John O'Keeffe, Managing Director of Diageo Russia and Eastern Europe Hub, tells about the most important values which he uses in his everyday life and in business - optimizm, trust and listening to his gut.
1. What values are of the most importance for you?
Great leaders generally have great self-insight, they generally know themselves very-very well and they know what they're capable of and what they're not capable of. And any great leader knows his values and spends a lot of time understanding that. I think that only by knowing your values you can be an authentic leader. That's the cornerstone of great leadership. In terms of my own values, not just in work but in life in general, I suppose I'm an optimist, I'm a glass-half-full-person, I find it very difficult to work with pessimists and I find it very difficult to work with people who take energy from me. Coming back to curiosity, I suppose I have a value around learning, around the need to be constantly learning. Wherever I lived I tried to learn something new - imagemaking or cross-country skiing in Russia. But I think being a student makes you humble and that's probably another big value in many ways for me. I'm not a humble person, I don't go around and hang back in my achievements. I mean humility in the sense that I believe everybody has something to value. And no one is more important than somebody else, and I think everybody has something to contribute. Again, the role of a leader is to find where in the organization this or that person can best use his talents. Of course there're some cases when you have to exile the person from the organization because his talents can be best used elsewhere. But the point is that the person is no more and no less important that anyone else. The other value I have is - trust my instincts. I believe that you need to do all the analysis, you need to look at options, you need to go into detail to a ground level. But at the end of the day for me, I listen to the voice in my head or the feeling in my stomach when it comes to decisions both in work and in life in general.
2. How do you manage to be an optimist?
I think it's just about a disposition in life, and to lead the business you have to live in the world of possibilities, you would be drown in anxiety if you will be always looking at the negative things and what could go wrong. And unfortunately there're a lot of people who are anchored that way. But I think if you want to succeed in business, when you're an entrepreneur or you're in a more established corporate entity, you have to be able to reach for the stars, you have to be able to seek up growth and to be optimistic. And with optimism you have to be able to align people to buy into that down the organization. I think that's the trick actually. Optimism in itself is not enough, you need to engage with people, you need to make people feel that there's a possibility there. I do believe that you've got to face reality, but there're two things here: people know when you stick your head in the sand. Take the current crisis. For today, you would have no credibility as a leader if six months ago you told your people that everything's fine. You have to face reality but the thing is what you do in this reality, that determines whether you're an optimist or not, and determines, in my belief, whether you can be orientated towards growth or oriented towards decline. So I think it's important to face the reality, it's the lens which you look through afterwards.
3. Do you have any example on that?
I remember the experience in the Norex when I lived there for two years as a general manager for Sweden and Finland, and we were very tax inefficient in one of our entities - we wanted to pay tax but we didn't want to pay too much tax. There was something wrong and I gave it to the experts, the tax consultants came back and said that basically nothing can be done the way you're structured in that particular issue it was optimal. And coming back to my value of listening to my instincts there was something that I just didn't feel right about. The experts were telling me that nothing could be done, I read the report, I couldn't contradict it. Those guys were smarter than me, they had degrees in math and tax that I could never had, but I kept on refusing to accept it. And six months later they realized that there was another way to become more tax efficient. And for me the lesson on that is that it's important to have a healthy disrespect for authority. It's important to take experts' views to certain picture and not be intimidated by that. I think you need to listen to that, but I think at the end of the day you also need to listen to that voice in your head, and when there's something you don't feel is right, you need to call it. You need the confidence to keep calling it until you get to a better place..
4. Did you have any example when you had to make any decisions based on values?
In my experience a leader having a set of values is important, but actually ingraining them into the organization is more important. When it comes to things like compliance and control or doing the right thing I think that you have to have values that are very explicit in the organization, and you have to have processes and controls around those values. For me it's not good to expose values, for example: "Let's always do the right things!", because that's not always going to insure that the bribe was not paid down the organization when pressure is put on. So I think the job of a leader, and here in DIAGEO, where we take compliance and control very seriously, is how we push controls and checks in place through out the organization. And secondly we must create a culture where people feel comfortable asking questions. Is it ok if I do this? Am I under pressure to do this? And if the organization doesn't have a culture where people can come and check a question it can get in trouble. It's a combination of process and control, and the culture that you must build in the organization where people are encouraged. Because you cannot legislate for every scenario that's going to happen, but you can create environment where people always check when they have uneasy feeling. At the end of the day everyone knows that if you have some feeling in your stomach that there's something that shouldn't be done. And you have to make sure that that's ok for surface in the business.
5. Bill Gates proposed to use 5% of the best people's time to solve the problems of society.
That's quite right. There's more and more thinking now in the corporate world about how can we enrich the society that we're operating in beyond giving tax to the government and giving jobs and how can we use our resources and in our case not just financial but people resources as well. It's the right thing to do, isn't it? And also it makes good competencies as well because the better the society is the better it is for the corporate entity to thrive and succeed in turn.
6. Does doing something useful give people more motivation?
This year in autumn and spring a couple of hundred of people from this business went to work in a hospital. And it's amazing for the hospital - we painted it and cleaned it, and we contributed it in a practical way. But it did more for the moral of this team and this business, than any teambuilding event and team party or any corporate event you can do - that's for people feel good doing good things. I think it's a great human thing to do. And any corporation is made of human beings, and the more we can make a connection in the society that we're operating in, the better it is. Ultimately the more your people are engaged, the more successful that corporation can be.
7. What is the biggest challenge for you now?
We're now living in unprecedented economic times and the global downturn is creating a lot of challenges for every corporation and every business. DIAGEO is a very strong organization but we are not immune. Certainly, my objective for DIAGEO Russia is to emerge from the downturn to a stronger position that we entered it. How am I doing that? First of all, I'm doing what every good corporation should be doing now - cleaning the house in terms of its costbase, rightsizing and getting lean - that's good for the good health of the organization. Secondly, I think it comes back to my optimist point and to my nature, I try to look at the crisis as an opportunity. For example in our industry consumers are trading down, they don't buy as valuable whiskey brand as they used to a year ago, for example they were used to Johnnie Walker Black Label, they might be buying Johnnie Walker Red Label. Or if they were buying Johnnie Walker Red Label they might trade down to White Horse. Rather than fight that we're trying to exploit that and we're introducing new brands on lower price point, we're introducing smaller pack sizes at easier price points. Everybody at the moment has been impacted by this downturn, people feel very insecure and they bring that anxiety to work. And at work the further anxiety is job layoffs, etc. I think in this case it's important for leaders to be over-communicative in many ways. One of the things that I'm trying to do at the moment is to communicate an awful lot in the business about where are we, what's the financial health of our company, what are we doing, why are we doing certain things, how can people help. And I think working really hard and keeping people at the speed on what's going on is a important antidote to anxiety that is quite tangible at the moment.
8. How are you dealing with this challenge?
I think ultimately you've got to face reality and put reality on the table. Because otherwise you will loose credibility. And if you loose credibility as a leader there's nowhere you can go. Then there's a component of the leadership team to give a prospective to where we can move forward with this reality. And that is a challenge to me at the moment: how do we get people understand that there's a brighter future. There is brighter future. This is an economic cycle, and it can be in six months or twelve months - all of the experts say that, although I'm skeptical about what the experts say, but it will come. And I think it's important we can hold hands of people in a mature adult-to-adult conversation rather than adult-to-child where you say that everything is fine. Ultimately the organization will be stronger. And I'm trying to come through this downturn with a stronger attitude. And to do that I need the employees who are massively engaged.
