Dennis Hopple, President of CBSD/Thunderbird Russia, tells us about his strongest competency - the ability to communicate well with people.
1. What is your strongest competency?
What I consider most important is my ability to communicate well with people and my passion for where we're going. Communication to me is a two-way street. It's not about my ability to tell people where we're going but our ability to work with each other building our trust and respect over a period of time. I was a foreigner in this country trying to figure out how to do business in Russia. And the first thing I realized was that leadership here was viewed differently than it was in the US. I was taught as a young manager to be a participative leader and people here weren't ready for that when I first came in the mid 90s. The reaction I've got from one person was: "Wait a minute; you are getting paid to make the decisions, why would you ask us?" That's changed over the years but it took some time to develop their trust in me that I really did want their opinion, and that we were going to live the same values and I was going to lead by example rather than by saying: "This is what we should be doing".
2. How did you do it?
The first thing I did was I made some decisions because like all businesses we've been through crises. Our first crisis was when our funding ran out. We were initially a USAID project that had been planned to go with USAID funding for some years. And shortly after I got here, the money ran out, and we had to downsize from 300 employees to 21 because we had no money. I went to the key people that we had in our business and said: "Let's try to figure this out together", and that's when I realized they were looking for me to make the decisions.
3. How did you get through this crisis?
We downsized, we pulled back into just Moscow, out of seven regional locations, and said: "We're going to start with multinational clients and we're going to give the best possible service we can do". And I went on the road, I was out selling, and then, I was in the classroom, and then, I was following up, mostly trying to give my people the example of what I called "excellent customer service". It took us about six months to convert everything from English language delivery with translation to Russian language delivery because it became obvious very quickly that translation was never going to make it. So, we centered our staff outside of Russia, we got them trained; we hired people that had foreign experience, and said: "Ok, let's make it happen." Our first client was Coca-Cola and they kept us busy for about a year while we learned what it was that we were going to be doing. None of us was sure about this training business. I came out of the food industry with a large conglomerate but I wanted to do something worthwhile in Russia and from the very beginning I've had a passion for this business that we're going to be the best.
4. How did you communicate your vision?
I'm sure that our people thought, initially, this is just more propaganda. After a while they started to get on board. I'm always optimistic about what we can do together, about what this market will offer and about the value of what we do. There are now over 90.000 people that have been through courses at CBSD. I think that is a major accomplishment for me, and something that I'm going to look back on and say: "Wow, I was a part of something really cool." I bring that to work every morning. I love it. And, we have good retention here because people get excited about what we're doing. We talk to each other, we work together. I, now, get loads of suggestions on how to best lead this company. And it all started by just setting an example, by leading and saying: "This is what we are going to do." Not by words but by actions.
5. Can you give an example?
I think a lot of things in our organization changed in August of 1998. Up until that time all of us were feeling like this is just never going to end; we're just going to keep doing better and better. The business was coming in, and it was growing. In August of 1998, I was in the United States at the meeting when the ruble crushed; by the time I got back 80% of our business had been cancelled.
People say that the fist two things get cancelled in a crisis are training and advertising. I can speak to the training side, it got cancelled pretty fast!
We sat down with our people and said: "Ok, we got a serious issue here, and we better figure out what to do or we're going to end up closing". It started with just a few key people, a few trainers and our management team. They came to me and said: "What are we going to do? Do we have jobs?" I said: "Absolutely, we have jobs. We have to figure out how to cut costs. I'll take a first cut, I'll cut my salary. We can cut some of the others. We give everybody a minimum guaranty even if we don't do any business but let's build for the future. Let's take our courses, read them, upgrade them, and we'll go outside of Moscow". We did. We went with the Soros Foundation and built some training centers, which wasn't our business but we kept money coming in. We went to Ukraine which wasn't feeling as much of the crisis. And, we've got a call from a multinational. They said: "We have 150 expats in our business and no Russian managers, and we are in serious trouble. We have got to cut overhead also. Can you help us to quickly develop our Russian managers?
6. Did this situation bring any changes to your company?
It changed our business from doing a lot of basic skills to doing management development. But, it changed our culture because every week we had employee meetings; here is the situation, here is what's going on, here is what we've done. And, that communication became two-way. But each week we had to reassure people. We kept our salaries in dollars which at that time was nice, and of course recently everyone wants to go to rubles. But at that time we said: "Ok, we're going to continue to pay in dollars, at least a dollar equivalent and we're going to take some cuts; we're going to cut overhead." It was amazing, people got involved and they found what is to cut overhead in the most amazing ways. The food costs went down by 50%, our rent went down, we just went back and renegotiated it. Everybody was more interested in how to do we stay together, so we didn't have any lay-offs. We kept everybody home. And we just reassigned people. It was at that time when people started to say: "You know, this is a pretty good place to work, and Dennis is doing what he said he'd do."
7. Why delivering on promises is so important?
Delivering on promises is a critical issue. I try very hard not to make a promise I can't deliver on. Even if the news is bad I'd rather tell them it's bad than say: "Everything is going to be fine", and I know it's not. So, even though I'm an optimist, if there is bad news we address it. When we lost our lease on Izmailovo Island, we sat down and said: "Ok, we are going to have to move after nine years, and it's going to be good because we're going to get more space; we're doing better as a business; we're going to upgrade". It wasn't an easy move. The first move after nine years is always traumatic to everybody. It's a big change. But it was amazing to see what happened to our business. By more than doubling the number of classrooms we had, we doubled our business. The timing was right and the market. But it was also a process of bringing people into that; taking them out; letting them see the construction site; letting them work on how we are going to set up our classrooms, what kind of classrooms do we need, what kind of equipment in the classrooms, what kind of offices should we have. And our employees were involved in the design. We went through five or six different office designs before we had a majority of everyone saying: "This works!" Those are the kinds of things that we like to do together.
8. Can you recall another situation when you ability to communicate was crucial?
It was interesting because when we moved to Krylatsky Hills our culture started to change. We were growing very rapidly; we were hiring a lot of people, and we could start to see that things were changing a little bit, not for the best. There were the old established people that kind of felt like these new guys are here for the money. So, we took everyone off. Actually, it was right about the time when we decided we are going to move to this facility. We went to the Georgian restaurant down the street and to start our day, we brought everyone up to this floor and to the training floor above us; gave them a tour of, basically, unfitted out building but with the great views of Ostankino. Then, took them over to a Georgian restaurant and I spent a day listening. We hired an external facilitator to come in and just find out everything they thought about what was wrong, and I just listened all day long. At the end of the day, I summarized what I've heard and made three decisions. One that will have a working group for event planning, that we would have more events as an organization, because we've gotten so busy doing training constantly, we forgot to have fun. It was becoming just a business and less of a place to have fun. So, we said: "Ok, two or three times a year we're going to go away and have some fun". And we are doing it. We did a recognition group that is in charge of doing special thanks, maintaining our annual celebration where we give out a number of different awards, and they even came back with a suggestion to do it a semiannually to get more awards more often. And now we are doing that every six months with the main one coming up on October 4th which is the day when Thunderbird bought this business and the day when all of us got contracts.
9. How you ensure your approach is cascaded through the entire organization?
It's amazing to me how important this corporate culture is but it's critical. We have trainers that work on a per-day basis so they are not here everyday. They come when they need to be. But what I found is that they feel they are part of it they are here most of the time anyway. They are working on new courses, they are working with new ideas; they are talking to other trainers. Even if they are not on the floor, they want to be involved. And that's critical, to keep in this kind of spirit going, keeping our momentum going. We have to hire a lot of new trainers to try to keep up with this market. So now we have a system of mentorship - every new employee has a mentor. For a trainer it's a mentor for three months. Whether they are being coached, they are being developed; they are learning how to do our programs. But they are also being integrated into this system, into the culture. So that they understand a little bit better how things work. I'm very proud of the way our teams have come up with these ideas, because it's not me - it's them. They are coming in saying: "This is how we integrate people better so we do have a good retention. This is how we recognize people better, so that they want come to work everyday". They are doing a superb job but they have taken over a lot of that from me.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on October 17, 2008
