THE INTERVIEW
HAVING BEEN INSTRUMENTAL IN REGULATING THE TELECOMS INDUSTRY, ETAIN DOYLE NOW SPECIALISES IN LEADERSHIP DEVELOPMENT. HER ADVICE FOR OWNER-MANAGERS IS TO CONSISTENTLY TAKE A STEP BACK FROM THE NUTS AND BOLTS OF THEIR BUSINESS IN ORDER TO RE-CLARIFY THE DIRECTION THEY WANT TO GO IN. SORCHA CORCORAN REPORTS
Etain Doyle remembers sitting at her desk in what was going to be the Telecommunications Regulator’s offi ce in 1996, leaf- ing through the pages of the legislation and thinking: “I have to turn these pages into a living organisation that will deliver what is required. What do I need to do?” T e goal-setting process she went through then has stayed
with Doyle and is a key part of her ethos now as chair of Vistage Ireland, which specialises in executive leadership development. Having started in the US, Vistage in Ireland is dedicated to the enhancement of the performance of SMEs. “A peer group of CEOs meets each month and one of our
key phrases is: ‘It’s important to spend a little time on the business in order not to spend too much time in the busi- ness’,” Doyle says. “It’s terribly easy when you are going into a business every
day, dealing with the nuts and bolts and whatever crisis hap- pens, to have very little time for stepping back and asking: ‘What do I really need to focus on?’ and ‘Where is it we’re actually trying to go?’. If you know clearly where you’re going, you’ve a far better chance of succeeding.” When she was appointed director of telecommunications
DRIIVING MODE
IN
regulation, there had never been one before, so Doyle had a clean slate to work from. T ere are lessons to be learned from her experience for any type of company. “I set a series of goals to achieve the type of organisation
I wanted and the kind of outputs I wanted to have. I didn’t want a traditional hierarchy/civil service-type organisation. I felt this was inappropriate for a regulator’s offi ce,” she says. “At the time there were 17 grades among the civil service
staff that made up my initial group. I reduced these levels and turned the organisation into more of a consulting business. A lot of what the regulator did was project work, which needed diff erent sorts of skills, such as economists and analysts. “T e [telecommunications] legislation had been done quite
quickly and did provide for the possibility of recruiting ex- ternally, so that’s what I did. T e regulator became an award- winning organisation and I wanted to stay on that and make sure I didn’t spend all my time on minutia and people’s rank.” One of the things Doyle says she enjoyed about the regula-
tor’s job was the ability in some way to enable Irish businesses to do more and do diff erent things. “From the start I wanted to enable the telecoms industry
to develop. We started putting documents on everything we were doing on our website in 1997. Now it seems so obvious, but at the time the State was only beginning to do this. “My objective was to open up the market in as many ways as possible as quickly as possible and get rid of barriers to
18 OWNER MANAGER VOL 4 ISSUE 1 2011
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