Three main leadership traits - long-term thinking, attention to the details and attention to people - are the milestones in work forMarc-Emmanuel Vives, Vice-President of Rosbank.
1. What is your strongest leadership competency?
I think in terms of competencies linked to leadership, I think there are three main competencies which are important, and two of them are especially important in the current situation: the first one is about long-term and keeping in mind the long-term evolutions even if you are taking very short term decisions. It's important, even in crisis situations, to keep this in mind and to communicate it. The second one is the capacity to assess the globality of situations and actions but never losing the sense of the details. At the same time you have to be focusing at the problem and zooming out if needed, and that's the permanent exercise.
2. What is the third one?
The third one that is important and very relevant in the current situation is paying attention to people. You can easily forget having higher responsibilities that you have a lot of people working with you, they are not numbers and you have to make sure that you keep contact with them. It's important for my personal feeling; I think it's important to put humanity into business, it's the question of style or where you put your priorities. But even if you look at it as at the element of efficiency, it's important that at each time you know what motivates people and that you're aware that human capital is important not only in good times but also in bad times, so you have to care for it in bad times.
3. What does long-term mean for you?
I think first, especially in Russia we have the first issue to address - which is long-term. Between Western countries and Eastern countries and specifically Russia we have different assessments of the medium-term and the long-term. At times it can create some misunderstandings, because for people long-term is not 3, 5 or 10 years, it can be 1,5 year and it's already very far away. Above from that I think it's exactly as you put it, and that's the right way to communicate it to people. You don't have to lose your focus and your focus is to find the target you want to reach. That means that you cannot reach the target if you start your trip the other way round and you ran out of fuel before reaching the target. There's a span of different actions that is relatively narrow if we're talking about two or three years' actions and a bit broader if we're talking about ten years or more.
4. What should a person pay attention to?
What's important here is to give people the feeling about the target because we are often in the situation when people give more importance to the means and resources and they forget about the final target. It's the case with many managers in Russia, so it's twice important, because it's very stressful for them to work without giving the perception of continuity. And it's important because we have to make them understand that they have to forget about the means and resources and they have to focus on the results they want to achieve in a few years' time.
5. Could you give any examples?
If you take the bank, it's clear what we want to do in terms of development and increasing of positioning and profitability of the bank in the country, and it's also clear that some intermediate actions or targets will be affected by the crisis. Basically, if the target is in a three years' time to reach the certain positioning and the market share, and in terms of profitability for the bank it's the return on equity of more than 25%, there are several ways to get there. Obviously, before the crisis it would have been easier because at the same time you could invest and generate additional profitability and the reasult of development was such that you had your income of 70% a year, and it was quite easy to reach the profitability level. While now we are half way to the target and there was a negative profitability a few years ago.
6. How should people behave within the crisis?
Within the crisis many things change completely and people will have to understand that you'll get the same targets only by reviewing our investment plans. That means that you completely change the general orientation of your investments. The pace of your investments will not be the same, it doesn't change the essence of the project, you just change the pace you're doing this. That's one example that is relatively simple: you don't change the general course, you're just a bit slow at the beginning, and you'll probably accelerate further. The reason of growth is changing; the reason of investments is changing. You have some other cases where you'll have to change some part of your activities, you'll have to reduce the weight of some of your activities in your business portfolio, that's not a strategic change, because you don't change your targets and your orientation but you change some smaller orientation within you strategy.
7. Does going into details mean micromanagement?
We have to be very cautious as managers that we are able to go into details but not micromanaging. I just think that it's very important that manager knows more precisely the way his company is working. A bit earlier we were talking about the capacity of taking very quick decisions. You can say that taking quick decision is based on having very good information but we don't always have time or ready information for that. You can say that is intuition but I don't know what is the real intuition for manager. What we call intuition is a deep knowledge and deep experience of things, it's not something that we just feel out of the blue, it's the feeling that we have about the way things should be done but it's based on real experience. That's my personal interpretation of intuition.
8. What is important here?
And when we're talking about going into details is a different thing. It's clear if you keep a permanent contact with the reality of things and it's not doing the job of you deputies and colleagues and replacing them. But it can be visiting the branches of the bank, different central offices, talking to employees, feeling what is really happening in the organization apart all the information you have. So, the first understanding of going into detail is not losing contact with the reality, it's really growing roots so that one way or another the reality will come back to you.
9. What is the second understanding?
The second point is when you make decisions, it's important that you understand very quickly all the possible implications of the decisions and that you make sure that in your organization people go into details regarding the way they will implement the decisions. Because the risk is very high in Russia in particular, you don't have a way to manage teams, a lot of managers are the best in their teams but not real managers. So you have to make sure from the start what the consequences will be, how decisions will be applied. And it means that if you don't do it yourself, you have to make your people understand all the importance of looking at these elements. But very often you make a very good decision, but implementing it is a complete disaster just because it's not well understood. So looking into details is not at all micromanaging things.
