You simply can’t grow a business as rapidly and successfully as Cairn Homes has without building trust into its very foundations.
Cairn Homes, Ireland’s largest home builder, was established in 2014. In its first year it employed 20 people and recorded a turnover of €4 million. Last year it employed 500 people and turned €827 million, making it not just one of the biggest companies in its sector, but in the country.
It has been a phenomenal personal achievement for co-founder and chief executive Michael Stanley, who took the company public in 2015.
“It’s been a compound growth rate of around 80 per cent, which in growth terms is like a tech company but for actual hard products,” says Stanley. “And it couldn’t have happened unless the culture was right from day one.”
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He attributes a significant part of the business’s success to the way in which its people are supported to work. “We’ve always tried to make sure that our people are empowered to think like business owners and have very commercial mindsets,” he explains.
“If you are going to grow at that pace, you have to trust your people to make commercial decisions on the fly and to be brave enough and have the confidence and courage to do that. If you don’t you’ll get caught up with the classic growing pains of a business that becomes bureaucratic and in which decision making becomes more challenging and the business becomes hierarchical.”
Despite its size, Cairn Homes is determinedly flat in organisational terms.
“We are also quite devolved,” says Stanley. “We have a head office but 70 per cent of the team are working in our nearly 25 development sites all over Ireland. We give them a lot of autonomy to make decisions. It’s the only way we can operate. Each is almost like business units in that they are empowered to get on with things and to do that you’ve got to trust them.”
Recruitment is key and where possible he avoids hiring generalists. “It’s about looking for talent and real sectoral expertise, people who are really good at what they do,” he explains. “We employ surveyors, engineers, site foremen, project managers, people who are good at all sorts of disciplines. If you can find and attract that talent, with area expertise, their colleagues trust them. That creates an environment of autonomy and a clear understanding of who is responsible for what.”
‘It’s important for people to feel you’re accessible and that you listen to them, both the good and the bad'
But you can only build up a culture of trust if the people who are empowered to make decisions aren’t crucified for making the wrong ones.
“We try as much to learn from what we may not have done well.” That has always been its mindset, especially as there was, he says, “no playbook” for Cairn Homes to follow and no analogous role models to look to for guidance.
“So you’ve got to be prepared to ask yourself what you could do better. If you’re not prepared to question, to accept that you are still not perfect, that you have still lots to learn, you are never going to grow. And that goes for encouraging people to make decisions, knowing that they won’t always be the right decisions. If you don’t do it that way, then trust is meaningless.”
The culture of workplace trust helps the company to attract and retain staff, giving the company a competitive advantage. “If people are trusted and listened to they believe they belong,” he says.
That comes from the top down, and there being no cognitive dissonance between what senior leadership is saying and what staff are experiencing.
As a Great Place to Work Most Trusted Leader, that is something he feels strongly about. “It’s important for people to feel you’re accessible and that you listen to them, both the good and the bad,” says Stanley. “It’s a very open environment here. As CEO, I don’t go in for formality and my door is always open.
“In a fast-growing business you can’t afford to be too formal, you’ve got to focus on productivity and quality instead.”
