Lion Nathan is proud of its Achievement Culture that focuses on marketplace success. Our people and our brands are critical to what we accomplish going forward.

Positive interaction between stakeholders has been the foundation of our culture for some time. It’s a way of working that focuses not just on striving to achieve great results but also on how these results are achieved. Basically, we look to accomplish sustainability through developing constructive relationships and through working with others. The people who can make this connection will be our future leaders.

We look for high levels of engagement through relationships based on understanding individuals and helping them reach their potential. That’s about offering them three things we know they value: the chance to be the best they can be; the ability to really make a difference; and the opportunity to have a great time doing it.

Our primary measure of engagement is through the “Hewitt Best Employers Engagement Study” which we have participated in for five years running. We are proud of our achievement level and have plans in place to continuously mprove our engagement levels throughout the business.

Our values remain fundamental to our approach to business. They were resoundingly supported and underpin where we’re going and are helping us engage even more strongly with our stakeholders.

It’s also really important that our people know where they stand. One of the key ways to create high levels of engagement is to provide the environment which allows this to occur. Our Achievement Culture Strategy is clearly understood by our leaders and our people and we track its progress through a biennial culture survey.

Our aspiration is to have our Constructive Styles at or above the 75th percentile with the Affiliative Style at least at the 50th percentile. We also aim to have the Aggressive/Defensive Styles below the 50th percentile and the Passive/Defensive Styles below the 25th percentile.

We use the Human Synergistics International Organisational Culture Inventory (OCI) which has been our key tracking tool since 1998. We have made steady progress over the years towards our aspirational goals and our most recent survey conducted in October 2004 indicated for the first time that our culture is primarily Constructive. Although there is still lots of scope for improvement, we are very proud of our achievements so far.

We believe the greatest opportunity to make further progress on our Culture Strategy is to significantly increase the focus of our organisation on the marketplace. Developing solid long-term relationships through behaving constructively with our stakeholders will go a long way to getting us there. A deep understanding of our consumers and our customers is critical, and that requires highly engaged people and great leaders.

Leader capability is critical to developing the right culture and to building high levels of engagement, and our ‘Competencies x Results’ model continues to form the basis of our Leadership Strategy. Our Sales Capability Programme, now in its fourth year, is building the capabilities of our sales people and we have also pplied the learnings from this programme to refresh our Marketing Capability Programme. This will be a core component of People & Brands going forward.

Sociability is a passionate business. It has to be. And that passion extends into our organisation and beyond it. Our key people focus is to grow and dynamise the culture that encourages people to really care about who works with us, who buys from us, and who drinks our beers, wines, spirits and RTDs.