Interview with Austin Swain

Citation

by Ruth Young, I. (2009), "Interview with Austin Swain", Human Resource Management International Digest, Vol. 17 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/hrmid.2009.04417daa.001

Interview with Austin Swain

Article Type: Interview From: Human Resource Management International Digest, Volume 17, Issue 4

Interview by Ruth Young

Dr Austin Swain is Director of People & Product at Lane4. His approach to people and organizational development is drawn from an élite performance and sport psychology background. Combining this background with extensive experience in the commercial world, Austin specializes in leadership development for senior executives and teams. Austin is also responsible for ensuring that Lane4’s product offerings and consultant delivery are cutting edge.

Lane4 is a professional services firm working in the fields of organizational performance, leadership development and executive coaching. With a unique heritage drawn from élite sporting and commercial achievement Lane4 was co-founded in 1995 by Olympic Gold Medallist swimmer Adrian Moorhouse MBE and leading sport psychologist Professor Graham Jones and has now developed into an international organization with offices in Europe, the USA and Asia Pacific, with a network of associates based across the world.

Lane4 has been awarded places in both the Sunday Times 100 best small companies to work for and more recently the MPF 100 best professional firms. What do you think makes it such a great place to work?

Although the company has grown steadily over the last ten to 15 years we have managed to retain the family feel that we had at the start, there is a real sense of social cohesion and camaraderie within the organization and in addition to that, in Adrian Moorhouse we have a very respected and much-loved leader. A lot of loyalty to Lane4 is generated as a result of Adrian’s style and approach which includes a very strong sense of optimism which pervades the organization. If you look in the media at the moment, and the business papers in particular, there’s an unremitting gloom about the economy and what the future holds and it doesn’t feel like that in Lane4. We have to work very hard to maintain growth and support clients in everything that they are going through but there is definitely a strong sense of optimism about what the future can bring.

Do you think that sense of camaraderie comes from the sports background of the organization?

There is definitely a strong sense of team work and what I have noticed about a lot of the élite sports performers who now work for Lane4 is that they bring a fantastic work ethic, great resolve, focus and that fundamentally they are team players.

What do you think makes a good leader?

In terms of Adrian, he displays a combination of humility and resolve but more generically I think it is important that a leader is able to manage the tensions between current and future and internal and external. There is a real tension between managing for today and simultaneously planning for the future so that you do not get caught cold by changes. In terms of the internal-external tension, a good leader needs to be visible and be able to keep an eye on what is going on within the organization whilst at the same time being very externally facing, linking with clients and customers and contributing to the organization’s positioning in the outside world. It is also important to get the balance right between vision, support and challenge. If you are working with an organization that is quite high support and low challenge you get an organization that is quite cosy and if you have the reverse then it is quite fraught and prone to burnout. The correct balance is high-support, high-challenge which I think leads back to the sporting theme because sports performers are always high-challenge, they always want to know how they can get better. Alongside that it is important to have a clear sense of vision because without this the high-support, high-challenge environment lacks direction.

One of your areas of specialism is using sponsorship to drive employee engagement. Can you explain how this works?

If we take the 2012 Olympics as an example, certain organizations will sponsor the Olympics and form a partnership primarily for external brand marketing reasons. The main sponsors for 2012 will be organizations like British Telecom, Lloyds TSB and then more general Olympic sponsors like Coca Cola. Although the partnership is primarily for brand marketing I think a lot of organizations miss a trick in terms of using that relationship internally to drive employee engagement. Sometimes there can be resentment internally about how much money an organization spends on sponsorship, so I think the key thing is to think about how you can make the relationship something that your employees feel proud of. Historically the role of sponsorship has not extended much beyond the level of providing free tickets for employees and I think it needs to go further than that and be something more fulfilling. What we have looked at is how you can get the relationship to influence the culture of the organization. The Olympic Games are associated with many things, one of them being excellence and as Olympic sponsors you get unique access and opportunities to get up close and personal to the Olympic Games and some of the key people involved. There is also an opportunity to link to learning and development objectives, and one of the things we are doing is branding internal learning and development programs and unashamedly connecting them to 2012. As an example we would get LOCOG, the London Organising Committee of the Olympic Games, to come along and talk about how they are preparing for 2012 which is in itself a fantastic thing because they are trying to do in five years what most organizations would take 25 to do. There is also the opportunity to get performance directors and coaches and athletes talking about the journey they are on between now and 2012 as part of a learning event and as exemplars of leadership.

That seems to be a great way to raise the profile of learning and development, which I think often slips down the priority list in troubled economic times. Do you see that as the biggest obstacle to L&D currently?

Yes and no, obviously if you are making redundancies it is very difficult to justify spending on other people and there has to be sensitivity there. However really smart organizations are planning for the medium and long term as well as the present and a lot of the focus has to be about how you retain top talent, how do you make people feel that their organization has a future, that they are going to be around and come through the other side of this and really flourish? To do this you need to invest in people development. I also think the issue is quite sector-specific, there are some sectors which are facing a real challenge such as construction but in others there are opportunities. In the financial services sector take Nomura for example, they bought out the Lehman Brothers in Europe and so we have been doing some acquisition inter-relations work about speeding up the integration of the Lehman people into Nomura, so in this case Nomura are in an advantageous position. I think you are right there is a challenge on budgets, but it is not all doom and gloom.

What do you see as the biggest challenge in your current role?

I think the biggest challenge is keeping pace; there are some timeless principles to development but I think we need to keep coming up with new services and new offerings and one of those is around organizational resilience. We have worked hard over the last six months to have a voice and a perspective on organizational resilience. We have previously done some work on mental toughness, but organizational resilience is more than just an amalgam of individual toughness and we have done some research with organizations into this and developed a pretty clear perspective but we have had to move quickly on that, so I think the challenge is in staying current. I also think in addition to that I need to ensure that our consultants find space to focus on their own development whilst still being dedicated to clients.