The Virgin Way: Everything I Know About Leadership (6 page)

As Allie Hope, the head of development at Virgin Hotels, likes to put it, ‘It’s all about stylish functionality – about leveraging what works and transforming what doesn’t.’ An example of something we know works extremely well for our Virgin Atlantic Upper Class customers is our Clubhouse Lounges. As anyone who has ever visited our flagship London Heathrow Clubhouse will tell you, it is just an amazing oasis of pre-flight calm in which to relax, enjoy a meal, play pool, have a massage, a haircut, a shoeshine or – if you must – work! Everything we have learned over the years with the steady refinement of our Clubhouses will be incorporated into Virgin Hotels, which will all have a 24/7 Clubhouse-like space for guests to make their own. It will also make for a very seamless hospitality experience for our airline loyalists who we fully anticipate will be the first ones in line for our new hotel offering. After all, they already sleep with us in the air, so why not do it on the ground as well?

And when it comes to ‘transforming what doesn’t work’ in the hotel space, as with every one of our businesses, we have found there to be no lack of amazing opportunities for us to ring the changes. One big-little facet we have focused on is the needs and expectations of our women guests – where lots of little details that are easily overlooked can make the difference between an ‘okay’ stay and a, ‘Wow, I can’t believe they thought of that’ experience. And again we have an abundance of female executives within Virgin – many of whom travel incessantly – so we have gleaned a wealth of input from this travel-savvy sorority within the family.

Raul Leal, the highly experienced hotel professional that we brought in to head up Virgin Hotels, won me over the instant he told me that his vision for our hotels was one of ‘exclusivity for all’. While the big legacy hotel chains might be classified as ‘reliably boring’ and some of the more established ‘lifestyle’ hotel brands take a slightly holier-than-thou/red-rope view on the world, our hotels will bridge the gap between the two. We’ll be neither ‘ladies and gentlemen serving ladies and gentlemen’ nor ‘too cool for school’. Instead we’ll be fun, slightly cheeky and irreverent, and everyone, whether a guest or an associate, should feel better for the experience. We have done an equal amount of work in ensuring both groups feel treasured and we know that creating raving fans in our guests will only happen if we can achieve the same level of engagement from our own people.

What’s happening at Virgin Hotels is just an extension of the tried and true belief in trusting your own consumer-based instincts. This is, of course, considered a very pragmatic investment strategy – if as a consumer you really like using a particular product and purchase it over other choices every time, then presumably lots of others do the same, so it may be a stock worth acquiring. The ultimate example of such consumer behaviour is the tale of American entrepreneur Victor Kiam, who made a fortune from his company Remington Products. As the story goes, his wife bought him a Remington electric razor and, as he famously said in their advertising campaigns, ‘I liked the product so much, I bought the company.’

CHECK YOURSELF OUT

So the simple fact is that any business leader worthy of their paycheque should, at every possible opportunity, be playing the role of a consumer of their own company’s goods and services. It has never been the Virgin way to put too much credence in the findings of third-party customer satisfaction ratings when so much more can be gleaned from testing your own product first-hand at every possible opportunity.

Despite living in an online age, when things go amiss consumers should be able to talk to someone – a real someone, not an electronic avatar. So when you’re playing customer, one of the first things to do is to try and locate a phone number to call on your website that will enable you to get through to a real human being. If you can find the number – most organisations foolishly bury a contact number in some deep dark corner of the website after ‘Contact Us’ has led you nowhere except back to the webpage you started on – try calling it and count how many recorded options, pre-screens and hand-offs you are forced through before you (perhaps) get to a real person. Once you get to that human voice, have a reasonable problem ready, one that they should be able to fix, and see how well they do and how pleasantly they go about it. If they do it really well you might want to consider identifying yourself at the end of the call and praising their efforts. If they get it hopelessly wrong you are better off taking the story to their supervisor so the failing can become a training subject.

Or for some real fun – play-act the part of a dissatisfied customer and try and call yourself just to see what happens. Do you get an incredulous, ‘No, I can’t possibly put you through to Mr Smith’s office.’ Or, if you are put through (don’t worry, you aren’t there to take your own call), how much grief are you subjected to in order to get there? Are you (the irate customer) deflected to someone who can genuinely take an interest and help you with your problem or are you just headed off at the pass?

I tried pulling this stunt myself once but it didn’t work out too well. I am so pathetically bad at imitating someone else’s voice that Penni, my trusty assistant for many years, sat there and let me make a complete fool of myself with some trumped-up complaint before saying, ‘Well, thank you so much for sharing all that with me, sir. Let me see if Mr Branson is available to take your call.’ She then kept me hanging on for what seemed like an eternity – it was probably a couple of minutes – before coming back on the line to say, ‘Sorry, Richard, but you appear to be out of the office at the moment, can someone else help you?’ before dissolving into howls of laughter. But give it a shot – I am sure you’ll be able to make a much better job of it than I did.

I had greater success on the phone when I was based full-time in the UK and used to frequently cold-call Virgin Atlantic passengers who had just arrived at Heathrow. Our Upper Class (business class) passengers could easily be tracked down on their way into London as they were in the limos we had supplied for them. The drivers were primed to expect this and to simply pass the phone back saying, ‘It’s a call for you, sir/madam.’ Needless to say they were surprised at getting a call and so would usually start out with a very suspicious, ‘Hello, who’s this?’, to which I’d typically answer with a cheery, ‘Hello, this is Richard Branson, I’m just calling to welcome you to England and ask if everything went well on the flight.’ Needless to say I got a lot of ‘Yeah, sure it is! Who is this really?’ -type reactions (some in much less printable language) but when we did finally strike up a conversation it was always time incredibly well spent on my part. Complaints, or ‘observations’ as I prefer to call them, are usually unsolicited and with too many companies not particularly welcome, so a senior person reaching out and inviting honest input really wins a lot of points as well as bringing in some interesting insights.

In the case of my calls to the limos, the results were almost always a win–win–win. The passenger was impressed that I’d made the effort to contact them, I got a lot of excellent hot-off-the-press feedback that I could immediately address with the airline and I was also able to pass along any specific compliments to the cabin crew or airport staff, who were never that surprised to take my calls. It was also a great way to say thank you to our most frequent fliers. I liked to be tipped off when a passenger was going through milestones, like say 100,000 miles, and would call to congratulate them and say how much we appreciate their loyalty. A little ‘thank you’ goes a long way.

I have always found it to be one of the more intriguing idiosyncrasies of the human condition that a problem that is handled quickly and effectively will almost always serve to generate more long-term customer loyalty than when the original service was delivered satisfactorily. That said, I am a huge believer in the old customer service mantra of, ‘First to know, first to handle.’ If someone can fix a problem on the spot it saves all kinds of angst for the customer plus time and expense for the company – just as importantly, an on-the-spot resolution more often than not will also keep a customer in the fold.

Call it leadership in reverse if you like, but any company that views their business’s level of performance strictly through the optic of the bottom line is living very dangerously. That kind of blinkered ‘view from the boardroom’ thinking was what cost Steve Jobs his job at Apple and history very quickly showed where that took the company – almost to the point of extinction. So rather than sitting in a gilded cage believing what the financials and customer surveys seem to indicate, effective leaders have got to set an example and get out there kicking the tyres on a regular basis. I am probably one of the biggest (constructive) critics of every Virgin company, always balanced with praise where appropriate, of course. Whenever I experience our services, as good and trendsetting as they might be, there is nearly always a way to improve upon them. Yes, I can sometimes be accused of nit-picking when I travel with my notebook in hand but it’s invariably the small details that combine to make memorably good – or bad – customer experiences. Like why were we handing out hot towels to our newly boarded passengers on a boiling hot Las Vegas day? Wouldn’t cold towels make a lot more sense?

I have always found that having senior people who demonstrably care enough to pay attention to customer-focused nitty-gritty details – as opposed to just the stock price – serves to encourage everyone in the organisation to get into the habit of seeing what you look like from the outside in. A domino benefit is that middle managers don’t want a senior officer to be the first to tell them how their part of the operation looks from the other side of the fence, especially if they’ve never troubled to set foot over there themselves!

As an example of continually attempting to ‘see yourself as others see you’, now that Virgin Hotels
is opening its doors I will be encouraging our hotel managers to regularly spend (unannounced) nights sleeping in random empty rooms in their properties. Just spending a few minutes inspecting a room during the day doesn’t give any clue as to what paying guests experience while sleeping there for the night. If you want to fully grasp what you are selling then you have got to see it from the customer’s perspective – or in this case when you’ve made the bed then you’ve got to sleep in it too!

While on the subject of hospitality, perhaps the boldest management initiatives I’ve ever witnessed was in a Florida property used by Virgin Holidays. The manager there had put his picture, name and phone numbers – office, cell phone and home – inside every elevator. The note with it read something along the lines of, ‘If there is any problem during your stay that is not resolved to your satisfaction by our staff, please feel free to give me a call.’ When I asked him if this hadn’t been a problem, his response was, ‘For me – not at all: for my staff maybe. I made sure they know how much I dislike getting disturbed when I’m at home with the family.’ He then added that in the year the signs had been in place he’d maybe received a couple of calls a month – a great example of the senior person putting themselves on the front line 24/7!

When I was hands-on CEO at Virgin Atlantic I did something similar with our staff. I’d write them a letter every month with an update on how things were going and – before cell phones and email – gave them my home address and home phone number if they wanted to get in touch with me. And, as with the Florida hotel manager, on the rare occasions they did I was always delighted to hear what they had to say.

C YOURSELF AS THE COMPETITION SEES YOU

Running a business would be a lot easier if finding a leader were as simple as handing out impressive titles like CEO, president, managing director or whatever. A fancy corporate title with a ‘C’ in front of it might open doors (once at least) or get more people to take a phone call, but it doesn’t guarantee the levels of respect and influence that are the marks of a real leader – those who earned the position as opposed to merely having it bestowed upon them. To this day, too many businesses still view the top job as being the prerogative of the ‘next in line’ who has diligently put in their years as the number two person in the corporate pecking order. That
might
work in royal families but it certainly doesn’t always get it done in a lot of business situations.

Middle management can make or break a company so having good departmental leaders at all levels is vital to any business – but not every good manager is going to naturally grow into a senior leadership role. It certainly happens in a number of cases, but it’s no given. Too often when the number two person is moved up it is done to ensure continuity in the way the firm is run, which usually translates to ‘business as usual’ or protecting the prior incumbent’s legacy. This may make sense with some highly successful companies, but even there I’ve always found a transition at the top is a perfect opportunity to get a fresh perspective on where the company is going (or not) and if necessary then a little shake, rattle and roll never did anyone any harm.

Clearly when considering candidates for leadership positions their resumes/CVs have to come into play, but they really should be judged equally on their vision for the future as on what they’ve achieved in the past. If a company is to move forward, hiring clones of the previous incumbent will rarely generate much in the way of positive change. No matter how good the previous person in the job might have been there is always room for improvement so my favourite question with internal applicants has always been, ‘So if you get the job, what are the first things you are going to change around here and why?’ Much as we like to hire from inside at Virgin I have no aversion to bringing in new blood from the outside – a pair of fresh eyes (and ears) can often see latent opportunities that long-term employees have simply come to accept as the norm.

THE INSIDE ON THE OUTSIDE

As it happens, over the last few years we have put new CEOs in charge of our two biggest airlines, Virgin Atlantic and Virgin Australia, and in both cases I believe we may have surprised a few people by replacing the long-term incumbents with senior executives from two major legacy airlines.