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At a glance
- William Ding’s leadership philosophy centres on alignment. He makes sure every voice is heard, tests assumptions, and shapes decisions using facts, data and shared insight.
- He believes strong performance starts with a firm, trust-based culture where people feel safe to contribute ideas, challenge thinking, admit mistakes and learn openly.
- As CFO at WM New Zealand, Ding encourages curiosity, courage and long-term ESG thinking, and helps teams manage risk and prepare for future challenges.
Is it a leader's responsibility to always present the right solution? Or should they build their style around helping others to devise their own?
William Ding FCPA, chief financial officer at WM New Zealand, the country’s largest waste and recycling company, has built his leadership philosophy around encouraging input from those around him.
Having become CFO five years ago at just 37 years of age, leading an already very capable team, Ding realised he had a valuable opportunity to develop his own leadership style.
“I was a young person who was leading this fantastic team. At a very early stage, I understood that was a challenge but also an opportunity.”
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An alignment approach
Ding describes his strategy as an “alignment approach to leadership, rather than an approval approach”.
“I could not be the old-school type of CFO who says, ‘I have been there and done that. I know everything. What I say is absolutely right.’ Instead, I adapted an alignment approach that allows me to hear others’ opinions.”
The “CV approach”, as Ding calls it, is about capturing information and then verifying facts.
“We have a discussion, then make a group decision,” he says. “There is no right or wrong and there is no fighting for your plan or for my plan. We are not getting into an argument. We are first just capturing all the beliefs.
“So, we are discussing beliefs and key assumptions based on that belief. That phase is very important. It means everybody is heard. The second phase is to verify.”
The verification process involves figuring out which assumptions are correct and which are not, ensuring the group decision is informed by relevant information and data.
“In that process I can verify that your assumptions one and three are correct. And their assumptions four and six are correct. As for me, a few of my assumptions are correct, too,” Ding says.
Then, the team firms up its plan around real facts and with a more accurate understanding of the challenge. “It is not one plan against another plan. Instead, we develop a plan that aligns everybody’s knowledge and insight.”
That perspective can be broad and powerful. Ding oversees a portfolio that includes commercial pricing, financial reporting, tax, treasury, internal audit, procurement, insurance and property.
His team of roughly 100 supports a business that sits across more than 80 sites and serves a vast mix of almost 100,000 council, residential and commercial customers.
In his previous role as part of the finance team of NZ Bus, the model was dramatically different. That business had just a few customers: Auckland Council, Wellington Council and the Snapper ticketing platform. As a result, the finance team was significantly smaller.
Now, leading a larger team through a period of momentous change in an increasingly complex environment, Ding has a finance leadership role that extends well beyond reporting.
The modern CFO, he says, is often asked to make decisions across functions they do not directly own. Ding’s approach is about helping his team, the business and other stakeholders to understand what could happen next by arming them with the information they need to make the very best decisions, either individually or as a group.
Culture first, then strategy
Alignment is more than Ding’s personal leadership philosophy. It is a culture that he believes should be of importance to everyone in organisational leadership positions.
While business education and management frameworks help people solve conventional business problems, they say far less about what Ding calls “emotional problems”.
“Business schools will teach you how to solve a business problem with the five whys, the fishbone diagram and so on, to understand the issues,” he says.
“However, not many places teach you that you may have to solve something called an emotional problem.”
This is more important than the business problem, Ding says, because it is about culture.
“If you have a weak culture that is causing fear and blame, your people will not give 100 per cent,” he says. “They will focus on trying not to make mistakes. That fear will weaken your team. You will develop a blame culture and your people will behave defensively.”
In a fear-based culture, people avoid accountability, hide mistakes or risks, and no longer offer full effort. For a CFO, Ding says, that adds up to a lot more than a people issue. It impacts risk visibility, decision quality, public reputation and organisational performance.
“One emotional problem can become so many different problems before we even try to solve a business problem,” he says.
Ding warns against what he calls a “tense culture”, where leaders and high performers create pressure and blame around and within teams by framing themselves as the only people carrying the load. “They are creating another kind of blame culture. You do not want weak. You do not want tense. You want to be firm.”
That “firm” culture is the ground on which Ding’s alignment approach depends. People need to feel safe enough to contribute honestly, and be accountable and empowered enough to act responsibly.
A different performance framework
Within his own team, Ding seeks four qualities. “I want you to be capable, which means technically capable,” he says.
“I want you to have courage. I want you to be curious and I want you to have integrity.
“The three Cs, everybody understands, but everybody interprets integrity differently. To me, integrity is not about the individual or the department or the branch. It is about the company as a whole. How do we make sure every time we make a decision we align that decision to the best interests of WM New Zealand?”
That broad view also shapes how Ding thinks about mistakes. He separates mistakes into two categories.
Type 1 mistakes are the things the organisation must never do. “This includes anything that could hurt anyone,” he says. “Never cause any permanent environmental damage and never bankrupt the organisation. Never, ever cross those lines.”
Type 2 mistakes are different. As opposed to being disastrous, they are sometimes a positive. They might even be encouraged, perhaps in the name of innovation, advancement or learning.
For Ding, this is about highly disciplined risk management. When team members are confident and they can make and report Type two mistakes without blame or other negative blowback, it helps the organisation innovate quickly and identify risks earlier.
Openness to the reporting of such risk becomes a control mechanism. If people feel safe to admit when something goes wrong, the business can learn, act to mitigate the risk and innovate around it.
“We define and communicate what we have learned, so next time we will not do it again,” he says.
“We figure out how to fix it but also communicate what we can all learn from it, so we can use that knowledge to develop new processes and solutions.”
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A complex sector
The complexity of the waste management sector is both a challenge and a benefit. Ding says he was attracted to the industry because of its many sides.
Although waste can look deceptively simple, WM New Zealand contains numerous business models within the one group.
“Residential collection is like a bus type of business,” he explains. “The winning formula for that is to maximise your route density.
“Skip bins are different. You drop a bin to a customer site and then you have to come back, like a taxi service. So, how do you price that? What is your winning formula for that?
“Then, you move into the recycling part, which is a factory type of business. You get your materials in and you process them. You get a final inventory and you sell them on to an international market.”
Landfill and energy generation also add an infrastructure layer.
That deep complexity and the challenge of managing it all from within one business has led Ding to consider the way he wants his team to think, to approach challenges, to ask questions and design responses.
He does not necessarily want narrow answers or highly specific solutions — what he prefers are options.
“I often say to my team, ‘Show me the universe’,” he says. “Before we drill into the details, let’s look into all of the possibilities. Then we can figure out which we should focus on first and why.”
It is a practical reminder, he says, that the role of the CFO is to help the organisation understand its choices, including consequences and trade-offs.
The role will always have a technical element, but it is increasingly commercial.
ESG as a business model
At New Zealand’s biggest waste management business, environmental, social and governance (ESG) issues are not just a reporting overlay, but central to the company’s purpose.
If nobody removes waste, Ding says, it washes down waterways and contaminates water sources. If it is not removed responsibly, it is simply burnt. In both cases, the social and environmental outcomes are disastrous.
WM New Zealand has a deeply ESG-related purpose.
“We are one of the important industries protecting New Zealand’s environment, as well as our lifestyle,” Ding says. He argues that ESG must be front and centre for every CFO as long-term environmental risk plays a significant role in long-term financial risk.
“The environment develops the long-term success for your business,” he says. “It offers more future certainty.”
Sustainability is also about being prepared for what the future might bring. Ding wonders, for example, whether New Zealand and Australia are moving quickly enough on technology and long-term planning. He points to what he has seen in Chinese truck automation.
“I can see that we are already 10 years behind China. If tomorrow the driverless truck is available, can we use it? Absolutely not, because we do not know the road conditions. We have not planned.”
The risk is that some organisations, industries and countries wait until a technology is mature and ready for use before they prepare for its adoption.
Here, Ding’s leadership values are exemplified. Curiosity enables exploration of new possibilities. Courage is required to introduce action before stakeholders have certainty. And alignment is vital because no company, function or leader can solve such long-term challenges alone.
And so, he says, the real work of contemporary finance leadership is alignment built with patience and humility. When people feel safe to suggest ideas, challenge assumptions and processes, and admit mistakes, it is good for the entire organization.
One piece of advice
“In a job interview, it is not about them interviewing you. You need to interview them to understand what kind of culture you are walking into, because early in your career, that culture is going to shape you.”
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Banner image Marcus Balley via Getty Images
