Leading Teams to Deliver Business Excellence

An inspirational speech by HMA Robin Barnett kicked of the recent UKTI Leadership training in Warsaw, part of a two city roadshow from Berlin to Warsaw attracting participation from Heads of UKTI in Europe and the Corporate UKTI training team.

The intensive training session is part of UKTIs ongoing change programme to promote UK growth across the world.

In a nutshell in order to deliver a bigger chunk of global prosperity opportunity to the UK the UKTI business model has to focus on two fundamental platforms.

First, identifying an attractive platform of high value inward investment opportunity into the UK – the UKs Great home market and more importantly the UK as a Great springboard to the rest of the world. This is particularly important for Poland as its companies start to engage on international expansion.

We are well placed to assist and have an ambitious inward investment campaign in the making. Hi tech and highly regulated sectors are in target.

Second, a process which identifies Great opportunities for UK business in individual countries and actively attracts high potential companies to exploit those opportunities. In short the creation of a service journey which becomes the highway for UK business growth in Europe. Direct, a ‘pull’ approach supported by a ‘push’ from the UK linked up by seamless digital promotion.

Easy to say but a process which requires leadership and management excellence to deliver.

What’s the difference between leadership and management? A great question and one which merits a few lines of explanation.

• A manager does things right: a leader does the right thing
• A leader inspires change: a manager makes sure it happens
• A manager maintains: a leader develops
• A manager keeps an eye on the bottom line: a leader has an eye on the horizon
• A leader talks: a manager does

Looking in the context of the Polish and broader Emerging Europe opportunity we have some great people we need to create some great leaders. How do we do that. A few thoughts on how I see it:

To motivate UK business to get out of bed and get on a plane to Poland we need to create and communicate an aspirational business target – 20 billion pounds by 2020 is a good start.

We need to clearly identify the high value opportunities in country which the UK has a great chance to win and promote them in the most efficient way possible, digital and ensure UK companies have the right material to make concrete business decisions.

We are dividing the team into 4 and each has a specific high value sector focus and a portfolio of 100 companies each – 400 companies with high potential in the market – key sectors: energy & utilities; security & defence; health; services-financial, retail, IT, ICT; Infrastructure.

Finally Great leaders work with great partners. As UKTI focuses on working more strategically with high value opportunities we are setting up partnerships with partner organisations which will help us deliver on our prosperity objectives.

We are working with the BCC to get the opportunity message of Emerging Europe out into the market; we are working with the BPCC to deliver an active British Polish LauncHub – a one stop business development shop. We are working with Great to promote Emerging Europe ensure we know Corporate UK knows about the strategic, sustainable growth potential of this region – Emerging market growth close to home.