The Fail File: with Jason Paris of One NZ

Each fortnight, Victoria Carter speaks to a prominent figure about failure and disappointment – and what they learned. Today, her guest is One NZ's chief executive, Jason Paris.

I've had a lot of disappointment in my life – much of it my own doing, but I believe things happen to you for a reason and it’s a chance for you to get better and improve.

I’m innately positive – my wife would say annoyingly so, at times – so I always try to post-rationalise why failure is a good thing, but it never feels nice at the time. 

I’ve definitely been the most disappointed on the rare occasion that I've had to let someone from my team go for poor performance. It’s a failure on my part. Did I hire the wrong person, did I not put the right support around them? 

My biggest work-on – and no one enjoys having these conversations – has been having conversations about poor performance earlier. 

Sometimes I used to avoid having these conversations because I cared about my teammates and didn’t want to hurt their feelings. 

I now know that if you care about their personal and professional success, then telling someone something they need to know about their performance is the way that you show you care. 

It doesn’t have to be too confrontational, maybe, “Here’s my observation on how things are going, how you are performing, what do you think?” 

My most embarrassing moment was, before children, walking into a hotel lobby naked to get my room key! 

I’m still mortified when I think about it. 

I’d had a big day at the Wellington Sevens – yes, I’d been drinking! I was staying on Courtney Place. I got McDonald's on my way back to the room to soak up some of the drink. I took my clothes off to eat and was watching TV.  

Then I decided the last thing I wanted was to wake up and have the stale smell of McDonalds in my room, so I opened my door to see if there was a rubbish bin handy. It was 3 or 4am. 

I still remember this vividly. I saw a cupboard and took three steps towards it when I heard a click – my room door had shut behind me. I got in the lift, I had the McDonald's bag in front of me and, as the lift door opened at the ground floor, a voice at reception called, “What room?” – so I guess I wasn’t the first or last to do this!

Professionally, my most embarrassing moment was my first marketing job at McDonald's. We had to reprint 1.2 million paper tray mats because we didn’t have the rights to one of the images. The agency gave us a range, I'd picked the ones I wanted, and no one thought to check. Good lesson there! 

What do I know?  I went to a session, a decade or so ago, where Steve Hansen was the guest speaker. He was explaining how better people make better All Blacks. His words stuck with me when he said, “The mirror never lies”. 

He was saying you can say whatever you want to others, but you can’t lie to yourself. I always want to be able to look in the mirror and see a kind, fair, good person who always tried their best, looking back.

What do I know? Part 2:  I'm a bit worried about how things are playing out in the world and in New Zealand at the moment. There's a level of division, anger, self-focus and negativity that's concerning me. 

I know it’s a small thing, but I’ve been noticing a deterioration in basic manners for some time now and it’s getting worse, for example, fewer people opening doors for others, giving up their seat, saying please and thank you, calling to check in. 

It’s an odd correlation, but I wonder whether lack of manners is an early warning signal for society that our values of what's right and wrong are being eroded, and that there's less care and respect for others. 

However, I do know that New Zealand is still the greatest country on the planet to live and work in, and New Zealanders really want to get back to our most positive, innovative, world-beating, humble and caring selves. 

That’s our opportunity. The beauty of New Zealand is that we're small enough that we can wrap our arms around everyone and make a difference at real scale across the entire country – whether it’s health, education, housing or the environment – if we really want to.

My kids taught me ... the most valuable asset we have is time, so make the most of it. Time flies so fast and your kids grow up so quickly. The other aspect of time is that often your most generous gift is your presence and focus – not something you've bought. 

When a crisis happens ... I’m an annoyingly positive person. I genuinely think there’s an opportunity to grow, adapt and win when bad stuff happens. I hardly ever freak out. A couple of times a year, we role play major risks as an exec that we may need to navigate through in the future, like a natural disaster or a data breach. 

These are massive opportunities to understand more about how you mitigate the risk or quickly restore services, but also the business opportunities that these would create, too, such as creating future-proofed connectivity, helping customers with data or privacy threats. 

I do take bad news very personally, though. I feel dreadful when I let people and customers down, and I still beat myself up for mistakes I made more than 35 years ago. I have an immense sense of personal responsibility at home and at work, and it can be lonely as a CEO at times, even if you’ve got a really supportive board and team.  

When you’re removed from the situation, it’s often much easier to have clarity and give advice, so whenever I’m under pressure, one of the techniques I try to use is to lift up, step back and reflect, even if it’s just for a few minutes.

The last piece of good advice I was given was ... “Don’t 'die’ at 60 but not be buried until you’re 80.” It’s a riff on Benjamin Franklin’s quote, “Don’t die at 25 but be buried at 75.”  

What you don’t use you lose, so keep learning, surround yourself with people who have big ideas, take risks and give things a go. My aim is to be like this – even when I’m 80!