BCBusiness

BCBUSINESS.CA NOVEMBER 2017 BCBUSINESS 43 LYNDON: What three things would you tell a young person who aspires to become a CEO? Get that title out of your head. Don't be a title chaser. Earned authority is the most important thing, not title authority or a nameplate. Make sure you matter. Make sure people care that you're there. Be inclusive and collaborative, and know that the team is going to help elevate you more than they're going to help suffocate you. The team's going to lift you up, not put you down. 3 1 2 Lyndon, who reckons the Herschel crew would be friends even if they didn't work together, regards his employees as family, too. With that in mind, the com- pany gathers its local and international sta-, along with its distributors, in Vancouver a couple of times a year for product launches. "We're very transparent, especially within these walls, about how business is going and how we can get better," he says. As a leader, Jamie adapts to the situation. For example, he says, he talks di-erently to a designer than to a product manager. His overall style? "I'm hands-on. I spend prob- ably 10 per cent of my day in my o‡ce in front of my computer, and 90 per cent is walking from section to section." But having made his expectations clear, he lets people own their roles: "I think they have more owner- ship of the brand because they have that freedom to run their section." To that end, Herschel began hiring department leads early on, Lyndon explains. "Rather than allow- ing people to graduate into a position, we went to the top Œrst and also allowed those people to hire their own teams." Herschel is a brand that listens—and keeps an open mind about how it can improve, he adds. "We've had ridiculous success," Lyndon says. "And it certainly has not been from a couple guys' idea. It's been from a whole bunch of people buying into that we can do this di-erently and better and smarter." Lyndon calls his leader- ship style inclusive. "We sur- round ourselves with people who are exceptionally good at their jobs," he says. "I would describe myself as a proud generalist, somebody who likes to have a light touch on everything but allows the people around me to get the job done and celebrate their own wins." He also strives to matter as a leader. His test: if you put the team behind a one-way glass and asked them, would they care if he showed up at work tomorrow? "My goal personally is to make sure I matter to the business," Lyndon says. "Because if I don't, then I think should probably just go." Jamie, who says his parents gave him a lot of conŒdence, always knew what his goals were when he launched his Œrst business—a sales agency in 2003—and worked in previous roles. At Herschel, he aims to steer managers in the same direc- tion: "You want to lead with conŒdence, but more than anything, you want to know what you're trying to achieve before you get into anything." Although Lyndon says he always had a knack for clearly deŒning that outcome, he used to be more stubborn about how to get there. He now knows there can be many paths to the same result. Something Lyndon isn't very good at: being comfortable in the face of success. "I Œnd comfort is, as a brand, a sign of weakness, and potentially an opportu- nity for people to come and smash you over," he explains. "I like getting on my toes a lot more than I like digging in my heels, and so I think that attitude is probably a little contagious." How do you lead a com- pany in an industry where tastes can change overnight? For Jamie, it means strik- ing a balance between the commercial—products that customers keep coming back to—and the progressive. "We're big on core items here, but [we] also have enough where we're push- ing the market in an exciting way." To make that happen, Jamie pushes his designers and creatives. "I'm going to call a spade a spade," he warns. "I'm going to tell you if I think something is ter- rible, and I'm also going to tell you if something is great." If there's one thing that gets Lyndon excited about the future, it's Herschel's continued growth. That expansion doesn't just equal more revenue to invest in new systems; it also lets him and Jamie hire more collabo- rators so they can strengthen the brand. "It's an overused quote around here," Lyndon says, "but the windshield for us is a hell of a lot bigger than the rear-view mirror." —N.R. LYNDON CORMACK Are you a born leader, or did you learn to lead? If there's a whiteboard in front of me, I like to have the pen in my hand, and if there's a microphone around, I don't mind it near me. Throughout my life I've had a natu- ral gift of the gab, [and] I don't have a lot of nerves when speaking to people. Whether it's an individual or a large group, those nerves got shot long ago. And so I think maybe there's a bit of a natural ability to crowd people together and speak and articulate in a way that others can't. What's a common myth or misconception about leadership? There's things about culture and creating culture. I think culture creates itself. If you allow people to be themselves, they're going to naturally perform better.

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