Lessons in leadership

He may be one of Ireland’s most successful entrepreneurs, having developed Aer Arann from a small island-hopping service with a €250,000 turnover into one of Europe’s fastest growing airlines – it has a reported one million passengers a year, 700 flights a week, and annual revenues of over €100m – but Padraig O’Ceidigh still counts his 12 years as a maths teacher as the best of his career to date.

“Of all the things I’ve done in my life, teaching was the one that I most enjoyed – by a long shot!” he says. And he’s done plenty: after qualifying and working for a period as an accountant, he switched to teaching, a profession he eventually left because he felt he was in a ‘straightjacket scenario’, constrained from providing resources and methodologies he believed best facilitated learning.

He moved on to law, running his own solicitor’s practice before stumbling on a half-built runway in the wilds of Connemara during a Christmas Day walk and being so intrigued by the vision of what was being done there that he ended up buying Aer Arann in 1994.

Since then, he’s built up a diverse portfolio of businesses, including the Irish-language newspaper, Foinse; an outsourcing operation (Fuinseog); a printing company (Clódóirí Lurgan); and Galway Aviation Services. Along the way, he was named the Ernst & Young Irish Entrepreneur of the Year in 2002 and Galway Person of the Year in 2004, while Aer Arann won the European Bronze Airline of the Year Award, also in 2004.

Outside of his business interests, he is currently executive chair in residence in the MBA programme at National University of Ireland, Galway; a director of Fáilte Ireland; a business mentor; and an accomplished and very inspirational speaker. Notably, he was one of three speakers in the Presidential Lecture Series in Áras an Uachtaráin at the beginning of this year. 

He believes it’s hugely important to find a path that’s personally fulfilling. “When I did accountancy I did not have a passion for it,” he explains. “So I decided: whatever you’re going to do in life, do something that you have a real passion for. Passion is something that does not come automatically with everything you do. Passion comes when you find something that means an awful lot to you.”

And he still feels passionately about teaching, an interest that informs his distinctly facilitative approach to leadership. “A leader helps develop the team and helps create the space so that people can develop their own leadership skills,” he explains. “So you create the space for other leaders to actually develop and grow. The essence of leadership is not control; it’s a creation of space and allowing people to control their own growth.”

It was the approach he adopted when he first got into the airline business, an area he knew little or nothing about. “I thought: Padraig, it’s a little bit like teaching – if you can manage the people, they’ll manage the business,” he explains. “So, that’s what I did. I created the environment so that the management and the people there could go and develop leadership skills. And I gave them space and autonomy to develop the airline under very broad-spec leadership from my perspective. I gave them space and opportunity to develop themselves as individuals. And, as a result, they developed the business.”

He says he follows the same formula with his other operations, putting strong management teams in place so that he can move between the businesses as well as investigating other opportunities.

The success Aer Arann has enjoyed to date was never part of his initial vision, he says. “I just wanted to provide a safe, reliable and profitable service to the Aran Islands. That was the end game as far as I was concerned.”

As regards the future of the airline, his objective is simply to survive the current economic climate. “That’s as far as I’m looking and that’s what my management team is absolutely focused on,” he says. “It’s just to weather the tsunami that’s out there now. And we’re working really, really hard on that.

“We’re looking at just keeping going, providing the best possible service we can. Then, when the tide turns, hopefully we’ll be there, first of all, and secondly, hopefully we’ll be in a position to go and develop the market further and focus on the UK and mainland Europe, for example. I believe the market for an airline like us in the UK is significant, but now is not the time for us to go in there because what we have to do right now is just make sure we survive.”

The ability to weather difficult times will have a lot to do with company culture. “In order for people to say: ‘I’m going to follow the leader’, there’s got to be a huge amount of trust,” he says.

“That trust is something that’s built up over time. And part of that trust has got to do with the culture the leader builds up in the company.

“The leader is the most important person in creating and developing culture,” he says. “And the culture almost invariably has similar characteristics as the personality of the leader. Pick any company you want, and then pick the leader or CEO of that company and you’ll see that person’s characteristics in the company. Like Ryanair, for example. I’m not trying to make a story out of Ryanair – it doesn’t matter what company you pick, you will see similar types of characteristics.”

In order to weather difficult times, O’Ceidigh also believes it’s vital to distinguish between the functions and roles of leadership and management – things, he says, that are often confused.

“If you take Ireland Inc, for example, they’re talking about managing the economy, but they’re not talking about leading the

country,” he says. “You have to have both if you want to have a chance of success. Leadership without strong management is useless. Strong management without good leadership is equally useless. One will not succeed without the other, in my view, in recessionary times.”

As regards Ireland Inc in the future, he believes entrepreneurship will have an increasingly important role. “In my view, what we’re going to be dependent on is Irish people being creative and entrepreneurial and creating opportunities for themselves rather than them being created by outsiders for us. I think that’s a very exciting vision to have for our country, because for the first time in the history of the Irish people, we will be doing in Ireland what we have been exporting our people to do abroad. I’m enthused and excited by that opportunity and being part of it.”

He is concerned, however, about the levels of support people will be given to realise their entrepreneurial talents. “I really hope that policy makers, government and otherwise, will actually actively develop and pursue a strategy to firstly create, and secondly maintain entrepreneurs in Ireland.”

He believes policy makers need to involve existing entrepreneurs in shaping a strategy for entrepreneurship in the future, rather than civil servants or senior managers in large corporations. “They should get a team of eight to 12 entrepreneurs in Ireland to sit down and create a white paper for the Ireland of the future.

“It’s amazing how Ireland has created so many entrepreneurs given the environment we have in this country,” he continues. “I actually think Ireland is very anti-entrepreneur. It’s only beginning to turn that entrepreneurs are seen as people who can actually create employment and real wealth in Ireland. By contrast, they’ve been seen like this in the US for 250 years.

“We’ve got a lot of catching up to do. So, we’ve got to challenge our culture in this area. If there’s a positive culture towards it you’re going to have young people saying: ‘I want to be an entrepreneur, I want to stand on my own two feet, I want to be able to make a difference’. The culture needs to change and the educational system needs to change significantly.”

In O’Ceidigh’s opinion, entrepreneurs must be engaged in the academic process in order to teach entrepreneurship at second and third level. “At the moment, there are one or two chapters

relating to entrepreneurship in the business-studies course for Leaving Cert,” he points out. “But that stuff needs to be written by entrepreneurs and also, quite honestly, needs to be taught in some way or other by entrepreneurs.”

But are entrepreneurs not sufficiently busy without adding teaching to their workload? “Busy is a factor of what you put in order of importance. I’d know most serious entrepreneurs in Ireland well and all of them are really passionate about passing on the skills and experience they’ve learnt to other people.

“A number of us are already in that space and basically all it takes is to come up with a blueprint to develop an educational process of engagement and direction with second-level and third-level students. I believe it could be highly effective because in Ireland we’ve got fantastic academics, people who actually know their subject really well – and I’m talking about third level in particular – who are crying out to get businesspeople in. But there is no proper process for that. I’m doing all of that stuff voluntarily, but people should be paid for it. This is so important – it needs to be put on a proper professional level. Then it becomes ingrained in the whole educational process.

“I feel passionately about teaching and learning because that’s our future – that’s the future of our country. Education is the foundation of success in my view, because the more you know, the more you can do, and the more you can do better, the more effective you are and the greater the contribution you can make.”

This article first appeared in Owner Manager magazine.