David Pearson (Deloitte): "People for the Most Part Want to Go in a Direction And as a Leader, I Think, It’s Critical That You Provide the Vision for Them"
David Pearson, Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer of Deloitte CIS, believes that being optimistic is his core competency, which allows him to bring confidence in his people and help them to believe in themselves.
1. What is your strongest leadership trait?
I'm confident and I think I'm able to use that to bring out optimism and confidence in others. It's probably where I'm strongest. And I work hard to consistently be optimistic.
2. Can you be more specific?
Certainly, and you know the last while has probably proven a few people that thought they were optimistic and found that they were not. People for the most part want to go in a direction and as a leader I think it's critical that you provide the vision for them. We are going to go here, and I'm going to help you as an individual to develop your skills to be able to do X. I don't know if you want to be the best accountant in the world, the best videographer in the world - whatever, we will help you to do that. If you start with that vision, then you're able to work, you're trying to always encourage people to get there, whatever that vision is. It's going to require optimism to help them through the difficult times, to support them when they are going through challenges or problems, and the optimism for them to believe in themselves such that they can accomplish something that they didn't think they could do. So, I think that optimism manifests itself in a number of ways but particularly around developing people. In our business - that's all we are. All we are is people, it's giving the confidence that, "yes, you can do this" - "well, maybe I can't" - "I know you can but if you have a trouble, I'm there to help you". And we have to do that thousands and thousands times a day. And I think that's what optimism is. To make that adds a little bit more to it.
3. What do you think is different about vision vs. dreams?
I think with vision you need to understand even if it's not articulated how you're going to achieve it, and you have to be ready for tremendously hard work to achieve it. So, if I want to be a tennis champion, I better play tennis ten hours a day for about ten years of my life to even come close to having a chance and maybe I have skills, maybe I don't but it's going to take a lot of hard work. And I think that's important for anybody who's trying to achieve something. And that's how I differentiate between vision and a dream. A dream is out there, probably will never happen, but vision - this is what I want and I know what I have to do to get it and I'm going to work hard enough and lead other people to work hard enough to achieve it. And I think that's the difference between the two of them, and that is a big difference. And, certainly, you meet people that have a vision but they won't do the boring stuff. Some of it is boring stuff. Some of this is not sexy, so you have to review this document and it's twenty pages long, it's not interesting, but you have to do it.
4. How can you make a bridge between the need of people to fulfill their dreams and the necessity to work hard?
What I think you have to do... and every one of us has worked in other jobs, you know I started with Deloitte twenty something years ago as an intern. I was the youngest in the office, I did the photocopying most of the days, so I know what it's like, and I think we all do. And what's critical is if you have a vision of where you want to go and you link that to the individual, and such that the individual understands, "ok, my objectives are to become a manager or to get enough skills that I'm able to be an expert in an industry". And, that's important because that links to my objective to providing outstanding client service to all of our clients, so if you're an expert - that's great. And so, as breaking that down, so understand, ok, Dave Pearson's objectives are the same as those of Deloitte. And I think that's critical. That's one of our roles is making that understandable for the young people, and something that they can touch. Giving somebody who's twenty two years old an objective for one that thirty-two, well, that's ridiculous. That won't make any sense. I tell our young people that I always have had a one year plan, a three year plan and a five year plan. Personally, I never made it once to my five year plan, but my one year plan - I nailed it. You know, I decide what I want to achieve this year and I generally achieve it.
5. Is there anything else?
The second thing I think is very critical when you're leading and when it's coming to vision and when you're talking to young people, in particular - one I don't buy all this generation Y and generation X and all that stuff - young people today are generally young people. You know, they want to succeed, they want to be happy. They will have a desire to be successful as well in business and in life, not different then I was twenty a while ago. Our responsibility is to have people to work with them such that there is trust. So, when I sit down with a young person, I hope that the young person looks at me and says "I believe you". And I'm being honest with them and, so, I can say to the young person that, you know, this objective of yours is perfectly aligned with Deloitte, this is fantastic, you're going to do great. Or I can say that it is not aligned with Deloitte, so what are we going to do about that. Naturally, our vision and our objectives of the firm are made up of what our young people want, because that's the core of our people. So, I think that's absolutely critical that you have a foundation of integrity, trust, commitment to each other. It allows you to lead people and they will believe in your vision for them and the firm. So, that comes to, again, hard work. Because you have to build that trust, you have to earn that trust.
6. How you can manage to make people accept it?
I think this is where optimism is relevant. Before I get into dull repetitive work, let's talk about working in the Far East or some remote location. When I was young I would work six months a year in a town of five thousand people in the middle of Canada. You learn a lot about yourself when you are in those situations. You learn a lot about teams. You learn a lot about a different culture because I'm living in a town of 5000 people and I've lived in the city my whole life. It also gave me a great opportunity to lead a big project without much support because I was on an island actually for six months of the year. Your development and my development in this situation was extraordinary because of the opportunity that was given to me, and I would not exchange that for anything in the world. It was fantastic for me. When it comes to doing something repetitive, I think you have to look at it and really focus on how you get better. How do you make sure you don't make mistakes? How do I become more efficient? Should I approach this differently? How can I improve this process? But you always have to have a drive to get better at something. Even though it's a relatively boring process, it's not a waste of time and you can still develop through it.
7. It seems that repetitive work without any improvement leads people to do their work not as well as before...
Absolutely, you have to be focusing on efficiency and if you leave an individual doing one thing too long you are going to fall into that trap. It's also important as leaders that we know the strengths and weaknesses of our people. And you know the strengths and weaknesses of yourself. So if I'm not used to spending time doing a mundane project, I'm aware of what I have to do to be successful. And when you are younger that somebody else is aware that this individual here if you give him something to do for two hours, they are not going to make it to three hours. They're just not that personality. So you have to be fully aware of the strengths and weaknesses of your people because you trying to maximize your development and you are maximizing the service that you are providing to your clients.
8. Do you have an example where your optimism helped you?
In my role I have very few items that I do routinely. I'm much more in just the role of the CEO. So I'm thinking back a little bit but I think where the optimism serves is when I've been in situations and it's quite routine. I make sure I'm very clear and I have a picturing my mind of what the situation is going to be when I'm done. That maybe personal or professional. When I was younger and I went through a very difficult busy season where I would generally work 70 to 80 hours every week for three months. My picture in my mind was a holiday I was going to take for five days at the end. That's what I needed to do to survive. Smaller things now would be I have a project that's going to take me six hours on a Saturday. Well, I know that when I get to work on Monday morning we are going to be able to achieve these three things by ten o'clock and I'm going to be very proud of that. That's how I look at those types of tasks. When these tasks are done I'm going to feel rewarded.
9. Do you maybe have some concrete example?
We just had a project where we tried to collect money from our clients that owe us money. We tried to get the whole firm together and decided - "let's get our clients to pay us before the end of the year. It was great. People liked it. We were successful. I think it's important to do those types of projects, if you want to call them projects, and you need to continue to look for new opportunities to do it. My credit to Mr. Dymov, that's a great idea. We continue to look for opportunities like that too. Historically, probably the biggest example, when I moved here almost eleven years ago. We were by far the smallest of the big five. We were 1/10 the size of the biggest firm. And so we pretty much said: "Ok, we are the smallest; no one expects anything from us. Let's go be strong. Let's surprise people. Let's get excited. Everyone is against us." It worked. We were very active and we were successful. We provided super quality to our clients and we were able to build our client base because of it. So it was a similar thing. Here's an opportunity to get our people excited around something.
10. Do you have any other examples?
I'm not sure if this is going to be a great example but when I moved here we worked on a project for about a year and a half and we had not completed this project yet. So, we were still trying to finish this project. It was very complicated, it was 1999. Certainly there was less complexity back then. And here is Dave and they say: "Dave, can you help us finish this project?" There was a good team working on this project, very good team. And team didn't need me that much. I helped them, did a, b and c but that was about it. And I think my value over these six months or nine months it was before we finished was helping people, who said, "We can never finish this, this is never going to happen, we can't do it" - "Yes, we can. Look, this is all we have to do, these three things. Come on, we are going to be alright. Let's go out for lunch, let's go out for dinner. Let's have a beer. How do I help you to get confident? How do I help you? Ok, well, I'll help you with your section. I'll help you to do this or that." And, it was that positive reinforcement that was my biggest contribution to that project. We finished and that remains our client today. I think that's where my optimism comes through more than anything. I don't know, maybe we have to ask others.
