Steve Strachota (Cadbury): "You Do Need to Look Forward and You Need to Look Ahead, Because You Need to Know what’s Coming around the Next Corner and Be Able to Anticipate and React"
Steve Strachota, Managing Director of Cadbury Russia and CIS, believes that envisioning, communication and energizing the team are his main competencies, and it is very important for a leader to learn how to sell the vision that you’ve created to the employees.
1. What is your strongest leadership competency?
I spent a little bit time thinking about it and talking to some of my people, so I walked into my Direct Reports and said, “Hey, what do you think I’m good at? What do I drive?” Just to test that. The two things that came out, which were similar to what I believed was that I am very good at envisioning, taking a look at the situation, understanding the changing dynamics and then, being able to create a vision out of that for where the company or the organization or the products should go or have the potential to go. So, I can operate at that strategic level. Also, I believe that I am very good at being able to sell that vision and get people energized behind that vision to make sure that they also see the potential and that they get excited about that potential, and that they bring that excitement to their organization, which enables all of the workers to work towards one common objective. So, keeping people engaged, enabling them to be able to accomplish what we need to get accomplished, and then energizing them, so that they wake in the morning and they are excited about what they are going to go do.
2. What do you do to create this vision?
Quite frankly, managing in Russia has enabled me to find tune this much more. And, I think that Russia provides an excellent opportunity or, actually, approving ground for a couple of reasons. Number one – the environment is changing very rapidly. So, what you thought was true today may not be true tomorrow. So, you do need to look forward and you need to look ahead, because you need to know what’s coming around the next corner and be able to anticipate, and to be able to react. Unlike, say, France or the US even, where things are much more constant in most industries, particularly, our industry. I think that you get a lot more practice here because you do see the changing landscape and you need to rethink things and then make adjustments. I think also it comes with experience. You know, when I was twenty-four, twenty-five, I thought I had all the business skills. I had gone to school; I had been in business for a couple of years. I saw what my managers did. I saw what the CEO did, and I got my MBA from a top school. And I said, “I know. I know what needs to be done.” But what I’ve learnt over time is, in fact, until you actually do it, until you are sitting in the place where you need to make the decisions, where you need to make the calls, and where you’re going to be hold accountable for what goes right and what goes wrong, until you had this experience it’s very difficult to make sure that you come out with the right answers. That experience, actually, builds whether it’s intuition, because you’ve seen something similar, whether it’s being able to draw connections from different life experiences and knowing an unrelated fields being able to see how things work there and to apply them using analogies to what might be happening in your business. That comes with experience. Unfortunately, that comes with age and some grey hair but once you get the practice and you get the experience to me that’s the “how”. That’s really what enables me to do that better now than, let’s say, I could’ve done when I was twenty-seven.
3. Can you be more specific?
I am very clear when I bring my team together; I am, typically, not the smartest person in the room. I have intelligence, I have experience but if it’s on a specific topic, for example, in Russia – I am not an expert in Russia. I’ve been living here five years. I’ve been able to experience things but that’s not where my overall strength will come. So, what do I do to create the vision for Russia, in a country where I haven’t been living that often and I don’t have all of that experience. A lot of people sit behind the desk and they look at the data, analyze trends, and they see what their competitors are doing and they do bench marketing. That’s important. That’s part of creating the vision – you need the fact base to understand in what kind of environment am I operating, where are the potentials. You need to look at what is your competition is doing. So, you need to spend some time to see where are the open spaces, where will there be the competition, where do we need to win to make something happen. But the other thing that I bring, I believe, is try to surround myself with best people I can find, with people that are experts in their field, with people that are smarter than me, quite frankly. And when we sit around the table, and when we have the discussion, because we have all of the text books answers, we have the PowerPoint slides with the data but what enables me, I think, beyond, you know, just doing that desktop work is to be able to bring different opinions, to be able to bring the best out of the people – their best ideas, and then, synthesize those into a strategic vision that is not only based upon the desk work but is also based upon intuition of people in the room, is based upon believes systems and is based upon their experiences. And by bringing all of those together and my ability to get the best out of those, I think, enables me to create a vision that is perhaps better than what my peers are creating or what others could create if they were in my chair.
4. Why do you need to energize people?
You know, there are many statistics that people talk about, you think about it, a manager once told me a long time ago, he said, “You can spend your time, you can spend two hours more in the office everyday, and maybe deliver 10-15% more of the things that you’re working on but if you can energize, if you can get somebody and the entire organization – say, 2000 people – that are willing to do the same, that are looking at the same objectives, imagine the power that that brings in driving results vs. myself looking at reports, having meetings for another two hours. If I can only get twenty more minutes out of everybody, think of the power, the organizational strength that that would bring.” So, to me where I’ve been focusing, quite frankly, is not only do I need to believe but I need to get my organization to believe. Because once they believe and once they understand then you begin to unleash that power. Now, there are many other things about how to get people to more productively, you need to breakdown barriers, you need to do creative work environment that enables them to do their best. I think it begins with having them want to operate in that kind of environment and having them get excited about what the potentials are and what the possibilities are. So, how I do that? I think, first, I believe myself because I could never sell you something that I didn’t believe in. you know, I came up through finance organizations, so I’ve been always very grounded in fact. You know, one of the big saying that we’ve always had is “strategy without numbers is just poetry”, so you need to have the numbers that back up what you’re talking about. But I have to believe in it, and it needs to be something that excites me. Once I get that excitement then I try to spread it like a virus, I try to be infectious to whomever I’m talking to, I want them to understand why it should be exciting for them as well.
5. What do you think is the critical point to chief success?
If you refer directly to the creation of a good vision and what the core ingredients are to create that good vision, I think that the critical things, you know, as you making a soup, you’re steering the vision to try to come out with what is perfect. I think you need a good fact base, I think you need to be operating from the best available information. Now, a lot of people get into what we call “analysis-paralysis” – they get so much data that they don’t know what to do with it. So, I don’t think that you need, it’s critical that you have every piece of data from every corner but you need to have a good picture of what the reality is today. I think that you also need to be able to draw, to use my soup analogy; you know that certain ingredients, you that when you make another kind of dish that a little bit of garlic, a little bit of salt makes it taste better. So, you need to be able to draw not just from your industry, but draw parallels between what has happened in IT, what is happening in automotive, and what lessons can I learn that have been successful or unsuccessful that might apply to my industry or what I am trying to accomplish. Because, in history of the world people have faced similar issues that you are facing today. They might not be completely the same but you can learn from those. So, I think, get a fact base, be able to pull those parallels in, be able to pull that experience in, and then the third is, I think, you need to be open-minded.
6. What do you mean by being open-minded?
You need to think of what is possible, not what’s impossible and you need to be able to think things differently. And that’s why when I surround myself with good people I don’t want people to tell me “yes”. If somebody tells me “yes” too many times – I don’t need them, because all they are telling me is what I’m saying. I need somebody that is able to challenge and to see things from a different angle and then I need to be open to that to be able to see how that might fit in. To those are the three main ingredients. You know, others may make their soup a little differently but for me, if I have those three ingredients I know I’m going to get good soup and then it’s a matter of how we work with it and how we get everybody else excited about what we’ve just done. By the way, if you are able to involve people and make them feel part of that vision-creation, they are ten times more likely to help be energized about it, because they see their fingerprints on what that vision is. It’s not something that I create over at my desk, I come out, and I say, “I’ve seen the light, it’s here on paper, I put a nice PowerPoint presentation and now I need you to act.” So, it works two ways to energize, involve people when you can.
7. Can you give an example?
The example that I’ll use is our strategy in the former Soviet Union countries – CIS countries outside Russia. When I arrived, when I took over this business, CIS was considered more of a sales arm, so that just a different region than Russia was. So, whatever happened in Russia we would launch in Belarus and Ukraine, and Azerbaijan, Kazakhstan. What people didn’t see was the possibility and to understand that there is a different fact base that, you know, what people are looking for in Armenia and Azerbaijan is a little bit different from what they are looking for in Volga region. So, first was just understanding that the markets were different. So, put in the practice, understand the data, be able to pull it. Then, I took a look at what other companies are doing. And a lot of companies have completely separate management. For example, our main competitor – Wrigley – has a management for Russia and the separate one for CIS. And though they sit down the hall from each other to share but they manage them completely different and you could see from the products that they had and how they run their business that it was different. And they were doing quite well. So, it appeared that there was a different way to do it than we were and using examples like Procter & Gamble, Danone or other industries to be able to pull it together.
8. What did you do?
You know, I brought the people in and I said, what is it that will enable us to unleash the potential that I see in these markets. You know, those markets are growing, at the time they were growing much faster than Russia. And from gross domestic product they were very dynamic, their populations were growing, they had younger populations there. So, what is it that we need to do to unleash that power? So, we sat around and said if we structure our business this way, if we focus on different types of products, so that products will lower out the pocket costs vs. more premium products where Russia was going to. Then, we have that potential to succeed. So, we created the vision and we created an action plan, two-year action plan that said this is what we’re going to do, this is how it’s different, this is what we are going to do the same, because there were some similarities in how we ran the business. By going through those steps, we created a vision that, quite frankly, has our CIS markets growing 2 to 3 times faster than Russia and becoming much more profitable by which we can invest those profitability for even more future growth. That was a change in mindset. That was an installation of a vision and, actually, people get very excited about that, especially in CIS, because now they are not being considered as a sales arm of Russia. They have a future that they can create and help realize. And, once you give people that power, and once you give them that opportunity, it’s amazing what they can accomplish. And I’ve benefited from that energy.
9. Did you face any resistance to change?
Frankly, in Russia change is a daily event. I have a lot of admiration for Russian people because of their resilience. You know, if the things happened in America that have happened in Russia over the last twenty years, I’m not sure America would be doing as well as Russia could given the resilience of its people. The difference in a crisis in America is that can’t buy your new Mercedes this year, the difference in crisis in Russia is that you’re really worried about how do I feed my family, how do I take care of my children. I exaggerate but I do think that the people in Russia are very resilient and can deal with change. So, one observation would be, in Russia, I think, change is easier to enact than it is in more developed countries just because people expected and they are not surprised by it and they can work their selves through it. The challenge that I find is not, are people open to the change. It is do they believe that the change is, actually, going to benefit them. How do they do well in the change? How many examples of people standing up and saying, “Okay, this is how we are going to do it differently” and then, everybody kind of steps back and they say, “Okay, is it for real? Will it really happen? Will it not happen?” You know, people sit on the sidelines. So, the biggest challenge I have in Russia is getting people in the game, to help drive the change and to help enact that to make it happen. And that’s hard. I mean, people have been almost anesthetized by the amount of change going around them to get them engaged and to have them go your path. And commit is the difficult piece.
10. What helped you to deal with it?
What I have found to be useful, number one is again, I think, you as a leader need to embrace and you need to really believe. Don’t ask people to do what you won’t do yourself. If you don’t believe it than your organization is never going to believe you. So, it got to go all the way down to the core of your being that this is something that you will do. So, that’s number one. It’s the visible piece of it. Number two is you need to get people on your side. You need to get those thought leaders, the allies that can help institute the change and that may not be your direct reports. There is, probably, somebody sitting in Accounting that people pay more attention to than, perhaps, the Finance director, because they have a certain respect. They’ve been in the organization for a long time. They are respected in different ways. If you can get them on board, then they become a change leader for you. you need to have those speckled through the organization, and those are people that are respected, their opinions matter. The last piece that I find successful is you have to communicate. You have to tell people what you are doing, why you are doing it and the reasons why the change will be beneficial to the business and to them. And then you need to communicate early wins. I mean you need to be able to demonstrate to the organization – this is where we’re going, this is what we’re doing and this is the success that we are seeing, so that you build that momentum. You know, they talk about moving the big flywheel. You know, you have this huge stone wheel that takes forever to get going but once it gets going, you can’t stop it. So, you need to put your shoulder and you need to move the flywheel and slowly slowly it gets to the momentum and then you can’t stop it. If you can do that in an organization than you can go through the change.
