Member Article

The Power of The Peer Group: Insight from the UK's Youngest Vistage Chair

Adam Harris is the youngest Vistage chair in the UK (and the third youngest in the world) - but his CV is nonetheless impressive. In a handful of years, he went from trolley boy at Sainsbury’s to CEO of the Technology Channels Association. He currently holds four directorships in every field from IT services to inflatable extras; he’s trained as a teacher, and he lectures at Nottingham Trent University.

With that kind of entrepreneurial spirit, varied experience and drive he was a natural fit as a Chair for the world’s leading peer group organisation, Vistage. Here, Adam discusses the value business coaching has brought to all his endeavours.

“Originally, I just wanted to be a member of Vistage: I went along to an open day and was blown away by the quality of the people in the room. Their ability, their willingness to be open and vulnerable, to be challenged and challenge other people made me wonder - ‘where has this been for the last fifteen years?’

“People join a peer group not to have their questions answered, but to have their answers questioned. Chief executives and managing directors are able to make decisions, but we only see what we see: having someone on our level who can challenge us from a different perspective is so helpful. I fell in love with that concept and those values and decided to become a Chair.

“They asked me in the Chair interview if I thought my age would be a problem - if it would hold me back as a coach and mentor. I said something like “if being mentored by someone younger is problem for someone, I probably don’t want to be working with them anyway.”

“It was definitely a weird experience. I’d never really been interviewed before: I’d done a lot of interviews and psychometric tests for people, ever since university, but I’d never been on the other side. I wasn’t even used to the dress code - I’d come from the tech space where you don’t see so much formality, and I actually had to raid my dad’s wardrobe for a tie.

“Now I have three groups - a chief exec group, a key group, and the first trusted advisor group in the UK. I’m also a professional speaker, coach, mentor, non-executive director - so any concerns I might have initially had were completely unfounded. It was worth raiding my dad’s cupboard for that tie, put it that way!

“Lots of the issues people bring to me fall into three broad categories. One’s around growth - someone says, “we’re not growing fast enough, what do we do?” That might sit around sales or operations. Another’s the same thing from the other direction: “we’re growing too fast, what do we do to sustain this?” And the last one is about money and cash - “we need more, how do we get it?”

“Often, the actual issue is people: the right people in the wrong roles, or the wrong people in essential ones. To resolve those, you need to see things from other people’s perspectives. My members have been through business closures, divorces, and one through severe depression, even talking around suicide. These stories come out on a week by week basis: it gets deep quite quickly.

Sometimes, at C-level, you need something like Vistage. It’s nice to have one day a month when you’re not the person who has to lead. You get to think, “I don’t know what’s going to happen today, and I’m actually quite happy with that.”

“The core concept I take away from Vistage is reflection - taking a step back, reflecting on what’s happened and planning for the future. Start with the end in mind, help create focus and clarity for people and businesses. Help people find the one big thing they’re going to do today that’s going to make everything else easier. That’s a very Vistage way to think: stepping out of the whirlwind of ‘doing’ the job and focusing on the big picture.

“If you can challenge and support people, becoming a coach or mentor is definitely worth looking at. It’s the most rewarding thing I’ve ever done, and it’s an opportunity to grow yourself and others that you work with; within their businesses and from a wider perspective.

“In a way, I live through my members: while I’m coaching them, I’m also coaching myself. That’s part of the Vistage ethos. If we knew what the answers were things would be easy, but often, the challenge is in the things we don’t know that we don’t know. The role of the chair is to create the right space for people to open up and admit to those unknowns, and be ripped apart and put back together again - in the nicest possible way.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Amy Gallacher .