Leadership Excellence: A Profile on Charlie MacLean, President at ASL Print FX
Leaders play a crucial role in setting the tone for the team. At Driven By… Co. we are focused on building more motivated and engaged teams, so we set out to find Leaders who are setting a great example.
We interviewed Charlie MacLean, the President of ASL Print FX, a Label and Packaging Company located in Vaughan, Ontario.
ASL works with brand owners, project managers, designers and agencies to help them reach out to their customers and help turn shoppers into buyers through printed packaging, offering capabilities including foils, silkscreens, raised textures, scratch ‘n reveal, variable data, laminations and effect varnishes.
Charlie MacLean has served as served as President for over 5 years and has made a significant impact on the team. Here’s what we learned.
What does leadership mean to you?
A leader can be anyone, from the head of an organization, to a manager to someone who’s colleagues view them as a leader amongst the group. I think leadership is getting a group of people, likely a diverse group of people from different backgrounds, to align on a collective goal and be willing to work together towards that goal. As a leader, once you get that group together rowing in the same direction it’s trying to remove any any barriers that might be in their way and trying to support them. Issues are going to come up along the journey and I think it’s the leaders job to get in there, get ahead of those and be the first one to tackle that for the group. It’s not just the person at the top of an organization, there are many leaders throughout any group or company.
What are key characteristics that you think every leader should have?
I think you should have a bunch in your toolbox as a leader. There’s a number of attributes that you’re gonna need to have and develop. Not everybody is going to have them going into a leadership role, so you have to develop them. A thirst for learning and development would be one, however the ones I typically point to are Empathy and Great Communication Skills.
With empathy, you need an individual who truly cares about the needs of others and the concerns of employees. Showing empathy as a leader is what builds a supportive culture, and you need that to be successful in the long run.
Just as important is communication. You need to be able to convey ideas and provide guidance in a way that different people with different personalities will be able to understand and interpret in the way you want them to interpret it.
It is also about making employees feel like they have a voice and that they can communicate with you. I always say, “Nobody knows our customers better than our sales team and our customer service team. Nobody knows our equipment (our presses) better than our operators who work with them everyday, so we rely on everyone to feel like they have a voice.”
“I learned pretty early on that there is EQ and there is IQ. You’re born with IQ, but with EQ, it’s a muscle.”
Interpersonal skills, empathy, communication, are not things where you can just pass the course and get your diploma. They are things you have to continually work on, and those skills can get rusty if you don’t do that. Conversely, those muscles can get a lot bigger if you spend the time working on them.
This was something that one of my mentors told me early on, and I have really seen the truth in that message.
What would you say was your greatest challenge in a leadership role?
For me, what comes to mind is time management. It is so critical that you spend time on the priorities that you have set as an organization. It is so easy to get sucked into firefighting all day long and to take your eye off the ball in terms of the pursuit of the larger goals.
More importantly, on the people side of things,
“you want to give the bulk of your support to the people who are having a positive impact in your organization, your A players.”
It is so easy to get sucked into the pattern of trying to fix or manage through toxic employees, and that is not where your time is best spent. When you do that, you’re neglecting the people that are making a real difference in your organization.
Make sure you are spending time in the areas that matter. It is a simple theory, but it isn’t easy, and it certainly something you need to stay on top of.
Do you believe that leadership impacts the culture of the organization?
A culture of inclusivity, one that empowers employees, is incredibly important to the path forward in a company’s success. For us, it starts with employee wellbeing and the team.
“It’s not a magic formula, but if we have an employee-first culture all the way down from leadership to every employee, that usually results in happy customers.”
It starts with leadership, but not just at the top, through management and all the leadership positions in our organization.
Do you consider workplace culture to be important to the success of the business?
I almost just feel like saying, “absolutely yes,” and ending it there, but culture is truly everything. A great culture is one that everyone contributes to, because you can feel it. You don’t need to be there a long time to feel it, whether it is amazing or whether it’s not.
We talk a lot about talented employees, and if you want the best, you better create a culture that jives with them, that makes them want to stay, and one that they feel that they can impact.
One of my first career jobs coming out of University was working with Coca-Cola, and I remember walking in the first day, excited but not really knowing what to expect, but almost immediately, the passion of the people in the building, hit me so hard. I said wow…. these people really are excited about this soft drink. Everybody was living and breathing a culture of positivity around promoting the brand, working as a team and selling it together. Prior to that, I had been in work environments, where people were just there to do the work. This (Coca-Cola) was really a place where people cared. Culture, one way or the other, can be very infectious. To me, the message was (at Coca-Cola), you’re either in or you’re out, right away. You’re either going to be on board and find your passion for this and work with the team, or you’ll be left behind.
If I had walked in and everybody was disgruntled and unhappy about the brand and didn’t really care, I probably would have said, well that’s just the way things work around here.
“It’s the contagiousness of it all [culture], you can catch the fever for it, or catch the negativity.”
As a leader, what are your strategies for engaging/motivating your employees?
I think it goes back to communication. It’s opening up with them, showing them that you care about them, showing them vulnerability - if that’s appropriate. By communicating with them you also have better insight to how you can put them into positions or on teams where their skill sets can really flourish, and where they’re doing the work that they want to be doing. That two-way communication is a great way to understand people and to get them engaged in what you want to do.
How important do you think it is to help your employees develop their skills?
It’s pretty much a non-negotiable for any competent organization. You develop your people and everybody wins. It is for the development of the employee and also the long-term health of the organization. There are so many reasons as to why developing your employees is a great thing. It is necessary for: employee engagement-which leads to productivity, employee satisfaction, talent retention, the list goes on.
You don’t just bring somebody in the door and say, I hope you have the skills to do your job, you say, let me help develop the skills for your job now and maybe where you want to go with your career. That’s how you’re going to get the best people coming into your organization and wanting to stay.
We have a lot of long-standing employees, 20, 25, 30 and even a couple 35 year employees and it’s so wonderful to have those long standing traditions and people in here. New employees are able to come in, are able to learn about them and add to the culture. We’ve got a great thing going, especially because it is a challenging marketplace right now, and employees certainly have a lot of power and a lot of choice to work where they want to work, so we work very hard to make this an appealing place.
What advice would you give to those who are new to leadership positions?
I will give the same advice that a few of the people I look up to and mentors I had gave me when I stepped into leadership positions, which was to seek out support. Seek out help, seek out advice from other leaders. Join a group or a network of professionals or industry peers who are facing similar challenges that you are, that you can bounce ideas off of. Or a mentor that can guide you through difficult decisions. Also, dive into leadership books and online resources that may interest you.
You’re going to be presented with a wide range of challenges as a leader and having the advice, the insight, and the support of people who have been there or who have seen some form of the opportunity or the challenge that you have in front of you in their career, will really help you develop into a strong leader. So don’t do it on your own! So many people are willing to help, all you have to do is ask. I have been fortunate in my career to have people who have come forward to help me and have been very willing when I’ve asked them for help. Nobody has all the answers, so we gotta lean on each other.
What has been the most rewarding part of your leadership experience?
It is tough, because sometimes, the losses stand out more than the wins, however I just had one this morning. On a team, you’ve got so many diverse backgrounds and personalities in people. Issues are going to pop up. There will be moments where 2 individuals don’t see eye-to-eye. That can really slow things down for an organization - if two people aren’t willing to work together, just from a morale standpoint, or maybe productivity, either way, it is not ideal.
When you can find ways to bring two people who are not working together, closer together, there’s an incredibly satisfying feeling about that. I’ve had a couple of those instances and it has felt great.
I don’t manage people’s relationships. I can’t tell you to like another person, but I can hopefully create an environment where you see a path to a better way in dealing with a colleague. People sometimes say we’re family at our company, and truthfully we’re not, because family, I assume, is much more important than work is. But I still want them to enjoy coming to work and enjoy the people we’re here with. The goal is to accomplish our objectives, every day, every week, every month, so that we can go home and spend time with the people that we are earning a living for and that we really want to be with. The best way to do that is to really work well with the people that you’re with during the day.
