Canada PostFernando Morales/The Globe and Mail
KARL MOORE: This is Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I am delighted to speak to the CEO of Canada Post, Moya Greene.
Good afternoon, Moya.
MOYA GREENE: Hi Karl.
KM: The top, where you are Moya, you have 72,000 people working for you. There are so many filters between a letter carrier with the truth in Gander or her truth in Vancouver. They are out there dealing with reality. How do you connect with 72,000 people as a CEO? How do you not let the filters get in the way, where somebody is scrubbing it clean, and by the time it gets to you there is nothing left because everybody has an agenda? How do you contact with the front-line troops?
MG: Make it direct. I am out there myself. I would say that I do 35 to 40 front-line meetings every year. That is a lot of time commitment on my part, to hear from our people who are actually getting the mail out. I get thousands of letters and e-mails directly, and I answer them.
We are like any company: We are going to have employees that are soured by their experience at Canada Post. We are going to have employees that are in emotional distress for a whole lot of reasons, maybe not even related to their work at Canada Post. We are a big employer, so we are going to have all of that.
Once you have been in the company for a while, and you have seen how it works or does not work in certain aspects, you can tell after four or five paragraphs or a couple of letters. The other thing that you get after a while is you get a very different view of the company and of the operation by all of those inputs, by all of those letters, by all of those e-mails.
I have a few people in the company who work either in final sort, or carrying the mail, and they are great thinkers, not just about their own task and their role in the company but about business generally. They are great readers and they send me ideas. Karl, you would not believe some of the great stuff that I get from our people. Over the past four years when something big is going on in the company, they can give me the view from Lethbridge, like "I know what you are trying to do Moya, but this is what it is looking like out here." That is really important feedback for me to say that I need to correct an impression here that I may have unwittingly created.
How do you do it? You try to do it direct, and then you compare notes. I am always trying to compare notes with the other members on my executive team because they are out there too. They magnify the opportunities that we have to be front and centre and face to face with our people. You have to continuously do it. You have to be committed to it, you have to see it as valuable. I see it as valuable for a whole lot of reasons because otherwise you get a very filtered view of what is going on.
Secondly, I do not think that you create ethical organizations if you remove yourself as a management team from the people that are actually getting the business done. I think that you have got to make a bridge there. You have to be more than just visible: You have to be receptive to what you are getting. I think that a lot of our people know that I am actually pretty receptive.
Let me tell you, they do not always agree with me. When I talk about absence in our company, which is a very big problem and it is part of a legacy that has a lot to do with the industrial relations history of the company. And it obviously has something to do with people getting sick, and it is a physical job, so it has something to do with that as well.
But which is the most important component of our big absence problem? I would leave a management guru like you to figure it out. It certainly has something to do with that heaviness of that culture. People sometimes do not like to hear that. They do not like to hear when I say to them that there are patterns to our absences that actually do not make sense. The laws of probability are against the possibility that you could get a cold every Wednesday for the past 16 weeks. They will go home and they will think about it and the people who have heard the conversation will say "Maybe there is a point there, maybe there is a good point there." That is actually how you do change the culture in a big place. It is to be pretty accessible and to be ready to hear what that other perspective brings to the table.
KM: In your job as CEO, compared to in previous jobs, where do you spend your time? You have talked about spending a fair amount of time listening to people, probably more than you have in the past. What else is different about being CEO, in terms of where you spend your time and energy?
MG: I spend a lot of my time on the transformation of the company, the modernization of the company. That is a very big endeavour. When you have 21 sorting facilities and 560-odd letter carrier depots and literally thousands of pieces of real estate out there, and the most intricate transportation network, bar none, in this country, and the huge geographic expanse that we have to face every day through all kinds of weather, the delivery system that we have at Canada Post really has not changed much in the last 150 years.
What we are talking about doing, other posts did 15 years ago - it is amazing how much of our mail is still manually handled. We are getting a whole lot better at tracking the mail but we sure have a way to go before we can tell every Canadian "this is where your parcel is, this is where your letter is" at every step of the way. If Canadians could walk with a letter from the time it is mailed in Tofino, [B.C.]to the time it arrives in Coley's Point, Nfld.; if they could just see what has to happen to that letter in those four business days in order to get there, it is nothing short of amazing. I spend a great deal of my time in figuring out how to modernize the company. I spend a lot of my time trying to figure out what will we have to do now, so that 20 years from now we are successful.
Trying to understand the trends in electronic commerce and electronic messages, and how that will affect us and our major customers.
What role can Canada Post play and what kinds of investments should we make in a time when capital is very hard to come by in order for us to be successful as that current just continues to evolve. I spend a fair bit of my time trying to figure that out.
I would say that those are the three big things; those are the things that are really critical to the success of the company.
KM: This has been Karl Moore of the Desautels Faculty of Management, talking management for The Globe and Mail. Today, I have been speaking to Moya Greene, the CEO of Canada Post.