James Timpson: The Leadership Formula Where Kindness Drives Profit (E427)

**James Timpson** (0:03)
The best ideas come from the people on the front line. The colleague called Glenn was working in West Brom, and he used to be a watch repairer. He was basically doing watch repairs on his own, and he thought he was going to get a real telling off, and now it's a 14 million pound a year business.

**Damian** (0:16)
Your parents fostered over 90 children during your own childhood. What did growing up in an environment of seeing these kids come in for refuge into your family teacher?

**James Timpson** (0:27)
What it taught me is the people I recruit into the business, I want people who have got a real reason to prove themselves, and want to grab that second chance, because a lot of people have never given it to them in the past.

**Jake** (0:38)
You stepped away from Timpson so that you could go and work for the government, looking at the prison system, which is so aligned to the values and the life that you've lived. From what you've seen outside of Timpson, are you optimistic or pessimistic about the future?
How are you?

**James Timpson** (0:58)
Amazing.

**Jake** (0:59)
Great. Well, we're looking forward to this conversation, because I think if you asked every leader in this room whether they trust the people around them, they would most likely say that, in fact, we can do that. Let's start with a show of hands. Put your hands up if you believe that you trust the people in your organization.
I'd say that's 99%. Do you believe that it's 99%?

**James Timpson** (1:19)
Not really, no.
Why? Because the reason why organizations have lots of overhead and lots of structure and lots of compliance is because we don't trust people or we can't trust people as much as we'd like to. And the nature of organizations is they have a lot of people checking.

**Jake** (1:38)
So when it comes to trust, what does high performance look like for you?

**James Timpson** (1:44)
For me, it's about trusting people. It's about having a culture where trust is the core element of how you operate. And that means that you recruit people who are fantastic and you trust them to get on with it and decide what they think is best. Because if you run the organization to stop the 5% of the problem people doing what they do as bad actors, then the 95% of the people who are fantastic get tired of the same brush and they're just restricted from being free and deciding how they should do things better.

**Jake** (2:18)
And what happens if you restrict that freedom? Why is it so important?

**James Timpson** (2:21)
So if you restrict that freedom, what happens? One is you build up a lot of cost in the organization because you need all these people checking and checking and checking. And then the second thing is you stop innovation. You stop people being able to make it up as they go along.
Let me give you a small example. If you go into one of the Timpson shops and you ask for a certain key or a certain shoe to be repaired, and you say, well, I haven't got the money for that, or that's too much, or can you get me a different color? The answer is always just yes. So we'll do deals, we'll order special items, we'll do things that lose us money.
There's no rules about how that works, but just trust people to give great service, and then you perform better. So it's a combination of basically, trusting people is more fun, and you end up making more money. So to me, those are two good reasons.

**Damian** (3:12)
Can you give us an example, James, as well as that idea where your staff are free to barter and negotiate, of something that happens in the Timpson shop that would terrify most head offices?

**James Timpson** (3:22)
Okay, first, we don't have staff, we have colleagues, because we don't like the word staff. It's a bit like, sort of nails down a chalkboard for us. We don't believe anybody's more important than anybody else. That's why everyone's a colleague. Let me give you some examples. Stock, so most retail businesses have huge computer SAP systems, deciding what stock should be in which shop on which day, and have all these projections and so on. What we have is the colleague in the shop decides what they want. And if they get it wrong, they sort it out. So they literally walk around and say, I'll have 20 of those, 30 of those, I won't bother with any of those. And they learn what is the right stock for their shop. That's one example. Another is pricing.