Richard Gaskin, President and CEO of GE Money Bank in Russia, names the pecularities of working with Russian colleagues and tells us about the most important leadership competence.
1. What is your strongest leadership competence?
I think a good leader doesn't spend too much time on thinking what his particular strength is. But something I work hard on in this business is trying to make sure that we get a good level of engagement across the entire business. By engagement I mean connecting people at every level of the organization even to the strategy of the business or to the priority that the business is facing right now and getting them on board with what it is we're trying to achieve, understanding the contribution that they make and where it's going to take them and where it's going to take the business.
2. Can you be more specific about how you are doing that?
Probably the best way to do it is to give you a recent example of what we have actually done up-front. We all have been through the most incredible financial crisis that most of us hopefully will never face again in our lifetime. And we had to quickly change the culture and the mindset of the people in our business from a growth mode to an optimized and downsize mode in the space of a couple of months, to make sure that they understood why we had to do that, what it meant for them, keep them motivated and focused on the job we want them to do in the future. One of the first things that we actually do is to naturally paint the vision or create a focus of what it is we want to do. We develop very simple communication that people can relay to. Then we go out and communicate face to face, I do a lot of face-to-face communication myself. We also make sure that the line management cascades that down as well. That communication should be very open about what we are facing and what it is going to mean but also offer hope and focus for people to get through the period. The popular phrase that I was using to talk about the impact of the crisis was "sometime between now and when you retire the good times will definitely return". But right now we actually have to stay in the business through this crisis and that means that we will have to make some tough decisions. Some people will lose their jobs. We have to do that so that we can get the business through the crisis. We should be well-positioned when the market does return. We are very honest with that message; we shared that vision with people all around the organization.
3. Russian people tend to be passive and obedient under the oppression of their past. How do you deal with it?
I know exactly what you are talking about. When I first came here we would have a lot of themes we wanted people to engage within the organization. I would issue a CEO communication; senior management team would be responsible for communication of their people. But we weren't getting any traction inside the business, any genuine buying or evidence of engagement. We were trying to figure out how to solve that. One of the ways we solved it was that we created what we call champions' networks. What we figured out is that generally people are more influenced day-to-day by their friend or colleague than they are by me. For example, we have what we call compliance champions. A big focus for GE is having an organization which is compliant not just with the letter but also with the spirit of the law. So we actually created a network of compliance champions and this basically means that for instance in one of our regions like Samara we have a compliance champion. He was a member of the sales team and his job is actually take the messages and the initiatives that we want them to expand and be the representative of all those things in the region. So during their team meetings when they are interfacing with colleagues - because they are now recruited and believe in it - they are actually driving that with their colleagues and friends who are more inclined to listen to them than they are from some message from an Ivory Tower. We actually replicated that in a lot of different areas. We have compliance champions, operation risk champions, so getting people all the way through the hierarchy of the business they can act very effectively at the peer level as proven very successful for building up the engagement.
4. Do these champions communicate somehow within the network?
Absolutely. And usually people are very proud of being involved in it as well. The compliance champions or the GE opinion survey champions are usually coordinated by somebody centrally so that we make sure that we have consistency of the messages that go across. We would have a lot of conference calls with them. When we go out to do some regional things we meet with them specifically on their topic to reinforce the importance of what they are doing. Operational risk is something we were taught in the last few years and we have to train people on how it works and what they need to do. They would report regularly on their activity. It is quite well coordinated.
5. How do you combine optimistic view for the future and current reality?
First of all let's talk about the bad side. I think everybody recognizes that during life - whereas it is personal life or business life - they have down-cycles and up-cycles. In a business environment during a down-cycle the mistake that I've made in the past and a lot of people make is to let people know at the last minute. That just frustrates people. Everybody is smart to know when the down-cycle is, everybody is smart to know there will be some impact, where the anxiety becomes unbearable. It happens when nobody is communicating and telling them and being open and honest with them about what it all means. So I think you actually have to do that. The converse of that is the process that you go through is just as successful with the good news-stories as it is with the bad news-stories and just as important. During a grow phase people still want to know where the company is going and what it means for them. The process that we used for the example I gave you is exactly the same as the process we use for everything else. So we shape a vision, we mobilize commitment, we put a very strong action plan, execute against that action plan and then we test it afterwards to make sure that it's actually embedded and it's not just a one-effect exercise that will deteriorate over time.
6. Can you provide an example of some competence which you consider important?
Let me tell you about the most difficult one, that I'm still learning. It has taken me a while to adjust to it. This is the topic of emotional intelligence, understanding of your style and the way you behave and your own emotional triggers - how they actually impact on people that are working with you and whether the desired reaction is the one that you are actually getting because of the way you are behaving. That was something that was drawn to my attention several years ago when I was working in a different GE business. I was the sales leader in the organization. I was very hard and emotional and probably not all that cooperative with my peers if I felt that my functional agenda was being compromised. Someone pointed out to me that was probably something I needed to work on. I was very lucky because GE assigned a coach to me to work on this topic. After several years of understanding it and practicing it I realized that you can achieve things by understanding how you are feeling at that point in time. Say, something annoys you. In the past I would have let you know straight away how annoyed I was and I might felt very satisfied with it. But you would have gone out of the door thinking "that is not the guy I would do the extra 10% for". I've learnt now that when these triggers are coming to be calmer, to be more relaxed, to take extra 10 minutes or an hour or even a day to rethink my approach. When I come back to you to give you some guidance or coaching, I'm lucky to get a much better response from you than I would have done if I acted the way that I would have automatically acted.
