Being a connector between people is the strongest competency of Jean-Luc Duramy, Director DuPont Eastern and Central Europe. "It's like building a football team - you need to make sure you have players with different competencies who play in different parts of the field", he says.
1. What is your strongest leadership trait?
I think in my case there are so many competencies but the strongest one is bringing people together. You know, building a team, making people collaborate, making people talk to each other - that's what I think is one of the strongest competencies from my sight. But those days when you are within a corporation or organization you need to make people work together. I call it being a connector, that's the way I describe it.
2. How do you manage to do it?
You know, I use the word "connector" but I could use "coach" or "facilitator" instead. The day-to-day for me is very busy. You need to build a team so you need to find people willing to collaborate with others and then you need to make them understand that even if they are very competent - and I think I have many competent people in the team - they won't do things by themselves, so they need to connect with other people with different characteristics. I mean I consider that people who are older in the organization can coach people who are younger, but think about the tools we have at our disposal: we have web, we have Facebook, we have Twitter - we have all these tools we are not really using when we're in the corporation, where people have to share knowledge. The young people can also coach the older. So either you make the talent that you bring from outside and who doesn't know the company you are working in very well bring all the personal characteristics and competencies to the corporation. Or you make the one who is already in the corporation, who had been working many years in the corporation bring what he knows is good for the corporation. It's like cooking. You need to find the recipe. Is there a recipe? I'm not sure. But if you try, you increase your chances to achieve something.
3. What is the chemistry of that process?
The way to do it every day is not to be complacent. You have to recognize if things are going well, if they are not, you need to be honest with people you need to tell people the truth - it's equally important. They shouldn't balance between good things and bad things and then reconcile them - they are to put the real stuff on the table. For instance, we are in Russia but we depend on people who are based in Germany, UK, France - we are part of a big corporation. You can only see things which are in your environment, you don't see what is happening somewhere else and where people can bring you something so you connect people together.
In my experience - and there are people around me who can testify about that - if you have new people in your corporation - and I have many new people in my organization - who connect up with people from somewhere else who are considered competent then you don't even need to bother, I mean, the chemistry will go relatively naturally between most of the people - that is one part.
4. What is the second part?
I was talking about Facebook, Twitter and so on. So the other part is that we have tools as well. You have people, you have a process and you have a system. My job is to make all these dots connected, that's what I call being a connector. It's not only about people, it's also very important that those people understand that we're in the context, we have processes to deal with and we have tools at our disposal - a piece of paper, a computer, a spreadsheet. We have a fantastic system at our disposal today that we are not using. That's an issue which is hot at the moment in my mind - what can I do to make sure we are using the technology of our century to make people connecting even better and making them part of the community so that they get knowledge in this community they can deliver it better where they are. That's the way I describe it.
5. What is the most critical part in connecting people?
I can never know if I am successful in bringing good people and making these people work in a team - that's a constant challenge, point number one. You can never be sure you have done it. It's like building a football team - you need to make sure you have players with different competencies who play in different parts of the field. The first thing to do is to bring the players and if they don't play well you put them on the bench. Maybe after the bench you keep them out of the team. That's the most difficult thing. For many years I've been working to reach the point where you say that performance management is very important. And on the field it is very important to make sure that they understand they have to play the same game. Say, we play football on the field but some of them prefer to play basketball and it's not going to work. You need to make sure the rules and the criteria for performance are clearly defined. The team spirit and the collaboration are very important. You need to bring people with different characters together, same with a football team - you need a star on the field. But if you have only stars it's not going to work. You need to have a good balance and a mix of different people that you will need.
6. Have you succeeded in it?
Are we successful? It's always in the context. In business life we always keep moving and keep changing. The current context, macro economical context is search but maybe we need a different type of player for example. So you need to be always pushing forward success and at the same time if you are not satisfied with the result, you push the envelope, you raise the bar and you increase the chance that the team will be also going on with you and sharing your energy. It's not a secret that a leader is not a single person. If you have more people in your team who are also leaders, you increase your chance to be successful. I've been working many years, I've seen a lot of successful teams and I've been also confronting teams - that was not easy to make it happening. There is only one way to behave - you need to have courage to decide that some people should go out of the team - that's also a part of building a winning team, I'm afraid.
7. Could you give any concrete examples of that kind of approach?
I've been dealing with the same type of the situation years ago in another country, in another context, in another environment and, due to my experience, goal number one, using business terminology, is having only A-players in the team, only top-players - people who are ambitious, people who want to make it. But during the interview make sure that they are very serious about our assessment and about working in a team. So take only best people into your team, bring them and be honest, tell them "We picked up you to be in this team, it will be challenging because you will have to learn a lot". I knew that for two or three years it could be very boring, to be honest. The recruitment strategy was very easy - we chose the best ones and we brought them together. If they left in three or four years, it was not a big issue, we knew there would be a turnover. Many of those people are now working in other companies and you know what? I consider our job done. We developed good people; the only challenge is to make them stay with us. We already have processes, systems to make sure we're raising the bar, we're developing them. Then if at the end of this process - in two or three years - out of ten people - or five as an example - two or three are staying with the corporation and there is still room for development and we are happy with the team - job is done. If others are going somewhere and become successful - job is done. It's life, it's like molecules in the body - you need to change from time to time to renew your body.
8. If there are only stars on the field there'll be a complete disaster.
Real Madrid, we've come to remember what they call themselves, that's what we're going to do next year. This is a team where they have small budget and they are successful. Personally, I like stories about all those teams which are less known, have fewer budgets, which are more creative. You picked up guys who want to do it, who are eager and, let's say, hungry for success and it's working. Sometimes you don't have a star on the field and we will be very interested what will appear again in - I never remember the word in Spanish - Galacticos - where they bring all the stars, like Kaka, Benzema. It would be very interesting how they're going to make it together. But when it's working, it's beautiful. Is it sustainable? I don't think so. And that's why if we're in business life having too many stars on the field when we need to achieve result year after year, quarter after quarter, is no good. I think it's more sustainable to have a mix between solid people and stars. And you also need to groom the stars because if you don't groom a star you don't groom people who will need enough character, ambitions and drive to take more responsibility compared with other people who are more balanced in their life, if we go back to business life. So you need a mix. If you have one solid person and many stars it's not going to work. If you build with many solid people and few stars, I think, you increase your chance that with a mix and development of people you will have a sustainable organization and a winning team.
9. What should be done in this case?
It is obvious, coming back to people, processes and systems within a corporation, that we have what we call "people management processes". I spend a lot of time in terms of people management. And it is obvious that we have - I wouldn't call them elaborated and sophisticated, but on the other hand they are elaborated and sophisticated - processes where we are extremely serious about performance management, where we have what we call personal targeted development. We ask everybody to go for their own assessment as well as the assessment of people who are working above them, their peers and people who are below them, about twenty-three dimensions. We ask everybody to try to understand where they position themselves, where they are, what is important to them, if they want to have a balanced life - balancing work and private life, if they are ambitious and stay disoriented or project-oriented - so you can categorize the A-people, to understand better who they are. Based on that there are certain characteristics where we try to identify who are those people we should be grooming. So we have talent management processes. It's like in life, it's not natural selection, it's a dynamic process. So you can be, for instance, two or three years with us and you can be targeted as a potential talent - high-pot, as we call them. Of course, these people are followed in a different way, we try to make sure that we give them the tools to develop themselves in an accelerated way, in a better way. We have those stars, talents, and we have all those processes to accelerate their development, to groom them, to expose them, to make sure they are shadowing over leaders. We make them moving from one job to another one, from one subsidiary to another one, from one type of function to another one - we try to have that. Some of them are developing, others are falling down, because it's life, they're changing their life and their environment.
10. What is your experience of developing people in your organization?
I am grooming each and every individual with their performance, with their personal plans. Every quarter we go for processes where we try not to cover everybody but to cover the vast majority of people. One quarter we focus on top talents, another quarter we want to make sure we put young people on the radar screen of the leadership who are not yet in this basket of top-talents, but who, we believe, could be in this basket. In addition we have people who are targeted as very important for the future but those people have their pluses and their minuses. So we have all these processes where even top-talents who have fantastic characteristics but are a little bit lousy on other characteristics need to improve. They should understand that nothing is for granted, they should improve those aspects which are their weaknesses, that's part of the assessment. If I look at the moment at the leadership of DuPont, let's say in Europe, you have people who are part of leadership who have been on both lists, which is normal. But you also have people who in their career hadn't been on both lists but they made it, which is good process. You increase the chances to have the mixed bag of different individualities with completely different backgrounds.
