It takes a major change in corporate culture to move from old style industrial relations to a more flexible cooperative workplace. Part of that shift involves recognising the different requirements of individuals in the workforce, especially women. Upending the rigid corporate hierarchy has seen industry supplier Konica Minolta welcome more women into key positions.
Much of the new dynamics in Konica Minolta in Australia has to do with the appointment of Dr David Cooke as the first non-Japanese managing director of the local operations. As he made plain when he stepped up to the role last year there was always going to be a cultural shift during his watch.
“I’m an Australian so I’ll do it the Australian way,” he said at the time. “I think that it’s inevitable when you switch from a Japanese management structure to an Australian seasoned management role. We will be a little more focused on staff, with a much more Western approach.”
This changed philosophy has had an impact on many parts of the technology supply enterprise but can be seen most clearly in the increase in the number and responsibilities of women in the organisation.
A more welcoming place
- A new look for Konica Minolta’s executive suite: (left to right) Gail Nakkash, Anne Gregory, Suzie Brett, Shannon Cunneen and Anne Phibbs.
One notable example is Suzie Brett, legal director and company secretary with a seat on the board, who has had her mandate expanded. Her main role is to give independent, impartial recommendations to the company. Under Cooke she is also working to design new risk and compliance frameworks that will put the company in a more robust legal position, supporting its evolution into IT supply and management. The frameworks she has designed outline and support best practice and she hopes they will act as a model for the company’s other subsidiaries outside Australia.
Brett maintains that David Cooke has been influential in making Konica Minolta a more welcoming place to work, particularly for women, favouring a flatter management structure and encouraging a more collaborative style of working. The changes have also helped women and other staff to work remotely or part time and juggle family commitments.
In terms of her own role, Brett credits a willingness to respect the limits on her availability, making her results more important than time spent on the job. From the moment she joined the company, Brett says she has found senior management at Konica Minolta willing to listen to new information and take the time to fully consider recommendations for change.
Significant changes
Another move favouring gender equality and enlightened work practices is the elevation of the legal, risk and compliance functions, allowing those responsible to report directly into the managing director. A key appointment in this regard has been Anne Phibbs who sits in a new role overseeing client services.
Recently promoted to the role she is responsible for customer administration, bids and implementations, analysis and reporting, and warehouse and distribution. While sales departments across the technology space are traditionally male preserves, Phibbs recently became the first woman to be appointed to Konica Minolta Australia’s senior management committee. She cites the company’s cultural principals and flexible business approach – big enough to deliver, yet small enough to care - as being the key point of difference, stating that David Cooke’s vision of an organisation that cares is delivering significant transformational change.
Phibbs has been with the company for eight years now and has notched up some notable wins in that time. Most recently in her role as head of government and education sales, she was integral in winning and implementing a number of major contracts, including the Department of Defence and the Department of Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) in Victoria.
Since being appointed as primary supplier of multi-function devices to the Department of Defence in 2007, Konica Minolta has installed approximately 5,000 devices and the contract was subsequently extended under the Commonwealth Government’s whole of government arrangement for major office machines. Over 1,000 devices were also installed into primary schools across Victoria as part of a DEECD project. Last year, Konica Minolta installed new multi-function devices into every Commonwealth electorate office around the country.
Quotas are not the answer
Another high profile woman in the Konica Minolta corporate structure is Gail Nakkash who recently joined in a client service role, leading both pre-sales development and project management around delivery and Optimised Print Services (OPS) implementation. A senior professional with over 15 years’ leadership in B2B managed services, her current role supports the company’s ongoing realignment.
Coming from a varied background that started out in advertising before moving to the supplier side in the graphic arts and printing industries, Nakkash has focused on sales and client management. She is now concerned with building up a number of teams and divisions in industries that were changing rapidly – a double challenge in terms of people management.
Nakkash says she enjoys having to think on her feet in times of industry transformation and says she has never stopped learning. People management is one of the greatest rewards, and at times, challenges, and she is regarded as an inspirational leader of others. She prefers to mentor executives unofficially within her teams and has noticed the benefits of having gender-balanced teams first hand, something the HR industry is now proving statistically. However she is yet to be convinced that setting up gender-based quotas is the way to bring this balance about, preferring instead to promote people on merit.
Rising through the ranks
Working her way up through the ranks has proved very effective for another of David Cooke’s female executives. Shannon Cunneen has been state operations manager in NSW for a year and a half. Over the past eight years, she has risen through the ranks in customer service and then as team leader in a role that supports the dealer network.
Although men mostly dominate that space, women in roles such as these are increasing in number under the new regime in Konica Minolta. The current breakdown is 60:40 female executives, which is a far cry from the 0.14 per cent average reported in Japan.
Cunneen credits one of her previous managers as giving her the courage to fulfil her ambitions and spurring her on to grow, learn and realise her dreams. She now manages nine people, half of whom are women, and likes to think that she is a mentor to the whole team. She recently completed a frontline management program and is also now in a leadership development program.
Strong leadership makes a difference
Getting across the full range of products and services offered by Konica Minolta is a challenge for someone coming into the industry from another sphere. In Anne Gregory’ s role as customer administration manager she oversees the order process and customer contracts for the whole of Australia. Heading up a team of 35, sub-divided into different client-centric teams such as government, education and commercial accounts, her major challenge is responding to the diversity of Konica Minolta’s client base.
With a degree in operational research and management, Gregory spent 14 years with a major diesel engine manufacturer in the UK, working in every area of the business from finance to sales and logistics. She then worked for Nokia, managing logistics and order management at a time when the business was undergoing a critical transition from selling products to offering software solutions for networks. As a business process expert, she found that understanding every element of the business, from supplier side to client side, is invaluable in being able to translate inputs into outputs.
In her two and a half years with Konica Minolta, Gregory has come to recognise that the company is in a similarly critical transition and thinks that strong leadership will make the difference as it moves from product provider to service-provider. This is her first experience of the print industry but she says that the company is similar to the majority of technology firms in having only a few women at senior level. It stands out, however, in its approach of positively promoting the right women according to their capabilities rather than gender.
It is an approach that sets an example for the rest of the industry as it undertakes the sometimes painful transition from a manufacturing base to a more service-centric focus. In that regard, companies such as Konica Minolta are leading the way in helping to foster the workplace of the future.