Radoslav Vojnovic, Vice President Holding, Russia, Managing Director, ZAO Atlas Copco, tells us about the leadership model that his organization has and about how important it is to develop people within the company.
1. What is your strongest leadership competency?
First, I think it’s competency related to my personality and competencies related to my experience. In our group, in Atlas Copco, we have very precisely defined leadership model, and practically all other things are coming out of this leadership model.
2. What leadership model?
First, every manager in our group gets a mission from his superior. What does it mean? So, my boss gives me the mission in a form of long-term targets or expectancies. He says: “Radoslav, in three years you have to reach this and this and that”. And of course it’s not a one minute talk, it’s a longer talk, and once when you get your mission, as a person you have to make vision in your head, how to fulfill this mission. If you don’t have the vision then it’s a problem. Once you get vision, meaning that you have a clear way and that you understand the mission given to you then you start to build strategy. It means use everything available to reach those goals. Like in football: you have strategy – are you going to be in defense, are you going to be offensive player etc., the same in business. When you make the strategy, then you should have a clear structure in your head to be sure that all processes are under control. The last thing is people. At the end all successes, all problems are coming from people. People are the key asset for every company. This is what we call in our group leadership model.
3. What other things are coming out of this model?
If you look at every person, potential manager, you have a lot of competencies linked to his education, linked to her or his experience and personality. Everyone has a personality. First part – education, it’s university degree, language knowledge, computer literacy, etc. This is something you get at school, university or training courses but when you start to work, then a lot of knowledge, skills, competencies you gain during this period, during this experience. The third, the most interesting part is personality. Everyone is different. In personality you have, let’s say, one category called ability – are you able to do something? Do you as a person have such ability? And the second part is your values – are you communicative? Are you straight? Are you honest? Are you loyal?
4. Can you explain a little more?
As I mentioned, knowledge you are getting from university, then you have experience that you get during your work, then there is personality, it’s different from person to person. Out of those three categories we measure different competencies. For instance, in experience, that’s your management competency: are you good in administration, controlling the business, people, etc. Than you have the sales management: how you organize the sales? Do you use different tools? How to make a realistic planning of the sales? Then, as I said personality, one of the most important is your leadership, ability to motivate and lead people. That is a very important competency, especially in those days during the crisis.
5. Can you give an example?
One ability which is a part of your personality is flexibility, and we define it as ability to adapt to new situations. I will give you an example. I’ve been working in Russia before “perestroika” and after “perestroika”. Before “perestroika”, technically we had no chance to contact customers, direct users. After “perestroika” things dramatically changed, we got a chance to visit them to talk. And we immediately notice this change and we start to build organization to adapt to this situation.
6. Let’s talk about the ability to motivate people that you’ve mentioned earlier.
Only competent people can achieve the goals. Therefore our strategy is to attract, retain and develop people. As a leader you have a serious task to motivate, to lead people, to coach people. It’s a big difference from August of last year and nowadays. During the crisis things change completely. You cannot be the same person before the crisis and the same person during the crisis; you have to change, a lot. You have to get new skills. You have to be prepared to work under much more stress.
7. How do you motivate people within your company?
We manage to select, recognize some people as good potential, not only for local purposes but also for worldwide because we are operating in more than 160 markets in the world, and we strongly support internal mobility. Our trainings are very extensive, it takes time to prepare someone, so we don’t want to lose people. That’s why we stimulate people to look for other jobs within the group. During this period we managed to produce few general managers from Russia who are taking very serious senior positions within Atlas Copco Group. One example is our general manager in Poland, second is general manager in Adriatic region, and there are few other people which are working in other different positions not in Russia, in Europe. Motivation of people is not only a salary; it’s also a job, career opportunities.
8. How in particular do you identify those people who have potential?
It’s a very interesting question. We have process in the group; let’s call it “high potentials”. Every manager has a task to recognize who is a high potential, and once someone is recognized, he will get special attraction for his manager and even wider. Then we divide those potentials. Which level they are: are they high potentials for local growth or they are high potentials internationally or for the group top management. Once they are recognized, they join certain programs of trainings.
9. How do you measure whether this person is prepared for responsibilities or not?
Every individual is trying to present himself in the best light. It’s good to have that characteristic but you should not exaggerate, over-evaluate yourself. Of course the worst situation is to have somebody on certain position who is lacking competence. It’s bad for him because he is doing job with efforts, get tired, job for him is not a pleasure, and also it’s bad for the company.
10. How do you solve these problems?
Every year we make some kind of appraisals of all employees in the group, and especially managers, and together with human resources department we are getting the competence wheals, where we can see technically where we have gaps or less knowledge or less competence. And we always have a chance to improve it. That’s the way it works.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on August 4, 2009
