Idealog.co.nz | The Transformation Issue
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interviewTHE CULTURAL SHIFT
Spark and Colenso BBDO’s 2018 campaign featuring
same-sex couple Chris Paul Hunter and Marc Hobson
with their young son Lucas David Hunter-Hobson at
home in Christchurch, illustrating a rainbow family
growing up in a supportive and loving environment.
But what you may not know is Moutter saw the ad for
the first time like many other New Zealanders experienced
it: at home, while watching broadcast television.
“I was home on a Friday night, oddly watching
broadcast TV – I almost never do that in this world of
streaming – and I saw this ad come on for a same-sex
couple and thought, ‘This is edgy, I wonder who this is?’
Then the voiceover came and I thought, ‘That’s the voice
we use on our ads’ then at the end, up comes the Spark
logo,” he says.
“What blew me away was a group of staff – no
managers, my other leaders didn’t know about it either- our people felt sufficiently empowered to produce a
controversial advertisement like that, and run it without
asking for permission. That was amazing.
I could tell you before any of this [the uncomfortable
truths speech], that would’ve never happened. Someone
would’ve thought of it and then said ‘No, they’ll never go
for that’. It would’ve died as an idea. Then the social media
team took over all the critics and took a very values-based
view to people who were being bigoted and nasty, saying,
‘If you don’t pull it, we’re leaving and taking our business
elsewhere’. They said, ‘Okay, goodbye then.’ That was also
provocative, but you’ve got to make a stand: these are
your values, and they’ve got to show up and be reflected
internally and externally.”
This has also resulted in other changes: the rise of
te reo Maori being used within Spark and Maori culture
being embedded into its values, such as a kapa haka group,
Samoan song groups, Indian and Muslim communities
coming together, and more.
“The only thing I did was be willing to be brave and go
public and make a commitment publicly to resolve it and
explain where the problem was,” Moutter says. “It enabled
the amazing people at Spark to take control of the agenda.”
The problem
with the Telecom
brand by 2012
was it was
marginalised to a
wealthier, whiter,
more business
orientated
customer group,
so we didn’t
have much
engagement with
younger people –
anyone under the
age of 35 wasn’t
inclined to be
with Telecom.THE STRUCTURAL CHANGE
Spark was one of the first corporates here to embrace the
agile structure of working, a structure formed by a group
of software developers in 2001 to allow organisations to
quickly navigate change. Lots of big companies in New
Zealand embraced agile units, but full-scale adoption was
a bold call by the company.
“We had to create an academy to train coaches for
agile, we had to build bootcamps and a way of teaching
thousands of people to do agile at scale,” Moutter says.
“Agile didn’t exist in the formal way before we
did it here, so the people we had to bring in expensive,
international to train the trainers. Once we embedded
that into the talent pool, they move to other companies
and which spurs others on. You’re laying foundations
and building capability that encourages and enables
more change [in the business ecosystem].”
Now, Vodafone, The Warehouse, NZME, BNZ and
ANZ are among the large companies with agile units
or structures operating New Zealand.
THE LEADERSHIP SHIFT
One of the biggest transformations that took place at Spark
was an overhaul of its culture of diversity and inclusion.
There is a lesson that Moutter took too long to
learn, he says: culture can’t be created or designed out of
processes and ticking boxes. As hard as the company was
working towards greater diversity, Spark lost four of its
senior women from the organisation in 2017, which led
him to believe something wasn’t right.
A report into the issue uncovered that the company
wasn’t as inclusive as it thought it was, and many
considered the processes in place for inclusion to be just
lip service. This culminated in Moutter’s “uncomfortable
truths” speech in 2017 at the Global Women 1 Day for
Change summit, where he publicly acknowledged where
Spark had gone wrong as he fought back tears.
“It took me over a year and a half to stop tearing up
just talking about it, even way after because I felt I had
let people down,” Moutter says. “I thought, ‘Wow I was
drinking my own kool-aid’ and taking my mind-led,
metric-led approach thinking we’re doing good on
inclusion and diversity, when I didn’t realise it was
anywhere near as wrong as it was.
“My conventional wisdom was, ‘I’ve got a problem,
I should have a strategy and set of initiatives and then dish
out 100 action points to get that delivered’. That would’ve
been a conventional, hierarchal manager’s approach,
especially as an engineer, that’s how we do things. An issue
about culture and people where it’s not mathematical –
that often moves you a long way out of your comfort zone,
because you’ve got to broaden your view.”
But the company has since come a long way since
that moment of truth. Moutter says though his speech
was focused on gender, it lifted the cover off the issue of
diversity and inclusion within Spark in a range of areas
– ethnicity, sexuality, religion, and gender.■