Yahoo Finance My first boss: Kyle Whitehill, CEO of Avanti Communications
The people who helped shape business leaders
For 16 years Kyle Whitehill held various senior leadership COO and CEO positions at Vodafone Group. Prior to joining UK-based satellite operator Avanti in 2018, he served as CEO of Liquid Telecom South Africa, where his focus on customer experience and talent investment led to significant company growth during his tenure.
Bill Morrow, who gave me my first big break, had been brought over from the US to form the new group business at Vodafone as UK CEO. He was a charismatic American and, for the first time, I had met someone who was like a true statesman when it came to boss philosophy. He motivated me enormously.
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I remember Bill saying once, ‘When you leave the office, everyone is watching you. They read from the CEO what they believe is happening in the company from how you behave on a day-to-day basis.’
He then narrated a story where he walked down from his office one day to the bathroom. His secretary wasn’t there at the time, but when he came back she asked five minutes later if he was okay. She then said that five people had phoned or messaged her as he had been unusually quiet walking to and from the bathroom.
He just happened to be thinking to himself. But for a $10bn, 10,000-strong company, that didn’t matter. The whole company was still eyeing Bill to either generate confidence or start worrying.
It helped me realise what a huge impact your boss can have on you and the organisation. I worked with him for a year before he went to head up Vodafone in Japan. But it was during his tenure that I decided if I wanted to be serious about becoming a leader, I needed to become like Bill. Someone who inspired and instilled an ethos of working for a great company, with a great path in front of us.
I had worked in the UK for seven years before going to India for six months as COO and then chairman, where I stayed for three years. Suddenly I was standing up to 500 people in the north of India, which was vastly different from doing it in Newbury. I couldn't be linear, factual or structured as all the staff wanted to hear was how we were going to be No1, how we would get it done and ending with a cheer. That was the start of the cultural leadership journey and it took me from India to Ghana, Qatar and South Africa.
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The biggest transition any leader makes was one I saw as corporate sales director of Vodafone UK and leading 600 people. Bill had given me the job moving to enterprise business unit director overseeing 3,500 staff. One day, I thought that I didn’t know how to do the job as the move from sales to marketing had a completely different identity.
However, a business coach sat me down and we discussed how to make the transition from being a functional leader into a general manager and what implications that had as a leader. I needed to be comfortable moving across the functions and building a capability that allowed you to inspire finance, HR or sales people. My view at that point was that most leaders didn’t worry about that too much and remained within their expertise. I didn’t want to be like that — I wanted to engage with everybody.
Bill essentially had a model. He came in, looked at the company and built a programme called ‘One Way Ahead’ and project managed it through his leadership team. He had done it in every CEO role, but it was a powerful brand. Traditionally Vodafone had been hierarchical but he broke that down, established town halls and it was the first time I had seen leadership through all levels.
He was an engineer by heart but he hadn’t made that who he was. He had invented a new person and became a charismatic leader with it. He was tall, good looking, smart, usually wore chinos and a shirt with his sleeves rolled up, as if to be ready to get stuck in and lead the organisation from the front.
I now lead over 220 staff at Avanti Communications. We have really challenged ourselves and the heart of the company now is about Africa and how we can provide rural connectivity to people who’ve never had access to it before in places like Nigeria and Kenya.
In the last two years, we’ve decided that our future is about not worrying which network we are delivering, but helping to deliver what’s best for organisations. For example, if a bank in South Africa can’t provide connectivity due to power issues, we deploy our satellite network to bypass the infrastructure, land it in the UK and it still allows them to process transactions.
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I’m also passionate about the work the telecoms industry can do to help disadvantaged communities get better access to education, healthcare and also help close the global digital divide.
We have been delivering digital education classes called Project iMlango for a decade to 250 schools in Kenya, with adaptive learning on Maths and English accelerating learning up to three times. The challenge is finding investment into these programmes and showing the Global Partnership for Education how we can deliver to give donors confidence. We now have eight pilot programmes around East Africa and have an ecosystem to scale in the most rural of areas.
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