My First Week at Airtours: The Mystery of Who Killed Dolly the Sheep

People often assume making an impact in a new business means arriving with fresh ideas and immediately changing everything. In my experience, the opposite is usually true: the people who make the biggest difference spend a little time understanding why things work the way they do before deciding which parts genuinely need changing.

Airtours was still based in Helmshore, a small Lancashire village surrounded by hills and farmland. Most of the workforce had been recruited locally, and the company felt more like a large family than a corporate head office. The building itself reflected Airtours’ rapid growth: corridors seemed to appear from nowhere, offices had been added wherever space could be found, and nothing looked particularly planned. But somehow it all worked.

For only the second time in my career I had my own office, with a small team of five people led by Susan Greenwood sitting just outside my door. There was no induction programme, no formal welcome and certainly no PowerPoint presentations explaining the culture. Someone showed me where I would be sitting, introduced me to the team and left me to get on with it.

It quickly became obvious that I had joined a business that had developed its own very distinctive way of working. Everything revolved around an ageing mainframe system that handled emails, documents and spreadsheets in its own unique way. Having come from a more conventional finance background, I thought it was awful. My immediate instinct was that we should replace it as quickly as possible.

Unfortunately, the system wasn't the only thing that wasn't particularly pleased to see me.

Susan had previously reported directly to my boss, the legendary and wonderfully grumpy Dutchman Ton Waslander, and I suspect my arrival as Head of Brochure Pricing wasn't the career development she had been hoping for. I quickly became very familiar with the phrase, "We don't do it that way here."

Fortunately, Ton was different. He believed in giving people responsibility, and once he was convinced you were prepared to work hard, he largely left you alone, because he had priced his last brochure the year earlier and had absolutely no desire ever to do it again.

Rather than fighting the culture, I decided to do what had served me well before. Keep my head down, work harder than anyone expected and deliver results first, because in my experience you had to earn the right to introduce change.

Then came the Dolly the sheep.

Like many ambitious young managers, I wanted to make a good impression, so I was usually sitting at my desk by seven o'clock each morning. One particular day I arrived slightly faster than normal in my rather disappointing company car. Instead of the shiny new executive vehicle I had imagined, I'd inherited a three-year-old Ford Sierra that had clearly already enjoyed an active social life.

As I swept into the left-hand car park, there was an almighty bang.

I slammed on the brakes and discovered, to my horror, that an unfortunate sheep had somehow wandered into the entrance at precisely the wrong moment. It was instantly obvious that poor Dolly wasn't getting up again.

Faced with this career-defining crisis during my first week, I did what many otherwise sensible people might have done.

I quietly reversed out of the car park, drove around to the other side of the building, and removed the suspicious-looking sheep's wool from the front grille.

Then I walked into the office as though absolutely nothing had happened.

By nine o'clock the entire building was buzzing. The internal email system had gone into overdrive. Senior managers, led by Tom Trickett, were trying to solve the mystery of who had killed the sheep. Every conversation seemed to begin with the same question.

"Who killed Dolly?"

It took me years before I finally admitted that the guilty party had been the new bloke from the South.

In fact, for the first few weeks I thought Airtours must have sent out an announcement introducing me because everybody who answered the internal phone greeted me with "Hi Steve."

Eventually I realised there hadn't been any announcement at all.

Along with my good friend Kieren Tobin a little later, I was the only southerner in the building, and my accent gave me away before I even introduced myself.

Looking back, although the sheep is the funny part of my first week, it wasn't the real lesson.

The important lesson was learning that every successful business develops its own habits, language and ways of working. Some deserve to be challenged, while others exist because they genuinely work. New leaders who arrive believing they already know all the answers usually create resistance before they've earned any trust.

The leaders who create lasting change normally do something much simpler. They listen first, understand the culture, deliver early results and only then begin changing the business.

And if you happen to run over a sheep during your first week, it probably helps if nobody recognises your accent.