Hard Yards in Leadership

19. Steven Johnston: From Provision CEO to Not for Profit CEO

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Episode notes

People management can be one of the hardest challenges for leaders and that is no different for this episode’s guest Steve Johnston. In fact he even admits it himself in this episode. Repeatedly.

And that’s saying a lot, because if Steve can find this a challenge, the rest of us surely will as well.

Steve has an extensive career and is a seasoned and experienced non-executive director and CEO.

He’s worked in retail, trade, and wholesale, in hardware, automotive, toys, sporting goods, outdoor, consumer durables markets and optometry. The last of those was as the CEO of Provision for over 10 years.

 

In this episode Steve shares:

  • The first leadership lessons he learnt as a football club captain
  • How he learnt how to be responsible for people by first managing himself.
  • The horrible experience of working in an org that’s “why” was just about making money for the individual
  • His journey at Provision where he came in as CEO when everyone thought the industry was about to end
  • The experience of being a new CEO and having almost half his leadership team leave
  • The importance of bringing in a team who believes in your vision
  • How his hardest challenge was leading people

 

Key Quotes

 

“If you don’t understand those individuals (working for you), you've got zero chance of bringing them on the journey with you.”

“We haven’t got two people around that team who see the world the same way.”

“There were too many people on that team who were not prepared to make ANY changes to their approach to people”

 

If you want to find out more about Steve

You can follow Steve on linkedin: linkedin.com/in/steven-johnston-aaicd

Or support Connecting2Australia here: https://connecting2australia.org/

 

If you want to find out more about what Wayne does, check out his business via the website: 

http://engage4performance.com/

Or you can follow him on socials:

https://www.linkedin.com/in/wayne-reuben-engage4performance/

 

 

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