How do you create and maintain a culture to enable happy and high-performing teams?

Jane Slimming is Founder and CEO of Zeal. She’s been running the agency for 14 years. 

In this episode, Jane shares how she:

• Defined their values on day #1 and consistently embeds these into everything they do

Jane was a great podcast guest with a lot of ‘zeal’. Her quote about what’s worse than having a hole in the team is truly memorable!

How do you maintain a high-performing team when growing from zero to 100 people

- Balanced the competing needs of financial performance and the all-important people aspects

- Built a culture around adaptability, accountability, selflessness and having an entrepreneurial spirit

- Embedded the right type of behaviours both when the business was small and then when it became larger

- Implemented a recruitment process as rigorous as Google’s, based on their three pillars of exceptional talent

- Created a mission for each individual in the team aligned to their business plan 

- Recruited the wrong people in the early days and had to deal with a large-scale team rebellion 

How do you get everyone in a large business to be high-performing? 

Vanella Jackson was Global CEO of Hall & Partners for 13 years, leading a business with a total revenue of $130m.

In this episode, Vanella shares how she:

- Applied a ‘learn, stretch and grow’ ethos to underpin high performance across the business

- Made sure people felt valued and supported across 100s of team members

- Maintained an entrepreneurial spirit within a large, networked agency 

- Identified her allies, the people who would always tell her the truth about what’s going on

- Got everyone pointing in the same direction with a purpose and vision mapped back to their roles

- Liberated herself from self-criticism and then worked to liberate others

Vanella signs off our conversation with a challenge for all business leaders - listen to find out what this is!

Welcome to Human Powered, the new podcast about creating a high-performing agency or consultancy business.

In the first episode, our host, Trenton Moss, explains why he's launching the podcast in conjunction with his bestselling book, also called Human Powered.