Robert Agee, Vice-president of Cisco Systems for Russia, tell us about one of his strongest competencies - the ability of setting clearly defined goals and objectives. That is the core factor, along with attitude of a person to everything he does, that he himself searches for in people.
1. What other competencies do you have?
One of the things that would be good for any future manager or a leader is setting very clearly defined goals and objectives for your people. I think, if you have all those goals and objectives clearly set out, or setting the bar a little bit higher. As I say, it's a stretching of the numbers. Just setting a plan is a bit boring, but setting a mission or something that has to be achieved by the team. It's a little bit difficult to accomplish, but it's more fun and it creates a team work cooperation, moving the organization and the management team in the right direction.
2. Is it just a list of precise figures that must be achieved?
No, that's a plan. In any company of a big size you have to have a numeric plan, especially when you're in a sales organization, that's important. It must be quarterly divided, it's going to be something that you can measure. But there's also a subjective thing: for all our managers we have subjective criteria that we want to develop: team working collaboration, leadership skills, innovation, thinking outside the box in term of accomplishing things, working with others. The bigger the organization gets, the more the soft skill have their importance. In a small organization you have to sell ten of pieces of product within a week - it's clear. But in a big organization it's complicated and inner dependent.
3. How does it look like?
It's like a football team. This morning we had a problem, something didn't happen, somebody forgot to write the pass properly before the customer's visit. And that one little act dropped the football team completely, because we had to hold a telepresence, we had people in Singapore, we had people in London, all sitting together waiting for somebody to come because of one piece of paper not being filled up properly - and that person wasn't here. It's the same thing like a football game: if someone hasn't put his shoes on right, or he's tired or had drunk too much last night, he's letting the whole team down. It's a big issue about how to make all people in the organization work properly together. One of the most important tasks of a leader is insuring that the human factor, the interaction inside of the team is proper. And if it's not you have to make painful decisions of taking people out of it.
4. Where does this inspiration come from?
The passion and inspiration is something that a leader has to embody, because I think that if a leader or a senior manager doesn't have a real interest in the company or in business, he shouldn't be there. That's number 1. He could be smart, he could be a brilliant guy, having a Harvard MBA, but ha has to exude this kind of passion and belief in the company. Because people will smell this - customers will feel it, partners will feel it and your team will feel it. That's an important factor to have this desire and passion of what your company is all about. It's not just all about numbers, we do more than that, we hope that in Cisco we have a lot of things going on that makes it a fun place to work and makes people come here. We believe, we are leaders in our niche, in our business sector and we should attract the best people for your company. I always say that it's better to have one 5 than three 3. it's rather quality rather than quantity. You have to have top quality people working for you because it's all about the people, especially in our industry.
5. What are main factors of choosing people?
These are all common themes: attitude, for me it's more important than education of a person. You can teach somebody something, but if you don't have the right attitude - that's all in vain. Besides attitude, communication skills are very important (I mean that communication is a combination of listening and speaking skills), knowledge of the business (except for our university program), we are looking for people who already know networking, telecommunication, IT industry, either from a customer prospective, partner prospective or industry prospective. And overall there must be some cultural fit where the person will feel good with the others. Here this human factor plays its role. You look at the person and say whether he has the ambition, whether he has the drive. A person can be really smart and really well-connected but he's happy being costing through life.
6. Why attitude is the most difficult thing to measure?
That's a good point. Very often in the interviews you can get fooled. I've been fooled also. I remember one guy I've hired who looked fantastic at the interview, and he was a complete disaster on the ground. First of all, not only one person hires at Cisco, we have at least 5 interviews for anybody being hired. In some cases up to ten. Once you've gone through 5 or 10 interviews, it's also good, back to the things you've heard yourself, you listen to other people's opinions. I might look at somebody from one angle and another person looks at him from a different angle, and another person might actually just read through what he's done. If the person had ten jobs in the last five years, maybe there's something not completely right. Yes, you can get tricked, but we also have a lot of people looking at them, we look at references and we check things. Generally speaking, everybody can make a mistake, but 95% of all the time we're ok.
7. How do you base your judgment over this feeling? Is it a gut feeling?
It's more gut feeling on the interview basis. Generally speaking, by the time somebody gets to me for the interview, he has already passed through other interviews, and after I've seen all comments, and I'm looking at the other factors, the things that I've talked about. It has to be subjective, or you can ask some questions which can open something up. If he's interested in the sport, I ask him to tell me about sport. If the person answers that he just go goes in for swimming in a boring voice that explains everything. But if I really see that a person believes in that sport, loves what he does - and you look for that in people. That's one of the most important ingredients to look for. Hard defined, I should say.
8. Could you recall any examples of hiring?
I'll give you a failure because you learn more from failures than from successes. He had a brilliant interview, exuded and he had passion and knowledge, he came from the industry, he knew everything. He was as we say, too much of a good thing. That's also a thing to look for, if something's too good to be true, it probably isn't. And all of a sudden everything started to go wrong, he was like a whole series of personal problems. And after he had been with the company for only three or five month, I suddenly found out that he was already interviewing with the competitor. So I said goodbye to him. He was one of a few people I ever fired on the spot. I always try to fire a person positively, because the industry in Russia's small and you will see that person somewhere. But that was the one exception.
