William Shakespeare famously wrote, “The quality of mercy is not strained; it droppeth as the gentle rain from heaven.” If you were to ask Newfold Digital CEO Sharon Rowlands for her version of the quote, she might replace ‘The quality of mercy’ with ‘A focus on the customer,’ something she believes should, like a gentle rain, saturate any successful organization.
It is that deeply ingrained customer focus that Rowlands believes has helped Newfold Digital become one of the three largest web presence companies in the world. And it is her team’s performance against that standard of total customer-centricity that she uses as her measuring stick.
“We judge ourselves by what [our customers] say about us,” says Rowlands. “The team has done a tremendous job driving momentum around our reputation, and I look at that constantly.”
The work the Newfold Digital team has done to improve the reputation of their many brands has been driven by a bias to action. Rowlands wants her team to feel empowered to make the right decisions for their customers quickly, without fighting through red tape. But knowing what you should do for the customer is different than taking a decision and acting on it.
“Execution is a big differentiator in business because you can have these really big companies with incredible resources, but if they don’t apply those resources to the right things and get stuff done, it’s of no use and of no value,” says Rowlands.
As CEO of Newfold Digital, Rowlands’ decisiveness has been an X factor enabling the company to move with agility, respond promptly to customer feedback and zig where the competition zags. Of course, she didn’t develop that quality overnight.
Leading by Example
Sharon Rowlands was born and raised in England, as part of a working-class family. She was the first person in her family to attend college, and, during her collegiate studies, became involved in student union politics and the university’s debate club. These experiences surfaced her innate talent for communication and potential for leadership. They also helped sharpen her capacity for the application of logic and rigor to large-scale problems.
After graduating, Rowlands taught at several schools, and simultaneously held various part-time jobs, including stints as a real estate agent, lifeguard and club bartender. Through her work, she found she had a knack for sales and, in the classroom, discovered her passion for storytelling. From there, she found her way into the business world and took to it rather naturally.
“I very quickly realized that I was good at business. I was a good leader (…) and realized that two of my key competencies were having a lot of common sense and being decisive,” Rowlands says.
These early experiences helped shape Rowlands’ leadership style, which may be characterized as being based on her aforementioned decisive qualities, effective communication and the ability to motivate diverse groups of employees and show empathy for them, along with a dose of good old-fashioned common sense.
Rowlands has learned that building a high-performing team requires not just the right people and the right talent, but also a source of inspiration. She leads by example to show her team members that hard work can make a significant difference both for them and the customers they serve.
Culture Before Strategy
If keeping both your customers and employees happy were easy, every company would be doing it. Developing a company culture that rewards employee performance while maintaining a customer focus as the guiding light for the business is a serious challenge, and one Rowlands knows she needs a strong team to overcome. Fortunately, under her leadership, Newfold Digital has risen to the occasion.
“I trust my team implicitly,” says Rowlands. “We’re partners in this together and we’re on a mission together and we also all have our own areas of expertise that we bring to the table.”
Rowlands has some strong numbers to back up her confidence in her team: over 90% of Newfold’s employees view the company highly favorably and would recommend it to others.
“When I looked at our scores, this was just so exciting,” says Rowlands. “On the axis of humanity and respect, we were 12 points above the benchmark; productivity, eight points above. I love this one – “speak my mind” was 12 points above the benchmark. That tells me that we’re doing the right things in terms of empowering and giving opportunities to our people.”
For Rowlands, Newfold Digital’s culture isn’t an afterthought; her vision of a customer-focused company that moves decisively in response to the needs of the people it serves is dependent on a company culture of mutual respect, empathy and the desire perform at a high level.
“Some famous person once said, ‘Culture eats strategy for breakfast’,” says Rowlands, a sentiment that has come to define her approach to developing Newfold Digital’s strong company culture.
That culture is the bedrock of the company’s every effort and the key to creating the customer-focused, action-biased business that serves millions of businesses worldwide today. It is Newfold Digital’s culture that offers team members the chance to grow their careers, bolster their skillsets and uncover, as Sharon Rowlands did, the innate talents that will drive both their personal and professional success.
By putting the customer first, Newfold Digital has created a wealth of opportunities for its team members, improved the reputation of its brands and paved the way for a bright future under Rowlands’ decisive leadership. When the customer is the culture, everything else falls gently into place.
