How a love of people and a love of business became Inject
There is an image from the early part of my career that I can still picture clearly. The temporary casino had operated out of the World Trade Centre, and after it moved, we sometimes used one of those enormous empty floors to run assessment centres. Four assessors. Maybe twelve candidates coming through at a time. Role plays in one corner. Team exercises in another.
I loved trying to understand people: not simply what they said about themselves, but what they actually did. How did somebody behave under pressure? How did they influence somebody? How did they solve a problem? In hindsight, a lot of what eventually became Inject was already there.
Before that, while working part-time at the cinemas, I started noticing something. There seemed to be this inherent conflict between management and staff. It was treated as though this adversarial relationship was just how workplaces worked. That didn't make sense to me. Why couldn't everybody win? Why couldn't employees have good jobs and meaningful careers, managers have good people around them, and the business perform better as a result? That was the idea that drew me towards HR.
When I joined the ANZ Graduate Program, I made a deliberate decision not to join an HR graduate program. I wanted to understand the business. If you are going to advise a business about its people, surely you need to understand the business those people are there to serve. Working at Accenture and then London Underground, two organisations that could hardly have been further apart culturally, reinforced something that later became fundamental to Inject: there is no single version of 'best practice' that you can simply pick up from one business and drop into another. Context matters.
At about 28, I became Head of HR at Fleet Partners and found myself sitting on the executive team of a private-equity-owned business. My goal became to be a business person first who happened to perform HR. I didn't always get it right. But over time I built credibility with the management team.
When I started consulting to smaller businesses, something surprised me. I could have a real impact. In a smaller business, changing the right process, helping with the right hire, developing the right manager or solving the right people issue could make a visible difference. So I started asking business owners what would actually matter to them, and their answers gave us four words that still describe the business today: tangible, tailored, integrated and proactive.
I didn't want Inject to simply become me as an individual consultant. I wanted to build a team, and I wanted it to remain high-value. Could we build a team that worked across HR, recruitment, learning and development and leadership? Could all those capabilities reinforce one another? That is still the question we work on every day.
Tommy Sim, Founder and Managing Director
A name that came from a client
An early client kept using the word. "We need to inject some better training into the business." "We need to inject some talent." "We need to inject the right processes." To inject something is to introduce something necessary or helpful into a situation. It can mean giving something new energy, strength or freshness, or putting something onto a new trajectory. Small and medium business leaders often have a real sense of urgency. They know the culture or capability they have today is not necessarily what will get them where they want to go. That became Inject.
