Ivan Svitek,Chairman of the Board & CEO, Home Credit and Finance Bank, is telling us about the importance of trusting your intuition in everything you do and about persistency in work and learning from your own mistakes.
1. What is your strongest leadership competency?
I was always thinking about what makes a good leader and I wrote a list of many things: you have to have charisma, you have to be team oriented, you have to be focused on the results, you have to be stable emotionally, you have to be enthusiastic and tough, you have to have maturity and you have to know what you're talking about. But there're two or three that are important that came to my mind and I would like to talk about them specifically. The first one that is very important is intuition, it means that in leadership positions you have to make decisions about future strategy and you also have to set up your strategy based on your intuition. Very often the numbers that you have may contradict with the feeling you have. The same thing is true when you manage and when you lead people, you have to understand what makes people tick, what motivates them, without asking questions you have to understand if the person is about to break or you can put more tasks on him. Having good intuition means that you're a good reader, you're able to take non-verbal communication, you have to be able to take the information not only through factual sources, but you have to be able to observe it and sip it in through other means.
2. Could you give any examples?
Like with any competency, you're born with intuition or not, but if you're not good at it, you can improve it. The important thing is to get and observe information, and if you're not a good listener, you will be bad in intuition as well because you cannot receive information. I think one of the most important tasks of a leader of a company is something that makes me worried - it's the obsolesce of our business model, and every CEO faces it. You always face with short-term issues, you face with customers, etc. But what worries me most of all is whether we will become the typewriters of this world. That is why the intuition is very useful because you have to look at long-term trends, you have to understand how these trends are going and you have to understand what it means for your business. Setting long-term strategy and trying to invest in these future trends and understanding which of those long-term trends you should be focusing at and investing into - that is the intuition.
3. Tell us a few words about your decision making.
I think I'm very decisive, that is one of my strengths, but sometimes in the past and even now I just procrastinate about decisions, I used to criticize myself, I used to be very upset when I couldn't make a decision and I thought it was my fault. And then I heard a great story about Colin Powell, who was the secretary of the defense in the US, and it was a discussion about the use of US military, and he was famous for procrastination of using the great military. And when I heard what he said I felt better about myself: "You should always delay taking the decision until the last possible moment. The reason is that until you make a decision you have all the options open". In his case it was sending the army to the war, in my case it's making a purchase or firing somebody, you eliminate all your options. Until you're hundred and twenty per cent sure that the decision you're taking is the right one, you should delay. It made me happy because I felt like I wasn't ineffective and that I was thoughtful in this case. And I procrastinate till I can stand behind the decision I have today with my all integrity and conviction - and I won't take the decision until that time. And it's amazing that I never regretted taking the decision in such a way because there always seem to be new facts and new relevant things that come up and tell you that having taken this decision earlier you would have deprived that additional information. I procrastinate, I wait, and it's ok to wait sometimes - and if I make my decision I do it in a right way.
4. What are the main principles in your decision making process?
One of the other principles that are key to me, and actually they can make your life as a leader more difficult, it's honesty. There are different types of people, some people prefer when there're any difficult news or facts, to wrap them up and to make the news soft. But I prefer to be blank. In a short term honesty may make your life difficult, people may look at you and say that you're brutal and tough and it causes a lot of tension and definitely makes you unpopular. But in terms of communication people clearly know what you stand for, and I always got feedbacks from people saying that it was easy to work with me because they knew what I was thinking of. I would say that my expectations from my boss is that I would rather receive bad news but I'd better hear the truth because the worth thing is uncertainty and guessing whether he or she liked it. And I'd rather say what I mean to move on.
5. At the beginning you've mentioned a combination of competencies. How does it work in your company?
Our company is such a large organization and I like to tell my senior staff that no company can survive only when a few leaders are doing the thinking. We could have the strongest leadership in our organization but if not everybody's engaged in making this company better we will fail. What makes one company better than the others is not the cult of the CEO, as we often see it when the CEO gets blamed or is favored for the organization's successes or failures, but what makes one company better is the ability of the leadership culture to extract from its employees a little bit more and get more engaged. If everybody from 14 thousand people comes to work and delivers on per cent more than they delivered yesterday - that is a huge plus. And it underlines my view on team, this is very much about teamwork, it's about the ability to organize work within the team. I'm tough about myself but once somebody has gained my confidence, I'll trust this person until death and I'll trust his choice and decisions. And that's why it's not a one-man-show, this is fourteen-men-show.
6. How do you encourage your people to lead the others?
When you look at your bosses, you realize that you learn one thing from each of them. Mostly these are good things. One of my bosses used to talk about buying and motivation. If people that work in your organization buy the common goal, if they feel that what they're working on come from their head or goes along with what their heart tells them, they will work on it ten times harder than if you give them an order. That's why I feel that the role of a leader is to make sure that my people and the people below them buy that common goal, and the priorities and the initiatives they work on are aligned with their hearts and minds and that they feel those ideas as theirs, they understand those ideas and that they have some part in solving these ideas. Giving orders never works, it doesn't work with children and it works even less with adults. It's better to ask the people what they think about this or that. And sometimes I find something brilliant worked out in other market, but if I feel that people don't buy into that I must keep talking to people and convincing and coming back to that. And one of my traits is persistency, so I prefer to come back to the same ideas until the people buy in these ideas.
7. What about your persistency?
I would say I'm persistent. I never scream, I never hit the table. And talking about honesty if I do anything badly the only way you can learn is only by accepting you make a mistake. And if people tell me they made a mistake it doesn't mean I'm going to punish them, but I just need to know that they learned something from it. Because if you acknowledge that all of us make mistakes, we can register it, we can learn from it and we can move on. If people trust you, for example if I give a bad interview or give bad answers, next time I will not be answering like this. It gives me freedom. For me personally, accepting your own mistakes is an amazingly liberating experience. Because once I accepted the mistake nobody can do anything to me because I've already accepted it, I don't have to pretend or defend myself, I don't have to justify myself, I've already learned from it, so it's time to move on.
8. Do you have any examples of learning from mistakes?
Mistakes hurt because they touch your own ego, and I think you have to be very self-confident and very self assured to say that you made a mistake. Once I hired a person who had a great CV: he went to the best university, he worked in the right companies and had the right experience, and I hired him as a head of sales and he was just fantastic for this job. But my gut was telling me not to hire that person, but I hired him based on the paper. It was a disaster. He lasted a year. It hurt so much because I lost a year, I lost a lot of credibility because it was clear that it wasn't the right person for the company. And the moral of it is: trust your intuition. Because if something is telling you that something is not right you have to listen to your intuition. One of the tactical mistakes was when I came into the business, there was a legacy business which was working and I spent a year and a half trying to fix that business but instead I should have spent a year and a half on building new things. It's a usual human mistake when we try to fix something unfixable instead of building something useful which will provide revenue for the future.
