There are two things which are important for Victor Saeijs, Vice-President Sales Eurasia for Nokia, - getting the best out of people, whether these are individuals or teams and stretching the people he works with to achieve the utmost results.
1. What is your strongest leadership competency?
The competency which I think is the most important and which I believe I'm strong in is getting the best out of people, whether these are individuals or teams. I love to work with teams and bring them to the next level of performance while performing what they're doing. We're reaching very stretched targets but we do it also with a lot of fun and enjoyment. I strongly believe that you spend so much time at work, and if you don't love what you're doing and if you're not engaged entirely with your own team - so why are you doing it? That's number 1 competency and leadership skill that I practise every single day.
2. Could you explain how you do it?
I used to work in Russia from 1994 till 1997, now it's my second period when I work here, and I actually loved to work in Russia. Why? Because I had the opportunity to build up a team from nothing, when I came here I was alone, I recruited a number of sales and logistics people, it was not in Nokia, it was in the other company. I recruited a lot of very talented team members, many of them had a better background, they had some physics or mathematics or engineering degree, but in the competencies of relationship building, sales, communication skills they were not always at the required level. What I practise constantly and I always worked in companies which practise it - that was learning by doing. I threw my people in the deep, and they could either swim or drawn. But I do it a managed way. I love to see that people really stretch and challenge themselves by going to the situations they are not familiar with. But if I go back to this example in 1997, it's important to stay very close with the individual team members and see what their weaknesses and strengths are and you help them to develop the weaknesses to the right required level.
3. Are there any other things about it?
If you think about target setting, you want to stretch the individuals and the teams to better. And the moment people understand that they can actually do better, and they get the hang of it, and most of the time they want to have more of it. So it was also about creating this appetite, wanting to excel and wanting to achieve and wanting to get something back out of this achievement. It's interesting enough but in my whole working life, these three years from 1994 till 1997 were the most defining period of my own professional skillset of my leadership. I really enjoyed that.
4. Do you have any dilemma in delegation of responsibility?
In many cases it doesn't work. If you work at CEO level, if you look at Olli-Pekka Kallasvuo and his leadership team to a large degree it will work. Because the leadership team is at such a high professional level and so much self-empowered that you expect them to go. But even at that level, as CEO, he sometimes has to look at the details. I see that this way: you basically want to bring your team members into uncharted territory, you allow them to delegate, but also delegation to your team members means that as a leader you need to provide the right environment. First of all this environment should be where failure is okay. Actually, Nokia provides this kind of environment. And if you fail earlier, you will achieve better because you learn by yourself. It's about allowing the people to experiment and guiding them to the right direction.
5. What does delegation mean for you?
Another thing about delegation - and a lot of people are struggling with it including me - is that delegation doesn't mean that you shouldn't build checkpoints in terms of where you're in a process and whether the things really have been followed up - that's one thing. The second thing is that you don't need to master the details because you don't only stay at the strategic level, you have to understand what is happening in the whole organization. Sometimes especially when things are getting stuck or in times of crisis, you need to go into the details to understand what is happening to provide the right guidance to the team members, and you can start to pull back when you see that the things are going well. If you're a young manager you tend to think that you have a team of five or ten team members reporting to you and you just manage what they are doing. But it's not as easy as that. You will do need to provide the right guidance, you do need to build the right check-points, the right KPIs and tracking mechanisms to track the process. And your responsibility as a leader is to understand what happens.
6. What do you mean by stretching?
By stretching I mean to stretch the ambition level. If you have a certain target, for example, where you are as a company at a certain period of time, you can take a safe path and know that you will actually get there, or to have a higher ambition level. We want to get to that place and we will do it this and this way. And what's also very much Nokia's philosophy is to put the targets a bit higher than initially the team thinks you can do. And it leads to trying to find ways to do things differently to be able to get there. Just by running faster, working harder, you will not going to get there. The real business breakthroughs or breakthroughs which are made when people and teams are challenged to do things differently, and if you put stretched goals in place and you keep your teams in a right level, you don't have to think of hiring 50 more people to reach that goal - it's not the answer. The real answer is about innovations and trying to find more effective and efficient ways to get there.
7. How do you measure the weight that a person in your team can carry?
You only find out by doing, and this is something you cannot simulate, everybody's different. And of course you need to pick up the signals. You know your organization, you know who is your talent pool, who want to be stretched. And in any team, and also in Nokia, there are people who are great performers, but they need a little bit to be challenged. By understanding who is who and where they are you can also understand what a certain individual or a team can or cannot take. And one group you will stretch more than another. But at the end of the day it's one team. You have to pick up the early signals that the things are not working at a certain point of time, you just can't put more and more on the individual's shoulder, you would need to either slow down with that particular individual or find smarter ways to organize things because it doesn't work with everybody.
8. How do you get the person from overstretching?
I can say two things about it - one thing which for me is very important, and I try to convey the same message and the team is actually doing it - it's that you can work hard, but you must play hard and rest hard. I've been in satiations within Nokia in another parts of the world for example in Czechoslovakia when I was a GM there. When I arrived there I saw that more or less all team members had 12, 15 or 20 weeks of holiday which accumulated over the last few years and they were taking one week of holiday per year. I asked them why they didn't take their holidays and spend their time with their families going skiing or to the seaside, and they answered that they were so busy and they were not allowed to do it which was absolutely wrong. I firmly believe that holidays must be there, you must spend time with your family, with your passions or your inner soul and you regenerate and then you will handle the work pressure. If you don't do it, you sacrifice your life and you sacrifice the quality of you as a professional. I've seen cases in Nokia of people who had challenges there, and as Nokia we deal with it very humanly, we allow the individual to take time off, to do some other job as we do believe that not everybody has the profile to do the certain job, and maybe the person is on the wrong role, though the person is very good. And then we identify what kind of jobs this person can fit in and help him to move to the right position. And if it really doesn't work out, you have to shake a pie from both sides - if it doesn't work then it doesn't work. And that's part of running the business.
9. What do you do in Nokia not to make people overburn?
We encourage them in Nokia as well and I don't think it's happening enough, and I have a number of colleagues especially in the last two or three years which have taken from six to twelve months of sabbatical, and many of them came back to Nokia. I'm giving some insider information but still my wife will not like what I'm saying, but I would love myself at a certain point of time to take six or nine months off and do something I want to do, I would do it very soon not because I'm burned out but because I think life's too short to only work. But my wife thinks differently about it and she's more traditional, I should work it out with her and find agreement about the proper time for it. I would like to spend more time with my family, I have three young children and I would like to spend more quality time with them.
10. What about the involvement of the team?
There are limitations to what you can do by phone or e-mail without face-to-face contact. And at the first part of the year we had economic crisis and cost control, and we did very little travelling, only essential travel to customers and to really important meetings. And you could see that in the interpersonal contact within the teams in Asia or Ukrainian team or Turkish team with sales or global team things sometimes were not moving as smoothly as they should. Since summertime we started to travel again, and now people are reconnecting and now we're getting back on track. But it was a painful period when the things didn't move the way they should without this face-to-face contact.
Prepared by 
