Summer Q&A: Rory Glass, managing director at Lion

Rory Glass, boss at brewer Lion, is looking for diversity and flexibility from the company. Photo / Supplied

Rory Glass, managing director at Lion, explains how he started in business by coming through the ranks of a supermarket group.

What was your first job?

Outside of lots of part-time work as a kid, my first full-time job was as a management trainee at a supermarket group. This involved working for a set period in every department to learn the business from the bottom up.

What did you learn from it?

I learned the power of having an in-depth understanding of a business across many divisions. Without question, that breadth and depth of understanding makes you far more effective as you progress through an organisation. It is something we really encourage at Lion. While people are always ambitious for upward progression, often the best way forward is to broaden your base by moving across an organisation. It sets you up for success when you do get the more challenging roles. Increasingly, at Lion we are looking for people who are agile, fast learners and who can do any number of roles.

What was the best advice you got from your parents?

There is no doubt they gave me plenty of advice growing up (some of which I heeded and most of which I didn't) but I can't say one piece of advice really stands out. For me, it's more the culmination of all of the advice, but most importantly the values which they instilled in all of us kids. Honesty, trying your best and humour are all important to me and I think that comes more from what they did than what they said.

How will you relax over the summer break?

We will spend a bit of time around home catching up with family and friends and then we plan to head down to the bottom of the South Island where we will try to keep our 10-year-old daughter busy while relaxing ourselves.

What are the big challenges ahead for 2016 for your company?

We are fortunate to have a very high level of engagement from our people across our business. Keeping our culture strong is an active not a passive endeavour and allows us to deal with the many challenges all businesses face.

That's important because apart from the obvious consumer and category challenges, where we have a clear strategy in place, many other issues are less predictable and rely on having great people and the right culture.

Diversity and flexibility are also important to us as a business. If you go back a number of years we had a largely male and older demographic.

This year for the first time we have over 40 per cent females and over 25 per cent of our people are aged between 18-29. That means we are getting multiple and diverse perspectives which is great.

On the flexibility front, there is no doubt that people are looking for more flexibility in their lives. I believe it will be an increasingly important aspect of attracting and retaining talent.

We have aspirations to be a leader in both these areas and we still have a way to go. Always important is keeping customers at the heart of our business as well as adapting to the rapidly changing digital world.

And for the wider economy?

We are reasonably optimistic for New Zealand in the year to come even though the China slowdown, milk pricing and a potential drought could impact confidence and spending. Overall, there is still a lot to be positive about and at Lion we focus more on what we can control.

Personal or business highlight from 2015?

On the personal side it was definitely the Rugby World Cup win. We were fortunate to get to some of the games and while the win was impressive, equally impressive was the way in which the All Blacks won.

On the business front, our highlight was being named Champion New Zealand Brewery at the Brewers' Guild of New Zealand Beer Awards.

The award is typically won by the smaller craft breweries and I was incredibly happy for our world-class brewers to receive such great recognition for the fine work they do.