Philippe Graff, the founder of the Dynargie company, tells us about the strongest trait of his company and about his own.
1. What is your strongest leadership trait?
As you know, we have been on the market for 27 years, now it's a wrong time for management consulting and management development because a lot of firms disappear after a few years. Because what they propose is not what the client needs. So 27 years is quite a time for a company, and during this time we have built the company with 14 offices in Europe. And I think the main reason for our success is that we're at the same time international, which means that we're providing our local offices with content and tools in order to help the clients grow. But we also leave them a lot of autonomy at the local level. And I think it's very important because people are people, they are the same everywhere, but there's one thing that is different, and this is culture. And we take into account the culture of each country, and the best person to know how to handle business people in their country is the person from the country.
2. Do you have any concrete example?
For example, in Greece they have developed products and services for Greek companies, in Portugal they have developed other products that are more important for Portugal. For example, in Portugal we have developed a program called "Mystery Client". It's a product or service that helps restaurants and other companies that have a lot of consumers to pay more attention to the consumers. Our consultant goes to a restaurant, doesn't give her mane and observes everything and makes a report on how to improve the quality of service in this area. This is something that has been developed in Portugal, it's very successful there, but today we wouldn't do it in Switzerland, because in Switzerland this has been done 15-20 years ago. I can't say that the Swiss are perfect in this, but in Portugal it was a must-have issue, and it would be a must-have issue in Russia also, and we discussed it with my Russian consultant a few minutes ago. In Russia it's important and in other country it might not be so important. It would be a mistake to do the same thing at the same time in all countries.
3. What is your personal strongest trait?
Before starting Dynargie in 1982, I have been working for a huge company, the Sandoz Group, and I was in the marketing area of this company in Basel and I also worked for Sandoz in South Africa, a country with completely different culture. From the very beginning of my professional life I've been accustomed to work in different cultures and to work in a multinational company. When I started Dynargie with my partner in 1982 from the very beginning we decided that this is going to be a multinational company or it will not exist. We were not going to do something just to make money in Switzerland or to succeed in France, because he's French and I'm Swiss. And on the second year we were already looking for partners in Holland, in Italy and in another countries in Europe. There was no question for us. And I must say it was a good choice because today I understand that the one thing that the consultants in out company prefer and one of the reasons why they stay with us is because we're international, because for them it's much more challenging and interesting. It's not interesting for the consultant in our field, which is the human side of business to work in a purely national organization, it's much more interesting to discover other countries, to go and conduct the workshop in other country - that makes the fun of the business. And we get all these consultants together twice a year, and they discuss with their colleagues in the networks, and this is one of the attraction of the job. Who had started purely nationally, had not probably grown the way we have grown.
4. What do values mean in the everyday life of the organization?
A lot of companies put their values on the wall for the clients who come to them to see. But very often you realize that people do not often implement those values. People would like those values to be the values of the company, but in fact when decisions are taken, very often the values are forgotten. It's important to make sure that those values are something that you print on nice brochures for the stakeholders of the company, but something that is really important for everyone. How do we do it? First of all we have a very long work with the CEO of the company. We make sure that he and his team think that the same values are essentially for the company to succeed. And these values differ from company to company and from business to business. If you're in the banking business integrity will become more important, if you have to choose only four values, than the ability to convince people. We make sure that these values correspond to the company, correspond to the deep belief of the number one person in his team and that it's really in line with the business of the company.
5. What does your company do to help the organizations?
What we do is we make the CEO to speak about these values on an interview or we put it to DVD and show it to people. And then we work in all departments of the organization and in all countries if it's a multinational company by small groups of people and we make them reflect on what these values really mean for them. And more important what these values mean in their daily work, because values must link very closely to what they do every day. Otherwise it's theory. If I'm a bank clerk or an accountant and I receive clients, what does it mean to have the positive attitude value, for example. If the positive attitude value has been chosen by my company, it might mean something for me. These are very concrete things. And if the client comes and complains on the services that were delivered by the bank, and I have the right way to answer him looking at the future in a positive way rather than defending myself. To be positive in this particular situation is difficult, it's not something normal and spontaneous. But if this value had been discussed beforehand during this workshop, if we have been analyzing the situations where you need to implement these values than it becomes automatic for the people to react to the situation according to the value of the company. Because this is what differentiates the company, and the person must be positive in this particular situation. Although it's difficult to do it.
6. What is the first thing of it?
The most important decision in the company is the way you hire people. You can have the best strategy, but if you don't have the right people onboard, you're not going to achieve results that you're looking for. So looking for the right people, hiring the right people is very important. Recently I've read in the newspaper that in Goldman Sachs before you're hired to join the company you go in average to 40 different interviews with 20 or 25 different people. That shows how important for Goldman Sachs is to hire the right people. And this is probably one of the reasons why Goldman Sachs has been so successful during the crisis compared to other companies. You can hire the right people and after a few months you can realize that these people do not practice the values.
7. Is there any example when a head of a department didn't share the values and it influenced the whole department?
It happened in a large international group and in the affiliated company of this group there was a manager who was bringing the results that the group expected from him, but there were more and more complaints from the people working in this company that the boss was very autocratic, didn't listen to people, humiliated them in some occasions by giving negative feedback in front of the whole team. And the company gave this manager a chance to change his behavior during the period from 3 to 6 months, and after 6 months because of he was not changing his attitude and his behavior the owners of the company asked him to leave the company, in spite of the fact that the person was providing the group with the result that was expected. Because the people like this you cannot keep the right people. The best people today want to work in an atmosphere and in a context where they can get the best of themselves. And it's impossible to work with a boss who humiliates you and gives strange remarks in front of your colleagues, you can't get the best of yourself, you feel frustrated. Therefore in the long run to have a person like this as a head of a company is a dangerous thing. In a short term it will be ok but only for figures and profits. But in the long term you're loosing the chances of success, as the best people might leave, and one day you'll realize that you have only one guy on the top and just yes-men below him, and this is a very dangerous situation for a company.
8. Why the issue values versus profit is so important?
If you look at what happened in the financial circles in America, I think that values were completely absent from the education that these bankers have received. People were really reflecting on the crisis and its reasons. And now there's an opinion that we have probably given too little importance to these things in the education of bankers and finance people. It's high time we put to the educational program not just technical skills, nit just financial analysis and all this, but also some lessons on what keeps teams together and why values are important, etc. Also one thing that we must say is that people were going to work for this type of companies being motivated only by money. And they want to make as much money as possible and they don't care about the rest. But let's not generalize.
9. Can you give any example of this kind?
Among banks and financial institutions there are some that made great mistakes, and the most well-known of all in Switzerland is UBS, the number one Swiss Bank which had consciously helped America's taxpayer to evade to cheat the local American administration, and they're paying the high price for it. What we don't speak of are all the other banks which have done their job in the right way. I think that we shouldn't put the label to all financial people, because I'm convinced that many of them have values, but unfortunately the ones that don't have values or don't implement values give the bad name to the whole profession. I'm in favor of introducing this type of teaching in universities. I think this is important, because before people had the religion and it told them something that they had to do and something that you mustn't do to people - all these simple but very important things. Today people believe less and less in religion except for the Muslim part of the world, and this must be replaced by the other moral - moral of well-functioning society where you don't treat other people for nothing and they don't try to cheat them but you try to cooperate with them. I believe that the election of Mr. Obama is a good sign that this type of leaders are becoming increasingly popular and they can be elected President of the United States. I'm not saying that Obama is perfect, but he reflects a number of values that are shared by more and more people in the world independently to their religion and education because that creates a better world. And this is the way we can make this planet to survive.
