Melbourne Business School. SEEK’s Callaghan has continued the company’s partnership with the School.
“It was a fitting relationship as the School is passionate about executive development as is SEEK about their business,” says Callaghan.
In the design phase of the senior leadership program, Callaghan worked closely with the Mt Eliza Program Director Edmund King.
King, says: “We developed a great partnership. SEEK is a vibrant, challenging and exciting company to work with and their executives are very brave in what they set out to achieve. They expect a lot from their people but are also very caring about them as individuals. Their entrepreneurial culture encourages flexible thinking and acceptance of new ideas. So our task was to broaden their management skills while preserving these entrepreneurial qualities.”
The five-day leadership program was held for SEEK’s department heads at the School’s residential campus at Mt Eliza.
Early Stage Markets Manager, David Waite said the program was delivered in an entrepreneurial way. “The key to the success of the program was that it was delivered in the SEEK style; it was challenging and thought provoking and delivered in an engaging team environment,” he says.
The program focused on a powerful combination of key managerial and leadership capabilities identified as essential to increasing SEEK’s managerial effectiveness and impact in an increasingly sophisticated global market.
“You can never move past leadership because it’s essential to our business. And it’s not leadership in the traditional sense of setting a vision for the next five years and sticking to it – it’s about the here and now and being an individual in a team,” says Callaghan.
One of the key areas explored was self awareness. Callaghan said it was the cornerstone of the program and the executives gained a deeper understanding of their own strengths, impacts on their peers and team, preferences and development opportunities.
“Self awareness has enabled our people to lead their teams more effectively in an unstructured environment and helped to maintain our high engagement scores,” says Callaghan.
Michael Ilczynski, Strategy Manager for SEEK Learning found the program a unique opportunity to better understand himself as a leader. “It’s not often that executives are given time out to participate in a program like this,” he says.
The way to help SEEK sustain their entrepreneurial spirit is the ability of their leaders to undergo a personal transformation. ”We helped the executives achieve this through examining their leadership style and behaviours on others and consider how these can be modified to create more powerful working relationships,” says King.
“We also helped them understand the links between their values and actions and their critical impact on organisational success.”
With the Mt Eliza program directors, executives set personal goals and action plans to embed their learnings on return to work – and this was further supported with the guidance from Mt Eliza coaching.
Central to the learning progress was reflective learning. It enabled SEEK’s executives to break from the program, walk through the Mt Eliza campus and reflect on the new learnings about themselves and their peers.
King said that through deep reflection participants were able to contextualise their own knowledge, better understand their motivations and behaviours and make sounder decisions about their future actions. And through this process they were able to create the link between new knowledge and theory from the program with their own intuitive knowledge and experience.
SEEK’s National Sales Manager, Emma Phillips is applying reflective learning in her role and is encouraging the use of this process with her direct reports.
Innovation is second nature to SEEK. Their executives needed guidance on how to translate their ideas into a business context. With the recent listing of SEEK on the ASX, executives are challenged to think more commercially about reporting and evaluating financial performance; and the relationship between financial performance and share market response.
Without placing too much structure and control around the innovation process, Mt Eliza’s Program Director, Richard Parker delivered a one-day session on financial management. Executives were provided with the skills to develop financially-sound business cases.
SEEK takes a fresh approach to embedding the learnings from the senior leadership program. Their HR personnel attended the program to share the learning experience. After the program, HR worked closely with the executives to apply the learnings in the workplace and support their leadership journey.
Callaghan said their HR people don’t assume the traditional HR role of managing payroll and developing policy manuals. “We perform a strategic role to develop the leadership capability of our people and support the entrepreneurial culture of our company,” she says.
Callaghan says the program outcomes are helping SEEK to yield excellent financial results and the ‘non monetary’ return on investment is exceptional.
“ROI is more than just the monetary benefits for us. We have a shared, common language around leadership and our people are empowered and enabled to make decisions based on our shared values and in an unstructured environment,” she says.
“Our Hewitt engagement scores are in the high eighties which is testimony to our executive development and an entrepreneurial culture that continues to attract and keep exceptional talent.”
For the past three years SEEK has received special commendation awards in the Best Employers to Work for in Australia survey conducted by Hewitt Associates. This year, the company was recognised in the 20 Best Employers to Work for in Asia (Hewitt).
Published in BRW, 4 October 2007
