2024: The Year of Hustle, Heart and Humility

As we are days away from closing this year and in between chasing trucks (!), I’ve had the opportunity to reflect on the last 12 months and what it meant for me, my team and our business. 2024 is turning out be another strong year and made even more special when I think about the headwinds we had to navigate this year across multiple fronts. It’s humbling to see our teams switch gears and hustle to the end…it has allowed me to grow and learn more about myself: some new, some reinforced ??

"You cannot outrun the future, if you do not see it" [1]

This has become even more critical as our market landscape continues to become more complex, fragmented and competitive. Disruption is happening more frequently and can lead to even more short-term thinking, if we are not careful. There were moments that this was true for me, and I had to learn to give myself the space to assess how we are placed to compete into the future and adapt the plan quickly. This meant fully trusting my team to lead on the present while I focused on the future, and takes me to my next point . . .

Collective Accountability = First Team Mind-set = Customer First Approach

The key shift in how we approached this year was to stop thinking about our own individual team’s targets and to be fully invested in winning as a broader team. This translated to some customer groups delivering well above their annual target while we saw the headwinds impact other customer teams hard. I’m convinced that this is the only way to navigate headwinds within a year… but let’s be real -> it requires courage and I’m grateful on how my leadership group have embraced this way of working.

From my side, it’s meant working with my Executive Leadership group to look beyond the traditional, inside out approach to spend; trade spend versus media spend versus operating expenses and instead, to focus on the end customer (shopper to consumer). This meant making choices and shifting spend based on the overall funnel objectives. But this type of thinking is only possible when we trust and have each other’s back which means . . .

Choosing Dynamics (How I Feel) over Mechanics (What I do) [2]

When it got tough, we focused even more on strengthening connections across broader business teams: accounts, field, marketing, category, digital, shopper, demand planning teams. We allocated days not hours in between a workday…I learnt that removing the ‘busyness’ of a normal workday allowed all of us to be fully present and listen to each other on how we can be our best selves and appreciate how our individual successes are inter-connected. This process reinforced to me that people remember how you make them feel and not what you have achieved and that’s the x-factor to performance.

And finally, be kind to yourself

Work is personal but it doesn’t define you…2024 was the year where I have truly accepted this. 6 years as a Sales Director and now I have finally understood that business performance is not a reflection on who I am but what I do. That critical inner voice is still there but now I feel that I can focus it on what I can do better, how I show up for the next time round. And when I find myself drifting away from this, I take a breath, run and reset for the next day…everything is better in the morning!

That’s how 2024 played out . . . The numbers never tell the story, but the journey does ??

1 London Business School professor, Gary Hamel

2 Elite Team Dynamics Ltd (Owner: Craig Biddiscombe)