Disappointment about being passed over for promotion gave Neil Randall, the resilience he needed to climb the ranks. He talks to Kath Hudson about the challenges he faced early in his career and the skills he learned from them

I joined a high-end health club business straight from university and did well in PT and duty management. I was doing a lot of fix-up projects: going into clubs that weren’t performing in PT and turning them around. However, it was the regional fitness manager roles that everyone wanted and when one came up I thought I would be a front runner, however, I didn’t get the job. Not only that, I didn’t get much feedback and felt the person appointed wasn’t performing as well as me.

I carried on doing my thing and before long another role came up. I thought I stood a good chance, but the same thing happened again.

Being a sportsperson I was equipped to deal with failure – I play cricket where it only takes one bad shot to be out – but I was left thinking why isn’t this happening for me? I always give everything I have – sometimes to my own detriment, as I make sacrifices in my personal life that I probably shouldn’t – so when I felt I wasn’t getting anywhere it was hard to take. It felt as though I wasn’t getting noticed and I wondered if that would ever change.

Leadership skills
At that point I had two options. I could get frustrated about the company not valuing me and walk away, or keep my head down and carry on doing what I was doing. I did the latter because I enjoyed the job. While it was difficult walking into regional meetings with everyone knowing I had been unsuccessful twice, I decided that to be a strong leader of others, you have to be a leader of yourself first, so put myself in that headspace and hoped it sent a strong message.

Shortly after I was invited to go on a leadership course, which was very intense. We were given the coordinates for a location and everyone had to follow a slightly different brief to get there. Then we were taken to Cheddar Gorge for potholing, before going to a Mountain Rescue Centre. For three days we were put through our paces and even woken in the middle of the night to be given tasks.

As a group, we made a bad job of one particular task and I was the only person to take responsibility. I encouraged the others to look at the learnings and what we could do differently with hindsight. Later on, I was pulled aside by the instructor and told they’d hadn’t seen anyone with that level of emotional intelligence and awareness before. Two weeks later, I was given my first club and that was the start of my GM and senior leadership career, having bypassed the regional manager stage.

Resilience and accountability
When I look back, I consider those as the defining points of my career and use the lessons a lot. The rejections were a small part of my overall career, but taught me resilience and accountability. In leadership you don’t always have things your own way. In business, as in sport, you can’t blame other people for your own performance. You have to be accountable. It’s better to speak up in a group and say “we could have done better here.”

Now we have these conversations in my boardrooms and executive rooms. I make it clear to all the members of my team that if something didn’t go according to plan that’s okay, but whatever we decide on in the room, we align on when we walk out. I try to manage all my stakeholders in that manner.

Learning accountability has been really useful in my role as CEO, because you end up being accountable for everything that happens in the company. If you are very openly accountable you get to the core of the problem quicker. I have every confidence in my business that people will tell me what’s going on because they know they’re not going to get pulled apart.

You have to give people that safe space to be open and honest without it resulting in pain. You can ask challenging questions, such as “what have you learned from this process?” and “do you need any help now from me in turning this around, or are you just informing me?” So you can get to the core of the problem more quickly and agree on a course of action. It’s not positive syndrome, it’s about keeping people with you and empowering them to make their own informed decisions.