Birger Steen, CEO of Microsoft in Russia, tells us about his strongest competency - the ability to learn from people who report to him.
1. What is your strongest competency?
In terms of learning and developing as a leader I have this combination of a very good luck and some skill in being able to work with people which I learn from. In most cases they were people that worked for me - open and patient people who've had the major impact on me as a leader. If I think how I went from learning the basic skills of team management to the basics of being a leader of leaders and a leader of organizational units or organizations, most of these things I've learned from the people who are working for me. I guess, the common value that I've taken away from that is that if you hire good people which are always smart, you can also build a relationship with them where they feel very comfortable teaching you things and giving you feedback on the things which you could do better or different. Then you can grow much more yourself. It's common knowledge that A-people hire A-people, but maybe if you're a B-person, you can hire an A-person and you can learn to become an A-person in terms of the quality of your leadership.
2. What attitude towards learning from people is required from a leader?
The first thing that you have to do is acknowledge that being a boss doesn't mean being an expert. The way I believe good leadership is constructed - it looks like a T. You have the ability to cover the entire breath of your business on the high level, but if you need to and it's called for, you have the ability to go all the way to the bottom in terms of understanding the nuts and bolts of the business. That means that on a certain level, on high level you have things you can explain and you can help your people understand, can help them uncover. But doing the deep dives, you're completely dependent upon the information and the skills that your people have. You can have the mental agility, basic skills required to understand your business at depth, but the complexity of most of today's businesses gives you no way of being an expert in everything. In this sense it's a two-way street, at the top of the T you have the ability to guide your people and you should do that, and sometimes they can give you new perspective. But as you go deep, you really have to learn from them.
3. What skill do you need for that?
The skill you need to establish this kind of joint learning and joint development relationship with people working for you is willingness to listen, curiosity, and you can't be sure that you have all the answers. And if people take the opportunity to give you a feedback, than you have to be very careful how you react even if you feel threatened or you have an emotional reaction which is not pleasant. It's important to make the person who gives you this news feel good about it. It's not much of a skill, it's mostly an attitude towards people who can help you get better.
4. What is the most difficult thing about it?
Almost every time when I ask for a feedback and I get the straight feedback, there's an element of "Oh, that hurts a little bit" because we all want to be good. But if someone tells you that you didn't speak very well today at the press conference, it didn't come out in a right way, I didn't have my usual energy, - you don't feel good about it. But despite that you have this reaction, you just need to thank the person for his honesty, and make a note of going to bed earlier before the next press conference or eating your breakfast. You have to express your gratitude and to say that it made difference to you and you're going to do something about it. If you do this - it will be the best source of learning you can have because most of the leaders spend 10% of their time with their manager who typically has another ten people to manage, but they spend 50-60% of their time with the people that they manage. Just by simple math if you assume that the people who work for you are not dummier than the people you work for, because in most organizations intelligence is fairly evenly distributed within all levels of organization. You will get 5 or 6 times as much feedback if you get it from the people who work for in addition to the person you work for.
5. Do you have an example of such behavior?
I was chosen as the CEO of one of the biggest Internet companies in Scandinavia. I haven't been a CEO before, I knew the industry pretty well, I knew the company pretty well because I've been working with mergers and acquisitions in consulting assigns and I've been serving on its board, but I actually knew little about day-to-day jobs, I didn't know the people on the deep level in the organization, and I was very new as a high-level manager. What I did, and I think, more instinctively than everything else, was that I sat down with my new directors running country operations and I told them that I was a new CEO we will do a lot of interesting things with this company. One of the things that I planned to do was to make that company public. But I was very open and I said that I didn't know that business as well as they did, so for me in accepting that job was important to know that I had their support. So in a way I went to a job interview with my direct reports and asked them whether it made sense for me to work in this firm. I think they were a bit confused by this but they all said yes. There was actually interesting that later on when I spoke to several of these people and they told me that it was a surprise for them to have me as their manager, but the fact that I took the time and had the humility to make that approach made the whole difference. Some of them wanted to leave the company if I hadn't done that. Instead of having a company without the leadership team and with all sorts of problems I ended up with having a company with pretty much where to go.
6. Did they ask questions or was it a statement from your site?
Surely they asked what's going to happen next, so it wasn't like I came there completely unprepared, but I made it really very clear that if I didn't have the support of these people there was no way I would work there. I think in some situations when a new manager comes, he tries to change the organization and to get rid of a lot of people, but in that situation it was clear that the people I sat down with had their place and they were important advisers for me, especially at the beginning. It's not something I would recommend to do always, but in certain situations that can be a strong way to open, if you will. I do think that most people can benefit from establishing relations with the direct reports, as they can be the most powerful source of learning. It is fairly valid across most situations. How you get there - it's a different question.
7. What is the consultant's job in this case?
One of the things that good consultants do is that they shortcut the organization and connect the bottom and the top in the very direct way. Because they move around the organization without any apparent agenda, people talk to them, they smell the things, the evident and obvious that doesn't make it through the bureaucracies, and if they're good, they take it to the board and get it done. You can ask yourself why can't organizations do these things themselves? Good organizations have mechanisms and good leaders have ways of asking that make these things kind of bubble up. But they don't always do that and they don't have great companies or great leaders to work for. That's where the consultants may have the super role if you don't have the leader in place who knows how to make this shortcut.
8. Is there any alternative?
On a more practical level, my father gave me this advice. The other people who I worked with were the managers who never showed up at the Christmas party. And the reason they don't was that they said that everyone gets drunk and dances, everyone wants to talk all night and they preferred civilized meetings with these people. But my father had an opposite approach; he said that these parties were the chance to get to know the truth about what's going on. That's the time when people relax and they relay to you on a one-to-one fairly equal level. I think it's a very good advice as well if you can't afford consultants, at least you should show up at the Christmas or New Year party.
9. Do you teach your people to undertake this leadership behavior?
I think everyone will find his own style; you can't really force people to change their leadership style. You can try to be a good example, to the extent that people emulate that, that's a good thing. But everyone's got the approach that is built in his own personality. If you're an introvert and not a very outgoing person, you probably have to find some other approaches. I don't actually think that there must be a strong connection between the extraversion and success, I think you can have to see a range of different personalities who might be effective as leaders. But I do think that you have to adjust your approaches based on who you are as a person. Everything else will probably seem fake. And that's the last thing you can afford as a leader - you can't be fake. The people will not follow you.
