When I began working at AlphaStakhovaniye insurance company in april 2002 it was going through a very important and difficult period. Just before I came in 2001 the company was formed through a merger of its two predecessors – Alfa-Garantiya and Vesta. Alfa-Garantiya was a small firm mostly servicing corporate clients, whereas Vesta was a much bigger company with well-developed retail network. The two groups of my subordinates, each from one of the companies, had real difficulty working together. They were not outspokenly hostile to each other but the two groups were divided by difference in culture and lack of clear sense of direction. Many employees left the company after merger, even more were thinking about leaving.
I understood that before I start acting I had to build a team. There was no unified management team at that moment. Employees fighting for power and arguing about who worked best had to be stopped. From evaluating the past we went over to reaching for the future. We began to formulate the strategy, the goal and the direction of our business development. Since I was a new person in the company It was especially important that employees started to believe in the goal we set together. If a leader of a company, branch or department does not understand and does not believe in the aim put before his team the work will be far from perfection. In my case it was not easy to persuade people, but I was so convinced that the aim is difficult but possible to reach that I ‘infected’ the rest by my optimism. It is possible that someone was not 100% convinced but still people were united around the new goal. Those who did not believe in it left the company. After that the situation became much better and it became possible to hold a number of training sessions and teambuilding events.
These are very important things to do because people are spending much time together and they have to develop good human relationship. I don’t insist that employees should necessarily be friends – friends are eager to forgive each other’s faults and look away from each other’s mistakes. On the other hand you can’t build business on corporate memoranda alone. The core of the new management team was formed by the people who were already working for the company. Then they were joined by a few employees brought in by me. Choosing people to work with I abide by two criteria. The first: ability to achieve the result. The second: compatibility of a person’s values with a company’s values. Both are critically important. Besides I tried to hire people with working experience in various industries who could bring new vision and approaches to insurance. I am not sure that it will work in other industries but we have achieved good results stimulating such a diversity. When you recruit an employee from a different industry than yours, it is very important that he should be able to quickly get accustomed to the new sphere and that it should be interesting for him. An employee should like his company and what he does at work.
When the aim in which people started to believe appeared the team was quickly built and its members learned to work together. We were not completely free from inner conflicts, but they will always exist. A team is a living creature and it can not be absolutely perfect. Though I think that now AlphaStrakhovaniye has one of the best management teams. Its members interrelations are based on professionalism, understanding and trust. For a number of years our top-managers are ranked among 1000 most professional managers of Russia according to the Kommersant daily. No one of them made to this list before although they were not less professional than now. Why? Because they never before worked as a team. Prepared by Maria Pikalova
The original Russian text
