Dee Cooper, Product & Service Director of Virgin Atlantic Airways Ltd, tell us about her strongest leadership trait - being the part of the team she works with. The leader has to be able to communicate to the members of the team what he likes and what he dislikes in the ideas proposed by the team and moreover, the leader must not be afraid of getting deep into details of the business.
1. What is your strongest leadership trait?
I think, I get involved, I'm part of solving the problem, I'm part of the team, so I'm happy to go to the airport to look at the problem, then I go to the manufacturers to see the issues, talk to people about it. So I'm very happy to get involved and to understand everything. I think that it's very important because it shows that you care and you make something very important to find the answer, it also shows how committed you are to the project and also it shows the people you are working with that their work is appreciated more often than not. You'll be asking them individually why they do something in this or that way, you ask them how they had come to this answer. So for me it's sort of being there, being part of the project and being part of the team. It's the most important thing.
2. Is there anything particularly important in being involved?
The problem, I think, with senior executives is that as they get more and more senior, people talk about that you can't get involved in the detail. But in fact you need to understand what the customer is going to be experiencing, and you need to be yourself in the customer's shoes and ask yourself: "When do I receive my glass of vine? When do you take away my meal tray?" And you have to think it through as a consumer. And I think it's quite hard for executives to do that, because it's often like "we don't do the detail". But my argument is that if you are a financial manager, if you are needed to look at the numbers and you add them together and you'd see if they're added up; and the same is if you're a manager of innovation, sometimes you've got to go in and look at the idea and solutions. Sometimes people are frightened of doing that, because they think that their managers over there will do it. But the fact is that more often than not you're looking at it as a consumer and create an an experience that we work out for our customers. And when you're the consumer, you can be naive because you don't need to know the answers and I think sometimes people are frightened of asking about, for example, the stress engineering of that. But that's not important. The important thing is to know if it works and if it works for me and if I enjoy using it.
3. Could you recall on any recent example of innovation?
When we develop meal services, for example, you can make sure that the crew can deliver it to the customer, so you actually do need to trial it, and you do need to mock it up; you need to see if everything fit on the tray and does it really look fine on the tray. Sometimes it happens that people are overoptimistic because they try it so hard and they want it to work very much, and then you have to say that you're sorry, you know that they were right. Because mechanically everything can fit on the tray, but in reality when you're in the aircraft up on 2000 ft and you have hundreds of different crews you may need to find a different solution. Sometimes the project teams are trying so hard and they are so close to the problem that the prospective helps and the fact that you come here with clear eyes, you're able to say "no" or "yes". I think that adds value, because you're not the person who was trying to make it work, you play the role of appetator and you tell them that you're sorry, but the solution will not actually work.
4. Do you have any other interesting example?
One of our seat concepts had airbags in the seat cushion, and obviously, that made the seat much more comfortable and it was like a lumber support, you could sit up and you could move around and you could make it more comfortable. But for a consumer is very hard to know that you have to lift up, then to sit down, to move it around. Now normally what happens especially with seats, you may have this investment and put aboard magazines to show people how to use it, but it happens that people and especially men don't read the magazine because they don't want to be instructed. And what they actually do is watching one another, so things like headrests or footrests they work out by watching other people, but something subtle like stand up, press the button, sit down, move around will be lost in the translation. That's the sort where you can be more pragmatic and think if the innovation worth it, or does it add value. That's the hard part of your job because you say "no" to the innovation.
5. How do you manage not to discourage your people by doing that?
You just let them work on their own and then you review. It's a sort of project management, you have your natural milestones, you have to sign off the business case or you have to sign off the model before it goes to tooling and production. You're not involved all the time and you have to trust them to do good work, but you get involved at key dates and you make sure that you're involved early enough so that you're not giving them a problem at the end of the project. If you have a very conceptual stage and you're saying: ‘I don't like this and I do like that" or "You need to worry about that", that's helpful. But saying to them the day before it goes into tooling that you don't like that and ask them to change it immediately, you'll just give them emergency. So I think that's giving them insight early enough, letting them work on their own and getting involved at key stages. And Richard Branson is the same, because all of us think how it feels for the customer, and does it work for the customer and do we like it as customers ourselves. We put off our airline brain and think if I was sitting here and eating this meal, if I was using this check-in - does it make sense to me?
6. How do you communicate this approach to your team?
You tell them what you like and what you worry about and you give them the chance to support their ideas, but you also can say: "I'm sorry, I think it won't worth the risk". On one hand you say that it's good, but on the other hand you have to be fair and you have to tell them that it won't work so they understand. Because if you're not clear, and as we know with creatives, you can design, you can create forever and ever and ever until the deadline stops you. So you have to be clear if the avenue is not worth exploring further. And you give them a chance to explain why the avenue should be explored further and you can give them a chance of two weeks or of two months or you have to say "no" to them straight away. But I think as long as you're clear and fair and you let them explain why they see it as a benefit, and sometimes you have to put it into the customer research and see if it works as part of customer research, it all depends on how obvious you think it is really and how much time you think it's worth investing in it.
7. How do you manage with creative people?
I think that's the other skill of a leader - to set the vision. There's another story when JFK was walking around in Canaveral Space Center and asked the man who was sweeping the floor: "What's your job?" and the man answered: "My job, Mr. President is to get someone on the Moon". That means that everybody was aligned and everybody's job was to get someone on the Moon, even if your job was to sweep the floor. I think there's something which should be said about vision: if you can explain to people why something is important or not important, they may be frustrated but they can sign into that and they can understand it. That's why ultimately you want to do that at the beginning so that you insure everybody is aligned and that you don't waste time doing the wrong work because that's frustrating for everybody. Vision is important when you're talking about innovation and change - what are you trying to achieve in the end of the day.
8. In you example with the seat there was a visualizing effect, wasn't there?
We invest a lot in model making, in doing trials. Of course, we might do trials on board the aircraft with the customers, but we might model seats or we might mock up other equipment and all of that helps you to really understand it and it's cheap. As long as you make mistakes and it's a cardboard model, these're cheap mistakes. If you make mistakes on metal aircraft on which you spent hundreds of thousand doing the tooling, this is a really expensive mistake. Make mistakes when it's a model, get your learnings there. Vision is important and it's important to be able to explain to people, as you've said. And it doesn't matter if you're a captain, your job is not to be the engineer making sure that the engines are working or whatever other job, but you as the captain should go and make sure that this person is happy doing his job and he's got the tools that he needs, etc. And you mustn't be afraid to go towards them and see the problems.
