The strongest leadership trait of David Thomas, President Volvo Car Russia, is involving all people in the organization into decision making process. He also thinks that the amount of the information the person has shoud not be the only thing that differs him from the rest of the people in the organization.
1. What is your strongest leadership trait?
I think it's involving and making sure that the people in the team are best qualified to implement things and to make decisions. I'm a great believer that if all decisions are made in my office we will not get a good quality of decision making. Everybody makes right and wrong decisions, but only because of the title in my business card I don't think I'm better in decision making than anyone else. You can always go with the decision from the specialist but you have to give people the opportunity to make decisions and also you have to make people learn from making wrong decisions because you will learn far more from the things you do wrong than from the things you do right. If you do anything right it's ok, but if you do it next time it may not be a good decision. And concerning the things you do wrong you will analyze and think about the things that next time you will do differently. I make sure that I delegate decisions to the lowest level as possible, and it's important to give people the opportunity to express their opinion, and again as a leader you have to decide against their opinion - that's life. But involving as many people as you can is very important for gaining the input before you actually make a decision.
2. How do you do it?
It's about trying to make people empowered to make first decisions and to feedback of how to make these decisions better and to help them understand how they could have made that differently. But you have to delegate. I'm not better than anybody else in the organization and if you don't get people used to make those decisions you wouldn't give the people the experience of decision making, and people have to understand that they work in the organization that does delegate and that encourages them to delegate to their staff as well.
3. How do you encourage people to give the right feedback to you?
It's the robustness of your follower process because if you delegate to people something that is not getting done, then there's an issue. And somebody can feel that he has not the right information about making the decision and he doesn't feel comfortable about implementing that decision. And as a leader you have to follow up and ask the questions because if you delegate something to be done you have to find the reasons why. And also you have to reflect yourself on why hasn't that happened. It's always easy to say that if something hasn't been done, the person is obviously useless and it was the last time you've delegated something to him. So you have to follow up and find the reasons why it hasn't been done. It's not natural to come to the boss and say that you can't do this or you haven't done this before. The human instinct is to keep quiet and hope your boss has forgotten about it, and sometimes they have and sometimes they haven't, but as the boss you have to come back and find out why. And again you should try to create the environment so next time that individual will come back and say that he doesn't' know how to do this or he needs help in doing this. Because your role as a boss is to help people to do their job, it's easy to get the balance wrong and not help the people. But if you help your people to do their job you're encouraging them to learn from that and to do it differently the next time.
4. Very often people think that the advantage of the position they get is the information they obtain. Do you agree with that?
If you believe that your power as a leader is based on the amount of the information you know better than the rest of the organization, then you set yourself to fail. You have to be careful. As a leader of the organization you may have a huge amount of the information, and if you cascade every piece of information you receive from your team, all they get is the same information as you. You have a lot of people with a lot of information and nobody knows what to do with it. You need to be fairly selective in terms of sharing the information with the team and you need to encourage your team to share it appropriately. Some information has to be restricted by its nature, but you also have to filter it in terms of whether this information relevant to each function. So if I have a piece of information that is reflected to PR I will make sure that Alexey and his boss will receive that information and they in their turn will share it with the relevant people within the organization. But if send to Alexey every piece of information that I get, he will be very irritated with it. And he will have too much information to be able to do his job. What I probably bring to the organization is enough knowledge of the industry and what information is relevant to what department, what information is interesting but not vital, and what information is so vital that you need to share it as wide as possible. That's the filtering process. But if you're going to protect the information you get as a leader, you're fooling yourself.
5. Could you give any examples?
Let's take the network function. We take a month' or probably a more frequent meeting led by the network director which focuses on dealers and it is attended by me, my direct managers from sales, marketing and finance and that group makes the decision if this is what we want to appoint, the dealer we don't want any more, which dealers we want, but it's led by the network team or by me, but not by sales and marketing. It has to come from the bottom-up. Those people who are closest to the implication of the decisions, so they have to make it and you have to give them the ownership of that, you don't have to give the ownership so far in the organization that you don't have enough information to make the decision. And you need to give the confidence to people to say that they don't agree and explain the reasons why. And that doesn't come automatically, it requires some coaching. And if a person says that he disagrees with me, may be I'm not going to change my mind but I'll listen to this person. That's a very good example when you have to make every decision about dealers in my office, that's what I did in UK before I came here. I give any confidence I can make decisions about that. But if I leave having made every dealer appointments for the last four years, who else in the organization can do it. That's what comes down to the coaching of the team development, you need to go away in the organizational functions, and that doesn't happen automatically, it takes time to give the people skills and confidence, and here it's all about confidence. Most people who work in a particular business know what's right and what's wrong, they may not have the authority to carry it out and they may not have the confidence to carry it out, and that's what you should be giving to people as a leader.
6. How do you implement the intangible value to the product you sell?
We have a global system in Volvo called On Call which is a telematic which calls to the car, it is a ultimate example of communication with the factory who built it. And the way On-Call works is the way that a mobile phone is built into the car and you have a button in the car, and if a driver has had an accident he presses the button that connects him with a call center. The car has also a GPS system, the call center knows exactly where the car is and they can dispatch either a recovery vehicle or the nearest dealer which see the problem and take the car away. What the system also does is when the car is in the accident with the airbags open the car will automatically call the call center and they will immediately send to the place of the accident the recovery and the emergency services. If you have a breakdown or an accident hundred kilometers from Moscow - it's a fantastic service. When you buy this option, you buy it with conjunction with a satellite navigation and the integrated phone it costs around 2000 Euros. For 2000 Euros you've got a button about the size of the logo on the business card. So we need to try to build 2000 Euros value into a button, and that's quite hard.
7. How do you introduce the values of the service you provide?
We know that the value of this service is tremendous, it fits very well with Volvo brand values in terms of safety and security, but there's a great selling job to try to sell something that is quite intangible until you've been in the situation when this call saves your life. We've done the PR events, we've done the "Trail of Susanin" in terms of getting lost in the forest, if you had On-Call you haven't got lost and you haven't got killed. And we tried to do some dealer training and we tried to communicate to them that this is a service that sits behind the product. And it's particularly challenging in the automotive industry because the automotive industry has such a strong product, it's a great industry to work in, everybody loves cars, you're dealing with something tangible, something that people have emotion about, but above that tangible product you try to sell the intangible product as well. You can see it, but it's so tiny, and you can press it and it will connect you with a call center.
8. People don't read the instructions, how do you explain them the value of this service?
I think it's trying to illustrate the brand qualities in as many ways as possible. The main value for Volvo is safety, it's a hugely important part of our brand, it's the core value right from the founder of Volvo in 1927. The cars are driven by people so everything that is done by Volvo has to do with safety, and safety has to be important when you have an accident, the rest of the time you drive a car and you know that it's safe because of the reputation, and you don't know how safe it is and what car is going to do for you in the accident. We communicate quite a lot of our safety anyway, we show our cars at the events and different shows and tell people how our cars are constructed. The XC60 which we launched over a year ago has Moscow city safety, you can't drive into the car in front of your up to 50 km per hour, and between 15 and 30 K the car will reduce the impact. That's particularly for Moscow traffic and that's fantastic, and that's the standard of XC60. It's hard to demonstrate it because you cannot say to the test driver to rush into the KAMAZ in front of him. But it's important to make people know how safe it is.
