Driving a High Performance Culture with E.On Next's Head of Digital, Abdul Khaled

Would you hire a “Chief Happiness Officer”? 🤔

Someone dedicated to looking after the happiness of your team?

Abdul Khaled is looking for one to join challenger brand, E.ON Next.

As the Head of Digital; Customer Experience and Digital Products, Abdul believes that to deliver the highest possible level of service and product for customers, and drive a customer centric experience, you have to start with your people 👥

In this week's episode of Marketing In The Madness, Abdul joins Katie Street to reveal his 5 key principles for driving a high performance culture.

From attracting rockstar talent, to recruiting top performers who challenge your current team, to driving ambition and diversity - this episode is jam-packed with advice on how to create a culture of excellence.

In this episode you’ll discover:

🚀How a shift towards customer-centric, digital-first strategies can catapult your business to new heights

👥Strategies for creating a culture that promotes continuous improvement and excellence

🖌Tactics for building trust within teams and fostering a psychologically safe environment for creative problem-solving

🔗Prioritising cultural fit and personal connections in the hiring process to build a cohesive team

💡Leadership skills for setting ambitious goals, leading by example and providing tactical guidance

Chapters
00:00 - Key principles for a high-performance culture
02:40 - Eon Next's culture ignites growth
03:46 - Eon Next UK challenger brand
06:10 - Challenges for customer-centric culture
10:37 - Talent deployment challenges and mistakes
13:26 - Kickass recruitment partner
15:52 - Building a like-minded culture
19:16 - Importance of gut-based recruitment process
23:44 - Test, disagree, and commit to a bar of excellence
24:59 - Trust rapport building, strategic and tactical
26:19 - Recruitment process, introduce your personality
30:14 - Focus on mindset, trust, and leadership for high performance
34:25 - Lead from the front, ever-evolving high performance
40:46 - Managing conflict; think, evaluate, respond
43:57 - Commitment to empowering women in the company


Episode highlights

00:08:23 "If you want to create great experiences, great products, or deliver great services, you have to be good at what you do. Customers demand excellence or they go somewhere else. So in order to deliver that excellence, you need to have a culture.” - Abdul Khaled

00:09:32 “I think sometimes high performance can get conflated sometimes with toxicity and high pressure environments and intensity, which are all red flags in a lot of organisations. But if you're not modelling it and presenting it in the right way, you can shy away from it, and then come across as not valuing high performance. And that's a disservice to your customers,” - Abdul Khaled

00:09:12 “I'll be talking about AI and new technologies that power all of this, or the marketing tactics and the innovations that they're deploying, but the reality is, if you don't have that high performance culture, none of the rest of it works. - Katie Street

00:19:26“You don't want an echo chamber of course, you don't want everyone thinking the same and moving the same, but they all know where they want to get to. And they can challenge each other along the way.” - 19:26 - Abdul Khaled

00:35:19 “If you want high performance, you've got to show high performance. And you've got to invest in high performance.”- Abdul Khaled

00:36:06 “Put yourself out there, roll your sleeves up, get involved, and show people what the level of excellence required is, by achieving it in everything that you do first and foremost.” - Abdul Khaled

00:44:04 “It's so important to set the vision, set the ambition, set the strategic direction, but then also show them how it can be done.” - Abdul Khaled

Links & references

Abdul Khaled
  / abdul-khaled-digital  

Katie Street
  / katiestreet  
  / streetmate  

Street Agency
https://street.agency/
  / street.agency  
  / streetagency