The modern business landscape is full of organisations that value collegiality yet struggle with alignment. Teams may get along, but without shared direction, structural clarity and behavioural standards, performance drifts.
Company unity should be treated as an operating model – one built deliberately rather than assumed.
When Lisa Pennell stepped into the CEO role at Barry Plant, she entered a network with strong personal bonds but uneven professional cohesion.
The group had once been a clear leader, but years of drift, stalled innovation and the disruption of COVID had weakened alignment.
Despite the closeness of the directors, the organisation lacked a collective engine.
Three years on, Lisa describes a business that is coordinated, instinctive and aligned.
“We move as a pack,” she says.
Her point is structural rather than sentimental.
Close, but not cohesive
The directors had a long history together; holidays, dinners, shared milestones. Socially, the group was as close-knit as a franchise network could be.
But unity of intention does not automatically follow unity of friendship.
“It’s no secret in the industry that Barry Plant used to be number one in Victoria, and it fell off that perch… it did because it had stopped innovating,” she says.
“It went through a bit of a rocky patch through COVID, and the trust and alignment you’re referring to now has really been the work of the past three years.”
Her early challenge was not strategy or brand work. It was earning the authority to lead a group that was connected to each other, but not yet collectively connected to her.
“What you’re seeing now is about them adopting me as their leader, not just for the title,” she says. “That has taken three years.”
A core part of Lisa’s approach is her refusal to lead from certainty.
“The older I get and the more experienced I get, the more I realise I don’t know everything,” she says. “Everything’s changing faster and faster… what was true five minutes ago may not be true in five minutes.”
This mindset shapes her structures. Rather than centralising decision-making, she designs mechanisms that distribute thinking and prevent any single person, including herself, from becoming the bottleneck.
The CEO Advisory Group: unity designed with friction
Lisa’s main vehicle for cohesion is the CEO Advisory Group: directors who run strong businesses and hold real influence.
Interestingly, one is selected as a ‘disruptor’, specifically to challenge the room.
Ahead of every board meeting, they spend about three hours working through major decisions: AI direction, tech evaluation, marketing shifts, content strategy, brand evolution.
The board observes the discussion before formal approval.
“I come in with my thoughts about what it might be,” she says. “Most of the time I learn something I didn’t know before.”
The purpose is not to achieve harmony. It is to create engagement and shared authorship. Decisions that leave the room already have practical buy-in.
“Because we’re moving as a pack, and I’ve got the most incredible head office team… we say one head, many bodies.”
The 2023 website rebuild illustrates how upfront alignment accelerates action.
A director looked at the site in a meeting and said, “Our website needs an update.”
Lisa pulled it up, compared it with competitors and immediately saw the gap.
“I looked at them and I went, I think you’re right,” she says.
Marketing leadership was already in the room, ideas flowed, and within eight weeks, the site was redesigned, reshot and relaunched using internal resources.
The speed was only possible because disagreement, debate and direction-setting happened first.
The human layer
Beyond systems, Lisa emphasises empathy as a practical tool for alignment.
“Every human being has a completely different set of life experiences and circumstances,” she says. “If I had your life experiences, I would behave exactly the way you do.”
Her comments about people being “meatbags full of reactivity” may be blunt, but the principle is grounding rather than cynical.
Cohesion depends on understanding behaviour, not just policing it.
With this framing, candid conversations become easier and less defensive.
Three years into this structural and cultural shift, the commercial effects are becoming clear.
“There are offices within our network now that are achieving personal best month after month,” she says. “More and more of the group is starting to be in that space.”
The significance, for her, lies in how the improvement is happening: shared direction, high standards, willingness to adapt and leadership that listens as readily as it decides.
“What we are trying to achieve here… I get very excited when I think about where this is going to take us.”
Ultimately, for Lisa, unity is not chemistry. It is design.
“Where we are right now? We’re back as a pack,” she says. “We’re moving together.”
Her guiding rule captures the entire model:
“Less ego, more heart.”
It is a reminder that cohesion is constructed through structure, boundaries and human understanding – not simply through liking each other or working under the same brand name.
