David Pearson, Managing Partner and Chief Executive Officer of Deloitte CIS, explains us how partnership concept works within his organization, and believes that developing people is the most important thing. He also asks other CEOs about how they are going to manage their people and their businesses with current improvement in the market.
1. What partnership concept means for you in Deloitte?
We do put our own money into the firm. So we do buy a stake. And I think it's important. I think what's critical about partnership vs. shareholder is that a partnership means you looking out for what's in the best interest of all the partners and you are there for each other as partners and support each other as opposed to shareholders. I think that's pretty critical. When you look at how a partnership works and why there is a difference to it. I think it's important to consider a partnership not like shareholder structure even though it may be in our environment, because you can get a lot more value from the leadership if you are working together, like when you are in partnership where we are backing each other up. I understand that my decisions affect you and your decisions affect me and I can help you and you can help me. That's very critical. It's a super structure particularly for our business where our job is to support ours being successful. Our job is to help out clients to be great. That's our job and I think that's very very important.
2. There are quite a lot of leaders who are claiming that there are situations when even in the greatest partnerships you need someone who will say the final yes or no...
It pretty much sits on my table. The more difficult decisions, however, of course there is a leadership structure that makes many other decisions, probably most of the decisions. But just because you are involved in partnership it doesn't mean everyone is involved in every decision or you never make any decisions. I think it's important that you have a business structure because you have to run efficiently, now we are back to efficiency again so you need a hierarchy of what decisions get made where. It doesn't matter about the structure because you need that.
3. What is the most important most urgent issue on your management agenda and how you're going to address this challenge?
The biggest challenge, probably, for us is identifying easily to our people our vision for their development. We're working through to help us to articulate that. We call ourselves the opportunity firm. We are always doing our best to help develop people, so they can accomplish more than they even dream they can accomplish. When you are in a fast growing market, that's quite easy to do, because, you know, you have lots of clients coming in and you don't have enough people, so there is lots of opportunities all the time. When the market is growing today it is not that obvious to our staff. The objective has not changed. We are still working hard to provide people an opportunity to grow. The difference is how leaders - our partners and our managers - have to work harder to identify the opportunities for people. And people themselves have to work harder to identify what they want to do. You know, back five or ten years ago it was like being in a fast river. You just had to get in the river and you were going to go. Now you have to paddle a little bit. So, I think, that's probably the challenge we're looking at right now. I have the message, it's how best to articulate it.
4. Do you have any questions you would like to ask other CEOs we will be interviewing?
I think it is always interesting when talking to the CEOs about how they are going to manage their people and their businesses. When we look at the improvement in the market, we're not going to get to the high growth days of five-six years ago in most industries. I think everything will grow. Russia is going to do well, but they are not going to see the super growth we had. So, how do you manage your business through this? I think that's an interesting question for people. And, again, it comes back to not managing you business, but managing your top talent, who are used to being in a raging river.
5. And what about you? How you are managing this situation?
Well, it's around articulating our message to our people and developing our leaders to be more in touch with our people. We've been very focused on that so far. We have different programs in every aspect of our business on keeping our managers engaged with our people. And that's happening. Now we are trying to think of how best we articulate it, because with new programs I'm always trying to push from the bottom and push from the top. Generally, we start from the bottom because that's the energy. You know, twenty-two-year olds, twenty-three-year olds they have energy and excitement, enthusiasm. So, you get them excited about something - you can create this change in this business. Just from them. So we get them excited, and we work at the manager level and a partner level and push down. And you keep pushing like this. So, we're working on that. You push down quite a bit. We need to continue to develop what's the message for people.
6. Do you think that your approach to the remuneration, to growing numbers, to buying people from the market for higher and higher salaries will change something if the growth will come back?
I think the last few years, particularly, 2007-2008, were pretty extraordinary with the influence of the individual on the market place, because there was such a shortage and everything was so overheated. I don't foresee we will be back in that situation in the near term. There is a shortage of talent in the Russian market place. So, there will be pressure on salaries always, but I don't know if we will return to the days where it was a few years ago. The biggest difference here to me is not necessarily pressure on the salaries with shortage of talent, shortage of top talent, it's that in Canada or the US or UK a particular market place has been active for a hundred years. And, so, when you have a hundred years of comparatives, pretty much, people know what to expect. Well, we have twenty years of comparatives in Moscow of which it's been like this. So, because of that it's going to be much more volatile that it in the west but it won't be quite as bad as it was a few years ago. Which is good. It's easier to run a business if there is a higher level of predictability. So, if we can be more predictable with our salaries the happier we will all be.
