GREG ROWE
Spell out your expectations and don’t interfere too much, the Rowe Group managing director tells Marissa Lague.
Biggest or best career break?
I graduated and practised as an architect but in the early 1980s I added town planning to my qualifications, a pretty important career change. Going into private practice was also a real milestone and the final part was establishing my own practice, Greg Rowe and Associates, in 1991.
Describe your leadership or management style.
I don’t interfere too much. I know I have ultimate responsibility for what the practice does but I’m pretty keen to empower people. I’d rather people explore their own boundaries and tackle a problem in their own way because my role is mostly to provide oversight and guidance. I’m the oldest in the office, I have the most experience and I’m supposed to contribute but I don’t want to drive it every day down to the detail. I’m careful not to cast anyone off without any guidance. We have a great retention rate and more than half the staff are 10-year veterans. They anticipate and work through problems and only come to me for final ratification. It works a treat, it really does.
Most memorable board or executive moment?
The decision to change the branding from Greg Rowe and Associates to the Rowe Group in early 2012. We wanted to modernise because the brand was 20 years old. We had been labelled as purely a town planning practice and were concerned the other things we were doing — design and delivery — were getting lost.
Best way to improve workplace productivity?
Productivity is tightly wound-up in leadership style. I think you can enhance and improve productivity if you manage well. Let staff know what it is that you expect from them, what you want them to produce and then they work their effort around that. Don’t leave them with any uncertainty as to what the expectations are. Once you set that in train and you couple that with our management style I think there’s no doubt that productivity increases and people will do things more quickly and efficiently.
Do you use social media? If so, how?
The short answer is not very much. I use Google and occasionally LinkedIn but I’m not a big fan and certainly don’t use it on a day-to-day basis. I use it for practical purposes to assess who I’m dealing with.
What do you do in your spare time?
There’s not a lot of it but I spend time with my family at home every chance I get. I like to travel and if I can get on a plane twice a year and go overseas I’m pretty happy. I like to buy and build buildings and I like to renovate residential and commercial buildings. It’s interesting to see if you can make something out of a building and not knock it down. It’s a perverted hobby that somehow piques my interest and training, and if it can be a good commercial outcome, I’m happy with that, too.
Best Australian holiday location?
Melbourne. The other destination I really like in Australia is Cocos Islands. The lagoons are beautiful, the reefs are beautiful, the fishing is great and you can forget about the world for a week.
Last book you read?
Bryce Courtenay’s last book before he died, Jack of Diamonds.
What are the challenges for developing Perth?
They are not greatly different from other cities and there’s no contest on what the problems are — public transport, urban sprawl, residential density, government processes. The biggest issue facing us is to identify and implement the most efficient and acceptable solutions. Right at the moment the culture seems to be that we all do a little bit but we won’t cross over some invisible barrier and work together. Government and private business can solve these problems. We have lots of clever people who could put those courses of action together and we sometimes lose sight of the fact that we are meant to be working co-operatively. Other countries work together to come up with a co-operative solution. We don’t have to invent anything, we just have to adapt into our context some really clever ideas.
What is the most important part of your role in the industry?
Our role is to help find those solutions. We do have an inherent role in what we do as a business. We have to come up with clever and innovative designs, we have to translate a client’s objectives into outcomes they are happy with — that’s our technical job. But we also have a responsibility to plan and facilitate change, and to make it happen in a timely, efficient, compatible and acceptable way. In reality, we have got to deliver the practical implementation. We are brokers of change.
