Encouraging Risk, Embracing Failure and Enforcing Accountability: How STG Logistics is Navigating the Future of Transportation
By Troy Tibbetts, Executive Vice President, Sales & Marketing
From hydrogen-powered planes to speed-of-light railways, people are constantly speculating about what the future of transportation looks like. It’s exciting to imagine the possibilities. But the truth of the matter is transportation’s future requires a more basic approach: hiring the right people with the right mindset for your organization, and creating an environment that allows them to take risks.
I believe the future of transportation starts with an organization’s culture and its people. Often, our biggest opportunities for advancement come not from our successes but from recognizing and embracing our failures. At STG, we learn as much from our shortcomings as we do our success, and we work hard to establish a culture that empowers our employees, allowing them to stumble when they’ve taken a risk and ensuring we come alongside with the resources and guidance to enhance our position or processes. It’s a critical component of our mindset – rejecting complacency and welcoming driven and growth-minded people to the organization who are capable of taking thoughtful risk to achieve our long-term growth goals.
The flip side of that is, of course, failure must be coupled with accountability – we are not in the business of missing the same pitch twice. It’s a balancing act. You want to ensure that you have the correct level of talent throughout the ranks of your organization, combined with cross-functional accountability and established metrics and goals to keep everyone in check. I constantly ask myself how we can better enable our colleague to focus on our customers and our long-term sustainable growth. Embrace failure and allow things to break but have the resources available and ready to make the necessary adjustments to learn from it for long-term success.
In addition to allowing opportunities for failure, we also encourage receiving and responding to feedback. Listening intently to colleagues and customers alike in an open way is one of the best ways to make sustainable progress. One of the keys when it comes to feedback is making sure you aren’t listening from a defensive position, and embracing the natural discomfort that can often accompany constructive feedback. Having an open mind to feedback – whether it’s from a colleague or a client, usually provides a different prospective which can create a pathway for growth. We have to remember that sustainable success and growth is made in increments. Its important to celebrate successes of all sizes and recognize long-term sustainable growth is achieved through tiny increments, not big leaps.
A growth mindset, along with a commitment to sustainable progress, has helped STG become a leading logistics company in North America. And while a series of strategic acquisitions and thoughtful integration has brought us to where we are today, I believe our people, and the culture we’ve worked to create, will shape not only the future of our organization, but the future of transportation, too.
