Adrian Marley, General Manager, DHL Russia, tells us about the strongest leadership competency – commitment to excel. He also tells us about his three most valued management principles: quality, respect for people and humor.
1. What do you think is your strongest leadership competency?
I think it's my drive and my commitment to excel. You have to have this drive, to say to yourself "I want to be the best at something". Once you've done that, you then need to ask what you need to do to achieve that, and to focus every day on excellence.
Whenever I'm asked about what makes a good manager, or to talk about the competencies I consider important as a manager, my response is very simple. You don't necessarily need an MBA or a fancy degree.
For me, there are three things that are the foundation of good management: quality, respect and humor.
2. Can you explain what you mean by that?
To sum it up in a couple of sentences: You have to strive for quality because without that you won't have anything that anybody will want to buy. Respect is probably one of the most important things for me. I always use the example when I'm talking about respect to anybody that every morning I come to work, I park my car, and I usually see the lady from the cleaning company we use on the stairs on my way to the office. I will always greet her with a "good morning". You must recognize everything that is going on around you, as if you ignore what's going on around you then you won't get very far.
Respect is not just to be shown to my boss or his boss or anybody else; it's to be shown to everybody that you deal with. This is particularly important when you're going through difficult times for business. Now is precisely the time when you need to show respect for other people. And through that respect, you can coach people to do more. People feel more comfortable listening to what you are asking them to do because they can say: "Ok, this guy is alright. He always has been straight with us." I think these are the most important things.
3. What about humor?
Humor is important because if you can't smile, then things can easily become a little bit miserable. There are many companies I worked for in the past where people are overly serious about what they do everyday and I think it reflects in the results too. I think if you apply quality, respect and humor then you tend to get the results that you want. And if you walk out of here after this interview and you stand in the middle of our customer service department, you'll hear the effects of that because you will hear people being good to other people on telephones, being nice to them. That's where it comes from.
So, returning to our commitment to excel, we need to be sure that we are doing what we do better than anybody else, because if we can manage that then we will have something to sell to people, and that's the most important thing for us. We believe we achieve that now, and we work very hard to ensure it happens. Plus, within our own business, we want to excel against other countries, to be ahead of Turkey in the quality of what they are doing, ahead of the US, UK and other countries, and that's particularly strong within this country. It's actually very useful here because it's probably the most competitive country I've ever worked in, in terms of people wanting to strive to be better. And if you can tap into that then you can really get something going.
4. Can you give any examples?
Within our organization obviously we have a sales force, quite a large sales force, and we measure its performance in a multitude of ways. It's not just about how much business they bring in and how often they see customers. This measurement process is something which we use throughout the world: all countries have the same thing. When
I first returned to DHL in Russia two years ago, it was very important to me that as a country we were the best in terms of sales - not just in terms of revenue, but in terms of sales process. Because many of the comments being made elsewhere about Russia were that it was easy to grow 50% when you're in the right place at the right time, when you don't need to do anything at all.
It was very important for me that we excelled as the best professional sales force in the world. We set about doing that, and we used this particular management tool with a system of traffic lights to ensure that each process within sales was performed to the best possible level, with the sole purpose of ensuring that we were the first in the world in terms of sales process. Those are the drivers that you have in terms of wanting to push the organization to excel.
Every single day in everything that you do you are trying to achieve excellence. I think it's very important for us, because it gives us the recognition that we need within our own organization, and it certainly gives you recognition from your customers because they say: "That's a great product that you are selling to me, I'm going to stay working with you" as opposed to with your competitors.
5. Did you ever have a problem with your top sales people?
Absolutely! With the system I've just told you about, when we first applied it people had to spend probably an hour a day at the end of the working day inputting all the information that was required to be entered into the database.
Without question, lots of people were not happy to do that, but the first month that we topped the sales charts, and I'm talking now about the sales process, not necessarily about revenue, the "light went on" for a lot of people, and they realized how important it was to maintain that level of quality. It was my job to ensure that the data entry process, which was taking an hour, could be cut down to fifteen or twenty minutes because I have to acknowledge that you can't expect people who have worked very hard throughout the day to spend an extra hour on admin.
So, in combination with saying we had to achieve excellence, I took it upon myself and our sales manager took it upon himself to ensure that we could help improve the quality of the process.
6. What was the system?
It was actually recording the data in the United States, online, so there was a lag. There were more interesting issues with top sales people, including keeping them under control. By under control, I mean keeping them motivated, keeping them going in the direction that you want them to go.
Once you have people moving at the right speed in the right direction, it's not just the amount of commission you pay to them. What's also important is acknowledgement, personal acknowledgement of what they've achieved. I find that the more you bring to the attention of the wider audience the success of one person, the bigger the impact that it has particularly when you have sales people with big egos. They like to be noticed, and that's good because they should be rewarded for what they do right and acknowledged for what they do. It's not just about paying them money; it is about other people knowing what they have achieved. When we sign up a new piece of business, I will contact every single person who's been involved and say "well done, that's a really good piece of work". I think that has a huge value.
7. There are a lot of debates about how to strike a balance between reward and recognition.
From my own experience, when I came back here two years ago, it was very important to me to look at what we were paying. The way the market was growing here two years ago, if you didn't pay reasonable salaries you didn't have good people working for you. Basically, everybody was moving on. You also had to establish a benchmark whereby you were seen as being a good employer, and we did that in a number of ways.
Of course you have to pay reasonable salaries but also you need to be appealing to the potential work force as a good employer. We did a great number of things to ensure that that's what we were. Last year we won a Russian "employer of the year" award with our business, and customer service awards in the CIS region.
All of these things add to the perception that "Hey, that's a good company to work for". In terms of those people who are purely motivated by money I don't think they would last long in our business, because if they are, then a lot of the values that you need to display to be successful are not going to be there. I think that if the person is purely obsessed with earning more and more, then the value they add to your business ultimately goes down.
8. The opposite is somebody who is sharing all values but is not performing.
You want a blend of the two. It goes back to what I said about commitment to excel. A commitment to excel includes the ability to understand the balance between the two things. I think that's the best way to put it. Ultimately, it's probably fair to say that neither of the extremes are going to have a lot of value for your business going down the road in terms of the business. You need to keep the approach broader.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on July 23, 2009
