Jonathan Breeze, Chief Executive Officer and founder of Jet Republic, believes that one of the main strengths of a good leader is being able to energize his team as well as being capable of getting right people to form the right team.
1. What is your strongest competency as a leader?
Just a little bit about my background: I was a Royal Air Force pilot, an officer in Royal Air Force in the UK. So, our leadership training there was really about energizing a team, was about taking the resources you had and then pushing them towards an objective. And, that's, basically, being embedded into me. So, my leadership style is about trying to get the right people to form the right team, so as to succeed in the mission whatever the mission is. And different missions need different team members. Sometimes you don't get to chose your team, so this is a bit harder but in these environments, in our environment, for instance, in Jet Republic, we got to hand pick the team, so we have an immediate advantage over, say, the manager that is placed in to a company or told to take over a team and transform it. It's much harder and it's much easier if you can select your people from the outside provided that you know the people you need and you know the mission that you have.
2. What is the way how you select people for missions?
What you are talking about now is a performance team; you are talking about the critical people to get right, people of the top of the business because they are the ones that have most power and, therefore, they can do most good, they can do most bad. So, if you get the wrong senior team, you can destroy a business. As you get more junior teams it's still really important to get that right but the top guys of a company can kill a company in a heartbeat, they can also make it succeed. The first thing you need to figure out is what technical competencies you need. In our world, what technical competencies does the CFO need, does the Chief Operating Officer need, does the Head of Legal need, and does the Head of Enginery need. Before you go anywhere, you really need to understand technically what you expect from those people, to be able to articulate those technical specifications and then be able to understand how you are going to check that they have those competencies.
3. Is it a hard thing to do?
That, in itself, is pretty tough and I think from observation that's where most recruiters, most headhunters stop. They look at the CV, they say: "Yes, he or she is done X, Y and Z, has this amount of experience". Honestly, the experience we have is that you are just at the beginning because what you're now interested in beyond technical is into behavioral as in what sort of behavior does this person have and will that fit with the team.
4. Can you give an example?
We see this in the sports teams, real performance management. Football is a great example. We see people with very high technical skill levels where managers try to force highly technical players into a team that never works, and there are always questions of: "Why didn't that work? That's a great defender, that's a great midfielder, that's a great attacker". The reason is that was never a team of people, sure they would go technically but behaviorally they didn't fit. It's essential; you absolutely have to figure out - will that person complement the team or are they going to be destructive? So, a lot of what we were doing in our selection for people at a senior level was trying to understand - would they add to the harmony of the organization. It doesn't mean we have to agree with one another all the time, that's not what I mean by harmony; by harmony I mean we can interact with one another without damaging ourselves.
5. What is the most important thing to remember while building a good team?
If you can get an idea of the technical characteristic you require with the person and the behavioral characteristics, then you are in a position to, probably, have a good team but you still got to lead them. They still need direction, they still need enthusiasm, they still need to know who is in charge. Again, this is all from the military: we know, in a leaderless environment as in no leader at all, we know that the performance of a team drops. It is better to have a bad leader than no leader at all. I know that sound ridiculous but we know this because we've tested it. So, someone has to lead. Ideally, you want a good leader, someone who knows what they do and who could energize a team, who can direct them, and then take it from there. It's a lot of fun.
6. What are your ways in figuring out whether a person will be good or bad for the team?
The easy way is to know them already. So, your network of professional accountancies, people that you've worked with in the past becomes very important. You know, our Chief Operating Officer in Jet Republic, this is our third project together. So, he and I both know one another strengths technically and behaviorally, and weaknesses technically and behaviorally. So, we both know what we're getting into. The same with my marketing director: I think, this is our fourth project together. General Counsel - head of legal - I've never worked with him before but others who I had worked with had worked with him. And with every single person we brought him we talked about technical and behavioral. And, so, we talked about the fact that if there were other people that came into the team, they had to fit into that team. You are helped with your selection by those recommendations that come from people within the organization already.
7. What is the hardest part and how do you deal with it?
The hard part is where no one in the team knows that individual, where they are new, unknown. The way we found that seems to work best is: a) to define ourselves, again, technically and behaviorally, to talk about what we are, so, there are no surprises, so that people understand, like in our world - look we all work very hard, we're connected to a BlackBerry, aviation runs 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. You are in a start-up phase, you need energy, you need this passion, you need this creativity, so, that there aren't surprises. We will spend time with that individual, we'll put that individual through the company, we'll run multiple interviews with different parts of the business. An engineer wouldn't, normally, spend time with the CFO, he wouldn't, normally, spend time with the head of Legal but what we are doing, effectively, is sharing with one another. You get to see the characteristics of the other team members and we get to see you - do we like you? do you fit? - and, more important, you get to see us. And, again, I've explained this to everyone who came into the business - the worst thing you can do is join us if you don't feel part of it. Don't take the job for the sake of a job because you'll be leaving in six months, hating it because it's the wrong place for you. So, we spend a lot of time with the senior guys showing them around, making them feel part of the family. We've had a number of people that we've thought in the end of that process and we've been able to sit down and say: "Look, you're great, on paper you're great but we both know this isn't going to work. You aren't going to fit in and you know that. So, lets shake one another by the hands, respect each other professionally and see each other in another world." And, again, there were people that we've all worked with in the past who were brilliant in those other roles with those other companies that we know won't fit with what we've created in Jet Republic. So, it's about having that level of honesty and dialogue.
8. How can you prevent choosing the wrong person?
You know, in that role three groups of people failed - the executive search agency has failed because they know that this person is wrong for the job, so they shouldn't have put him forward for it; the person who was offering the job has failed because they should have felt that there was something not connecting and the person accepting the job has failed. So, lots of things has gone wrong and I think, having had some experience with executive search companies, one of the challenges you face is when that executive search company, when that recruiter doesn't get in to the skin, get in to the fabric of the company that he is representing. It's a cookie-cutter - they are just looking for a CFO, whereas, what they should be looking for is looking for a CFO for this plastics factory. And this is what's the plastic factories like, and this is what they feel like, and this is what the boss is like, and this is what the work force is like, this is how they run, this is the feeling. I don't see that very often and that should be. That is absolutely essential because if you can't do that then as a recruiter, you are, literally, just doing cookie-cutter: you're taking the ten CFOs you have on file, throwing them all at the poor company and hoping that they'll take one another. And, you know, less that happens less nowadays with this break close where if the employee doesn't last the certain length of time the recruiting company is not rewarded. But in that instance it's everyone's fault. We've all been too quick to judge and we haven't spent enough time getting to know one another. It's like a marriage, you know, you need to spend a bit of time getting to know your wife before you propose and before you get married.
Prepared by Katia Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on June 29, 2009
