Auditor's business is much client oriented, it's impossible to run the business without people being sure in the level of integrity of the organization, believes Andrew Cranston, Senior partner KPMG Russia and CIS. In the fast changing reality of the crisis the companies must bring to the clients the ideas fitted directly for them, but not the solutions which were up-to-date a month ago.
1. Could you please explain the DQ point?
From my point of view these three things - IQ, EQ and DQ - are multiplicative. You can be very bright, you can have a very high EQ, but without the ability to make things done the value of these two things goes down. I look at it in two ways - one is the ability to manage yourself, and self-discipline is phenomenally important. You rarely find a strong leader that is not self-disciplined, I think that's a real trait. If somebody is not self-disciplined, he never gets that far. But the ability to manage others and to manage projects, hit delivery dates and deadlines. In our business everything is deadline driven. If you cannot meet deadlines, if you have constantly been watched and hurried along, you're not going to be successful.
2. Do you have any example of this DQ competency?
I find it quite difficult to explain this about our own business. I love telling the story about dentist, because dentists are a little bit like auditors. Auditors go around the company, they're trying to find things that are wrong, and not really everybody like this process. Nobody really likes going to a dentist, nobody really likes having an auditor come to see them. And as I hit my early forties, I found out that my mouth began to show signs of age, so I had to find a dentist. I went to two or three recommendations, all of them told me that I needed a lot of work, but the two of them hit with a problem: neither of them could find an anesthetic that would work on me. They were trying to do work and I still had a huge pain. So for me that became the most important issue and I wanted to find somebody who could deliver this service to me. Somebody recommended me the third dentist, and I was loosing hope because I couldn't believe that would work. I explained to that dentist what I wanted, he told me that that day he was not going to touch my mouth but we just talked. He told me why I had this problem with the anesthetic, showed me that he understood that he knew the ways to make it work. And then he gave me his own guarantee and promised me that if I came to him the next week he will do everything to help me. He understood that I was a busy person, but I needed five things done in my mouth and he would do them in one session, so in two hours everything would be done.
3. What had happened next?
I came to him at the appointed time, he was ready for me so I didn't have to wait, all the equipment was ready. And one by one he started the work with my teeth, and went through my whole mouth, in less than two hours. And I felt no pain. I really felt like a million dollars - I've been to the dentist but a felt great because this guy provided such excellent service under such difficult circumstances. IQ - he knew the answers to the problems, he knew how to deal with this anesthetic problem. EQ - he put himself in my shoes and understood all the problems and concerns that I had and managed my expectations incredibly well. And DQ - he delivered, he didn't keep me waiting, and he did all this huge process in a very structural way. What I say to our staff here is that's what you need to do - it's exactly the same. Loyal clients who will find you wherever you go in the town, will not be price sensitive in this particular case. I'll pay 10 or 20 per cent more to have service like that. And that's exactly what you have to do.
4. What values are important for you personally and for organization in general?
You will find our values very similar to the list of values of our competitors, to the list of many British and American type companies. If you look at them they are very common sense and all come down to the fundamental one thing - you should do the right thing. For me it's all about if all the facts are known to the person who's aside the situation, in order they look at the decisions you've made and the actions you've taken and say that this makes sense. For us above all integrity is the most important value. And our business is essentially about selling integrity. Because if there's any question about our integrity, either of business or personal one, it essentially destroys our brand. So for us there will not be any business without people believing in our integrity - that's something that we take incredibly serious, because it is important for everything we do.
5. What values help the organization to stay healthy?
One of the things I saw that I liked was Goldman Sax's set of principles, and I found it quite good to read because it's a little bit detailed by what they mean by each of these things, and I think it give a little bit more color to it. Our own values are quite short, but I think you should get behind what each of them means. A year ago I took this role, I looked at each of these values and I explained more what they meant in terms of behaviors concretely in our day-to-day business, but secondly what they meant that we would not do was to put limits to our behaviors. And I verbalized what we could not do. And it's amazing that people find it incredibly useful when I verbalized the behavior that we could not do. These values only come to life if you build them into your business performance and you say that you actually measure them, and people who follow them will do better in terms of money and in terms of promotion of people who don't, and if you don't do it, it will not come to life. And that's sometimes a difficult thing because you often will have tensions between business objectives, you want to have the total quality, you want to grow your business. And it's always finding of the trade-offs, but if you want to state your values, you have to be able to say no. in our business in particular if you're an auditor and you go into a company, of course you want to have a satisfied client, but at the end of the day you have to be an auditor with your type of reputation. Because you want to be objective and tell the clients the truth all the time even if it's very difficult, even if it hurts. Even if it means that you loose the job. It's a difficult balance that we are going to live every day.
6. Is it possible for you to accept the lack of honesty in people?
The first thing that we say to all our people is consult, if you're facing the situation where you're crossing the line of values, the key thing is to consult. Because if you take a decision and it's wrong and you didn't consult, you're really alone. If you do face the situation where you face a dilemma, you must consult, and if you consult, you're protected at a large extent. In terms of measurement - it's very difficult to measure, but I think a lot of us don't even try to do it. What we do with all of our partners is that we go through a list of things, we consciously think about them for each partner, we consciously think about our own targets. And even by doing that we think about each person, and I think that provokes thoughts, you don't necessary know everything they do out of the building, but you have a good feeling and I think that you can pick up staff from doing that. I think the other point is that you do need to be absolutely consistent when you find bridges of rules and there can be no second guess there. One of the things we unfortunately get from time to time is that a lot of our staff study for professional exams ACCA, and we've had two or three cases over that past three or four years when people were caught cheating at the exam. We all know that there's a culture where cheating is acceptable under certain circumstances and institutions. But we make it very clear upfront that you're in a new world here, this is all about ethical behavior and cheating won't be tolerated. And in every case they go immediately, you cannot make any exceptions and excuses.
