Robert Agee, Vice-president of Cisco for Russia, explains why people with ambition enjoy being empowered and stretched and speaks on his values and principles in life and work.
1. What is delegation for you?
Delegation is obviously critical, you have to allow people the authority and responsibility to manage things, and to take the responsibility of the outcome of the team interactions. The key in delegation in any organization is a) insuring the right person; b) insuring that the trust is there, because in delegation especially in Russia the trust factor has to be high. The third thing is going back and checking the results. That is a regular process setup whereby we're measuring how the things are going, there're milestones along the way to tell people that they're in charge and to set up the plan. Then at the end of the month or the quarter you see that everything's going well, the team is happy, everything's going in the right direction - that's a good stuff.
2. What is the most important thing in delegating?
If you se, however, that the things aren't going well, very important to have a feedback loop in delegating, which could be either informal or formal but I prefer informal. If several people are telling me that we have problems, this delegation, probably, isn't working too well. I would say it's a question of feedback and then having a clearly defined process when you're checking the results. And if you have those things in place and if you've picked the right guy with the right level of trust - that should be fine. But not easy.
3. How to find out the responsibility burden one can carry?
I'll give you an example - at the age of 24 I was a country manager in Yugoslavia and I did a good job. At the age of 27 I was a managing director of a company in Africa with 300 employees,. So if a person has the right environment and the right support, he can rise to his level of competence very quickly. I think people can and should be stretched in terms of what they can do, and one of the problems which we have in business is that is we don't stretch people enough, it becomes dangerous, as the person gets bored, and for the company it's not good as it doesn't get the full idealization from the employee, as the person probably not enjoying himself as much. People enjoy themselves more when they're stretched than when they get everything easy. I think you can probably stretch the person as much to the level when he's starting saying it's too much. If the person says that it's too much or you see that it doesn't bring the result, you should skill back. There're a lot of things to skill back and to change the things but you have to have a very clear monitoring process. The feedback loop is important and also an objective setting in monitoring process.
4. What was the reason why you agreed to take this position at such a young age?
Back then it was a combination ambition, I wanted to be the President of the company, fun, making money leading - I got all the things that I wanted in that regard. But I very seldom in my early career said no. If somebody told me to go and run Yugoslavia, I went. We also inside the company are looking for talents inside the company and we try to suggest moves, some people take them, some people don't. I remember a very good engineer, we wanted him to an engineering manager in Kazakhstan, but he said no, as he didn't want t move to Almaty. Other people would be willing to drop thing, we have people who went to Europe to work in the technical assistant centre. So I think in business it is important to identify talents and to take the people out of their comfort zones and put them into different areas. Not too frequently, as you would disrupt them too much, but in two or three years' cycles they need to be changed around. Because after three of four years you get into the comfort zone and you sort of drift off - and that's where leadership is also about whether you're having the process of finding the talents and making sure that they are on the right track personally and professionally. Whether it's training, job, location, we have a so-called retention, replacement or rotation.
5. What is the role of values in you life?
That's an important area and I think it's an area which is very hard for people to identify and understand. When we get back to so-called human factor, we need to have an understanding of what kind this person is, a good person or not. We have lots of talented people, especially in old days at Cisco we had people whom we called gunslingers, who were very aggressive, very smart people who were brilliant. For example, one guy put a multi million dollar deal by his own, he was brilliant, but he was a complete maniac in the organization and a lot of people couldn't stand him. I think it's just a question of ethical values; it's the fact of how this person will be able to interact in your organization. The person who is right for one organization might not be right for another organization. The cultural adaptation is a very-very important question.
6. What values do you personally share?
First of all it's trust, I have to trust people and if I lose trust in the person, I find it very difficult to work with him. So trust is extremely important. Trust and honesty go hand-in-hand. I always try to be very honest with people, I don't like political thing when people discuss things behind your back - I can tell you upfront that I'm not happy with you. Many leaders have o problem of telling a person that he's not happy with him. Together with trust and honesty the ability to communicate is important, some people don't like to listen. If a person is not a good listener and my value is to insure that everyone is on the same page - that's going to be a problem working in my team. Some people might like that, and some people might have the dictatorial style. But for me the ability to communicate and have a high quality dialog is very important.
7. How do you communicate your values to people?
I think you have to walk to talk. People must not hear but also see what your values are by the way you act. And people who know me for a long time might probably say that these things are the characteristics of me. I hope so. I think it's more by seeing rather than hearing. But also if someone is getting a coaching feedback from me, he also gets the elements of this. By interacting with people they should see what your values are all about.
8. Could you explain the business model of your company so it could be understood by a 7-year-old child?
We work in four different segments: we work as a service provider, everything that Cisco does is related to you core technologies; however it has a lot of other types of technologies. We have a corporate enterprise for the corporate clients, enterprise for the public customers, and middle market for the businesses which tent to operate through big businesses. And each of these segments is ruled by their own operation team and each is delegated with their own responsibilities. The business model is about of making all this machine work, insuring that everybody internally is happy, insuring that the rules and the regulations of the country where we are operating are adhered too and your eco partners that are working with you in this process are in track and motivated to move your products forward. I tend to be involved with the key customers but I also spend time in going to the regional meetings, small customers and our partners and so on. That's really the business model, that's how we work and we work mainly exclusively through partners, we're the company that relies on Russian system integrators and re-sellers to take our solutions for our customers.
