Chris Huggett, Regional Sales Director - EMEA East 3Com Europe Ltd, discusses his strongest leadership competency - dealing with people like with adults in communicating the strategy of the company.
1. What is your strongest competency as a leader?
I always thought as a leader myself that it’s very important to be clear with people; what you are trying to achieve; what you think they are trying to achieve. Organizations are not families. You are not parents dealing with children, generally speaking. You are there for any situation where you always trying to negotiate some form of desired results and hopefully doing it in a way in which everyone are happy with the outcome. People who work in the organizations (you know none of us are slaves) always have the right to work pretty much where we want to. I was taken a view that if you deal with people as adults then that helps enormously and of course a lot of things go with that is right: responsibility is for both me as a leader and responsibility is on the people who are working for me, to respond to each other on that level.
2. What do you mean by treating people like adults?
Anyone who is in a leadership position has a function as a translator of strategy in a sense. All organizations have a strategy; senior people in the organization will have a strategy; the organization will have a strategy. Sometimes people from the down of the organization don’t necessarily understand that or they don’t necessarily understand what it means for them; what it means for them in their daily life. So, dealing with people as adults would say: we sit down and we’re very clear about overall focus areas that we want to achieve the results in and if you were very clear about what those are at a senior level and very clear about what the desired goals are in each of those areas and what we are trying to achieve, you can translate that for people into a set of specific activities that when you are showing to someone: here is how you fit in, here is what you are doing is aligned with the overall objectives of the organization. I think people need that sense of meaning in what they are doing in order to feel good and feel happy about what they are doing. They need to be able to see how what they are doing makes a difference to the organization. Dealing with people as adults says: well, make it clear to them. Don’t just tell them what to do and never explain why you want those things. Tell them what you want them to do. Show them how it fits in with the organization. And if necessary and I tend to do this, make it really explicit in your planning process that you are actually linked together, your activity as an individual in my team and what it leads to in terms of benefit for the organization. So, you can literally take that away and you can see what your contribution is.
3. Is the ability of communication with people like with adults also a competence?
Good communication will involve the person you are talking to understanding what you are saying. It’s not good communication for me to use such complex language that you can’t understand me, and if I’m talking to someone in my team to use such complex ways of describing my business that they don’t understand what I am actually asking for or what I am suggesting. I think it’s really important that you can make clear what you are trying to achieve. Sometimes that may feel like you are simplifying but actually if you can’t simplify enough to express clearly what it is you are trying to achieve and as a result your team is left confused then I think you failed as a leader. You have to be able to explain things clearly. And it’s not the same things as oversimplify. Oversimplify means you are missing important pieces. People should go away from the conversation with a leader understanding exactly what he was saying; ideally without him having used loads of jargon, and ideally with the conversation being very coherent and to the point. It’s not easy to explain in simple words, that’s why it’s harder to write newspapers where they have a small vocabulary; it’s harder to write articles for Sun Newspaper in London than it is for the Times because your readership understands more words if you write for the Times; it’s easier to write for those people.
4. Can you give any concrete examples of how you do it?
Many years ago I worked for a software company and it was based in the UK, and the business was failing basically and we were faced with the reality that we had to make reductions and we had to change the way that people who would stay with the company were going to work in order for business to survive. I found myself in charge of this team; I was relatively new leader at this point. The key activities that I focused as we went through this process of announcing to a team of people that some of them would be leaving and making it clear who those people were going to be. And, then working with the rest of the team and bringing an immediate change in the way they were thinking about the business so they weren’t just a survivors, they were actually members of a completely new style of organization. There is often a tendency when you are in this situation to spend a lot of time dealing with people who were leaving and not enough time dealing with people who were still going to be in the organization. Actually, you realize much later that they are more confused than ever about understanding what is expected from them. So, we built a single day event where early in that day we talked to people who would be leaving the organization; we explained what we were going to do for them, then we spend the rest of the day and in fact most of the next day working with thirty or forty people in the organization who were going to stay. And we did a couple of things. First two hours in fact I might’ve been first three hours we just let them get out of the emotion of what just happened because when you are a survivor in that sort of situation you feel pretty angry. Before you can actually talk to them about what are we going to do you had to just let them fire bullets at me for the next two or three hours and talk about how they felt about the situation. I just spent two or three hours with the whole team: introverted, feeling sorry for the people who are left, feeling confused about what it meant for them personally; feeling guilty about being a survivor. And then only when we felt like I’d got through the emotional title wave that was being thrown at me then we started moving to: right, so here is how we got into this situation; here are some of things that I think we need to change, what do you think? And then spend two or three hours with a lot of ideas, loads of negativity, some optimism about what we could do differently. And then got through that stage to then: so right now on these last couple of hours we need to be concrete about what are we going to do, how are we going to change our structure. And that became possible only because we gone through intellectual phase of denial and all emotional stuff that came out, through inevitable confusion that follows. I wanted to do this for years and no one ever let me so we let people explain what they thought abut their ideas. And then eventually we got to the point when we could start to put people back together and that’s really hard work because by the end of the day as a leader of that group you are completely exhausted; by the end we got a group of people to a completely different place, than where they walked in that morning.
5. Do you have any other strong competencies you would like to share?
I think the execution competence. Because I think people very quickly get frustrated with leaders who are always telling them what to do but those people don’t appear to do very much themselves and I think particularly in the industry that we are in, in IT people are expected to be very active and to be in front of the business not behind the business, so, not issuing command by e-mail and voice mail, and not actually being in front of a customer. It’s a bit like when you are in the army. Everyone in the army has a specific role, that might be medical, that might be to do with communications, that might be to do with artillery but everyone can carry a rifle. This is that core skill that links everybody together. In most IT organizations, certainly most American IT organizations that skill is the ability to sell and the ability to be good in front of the customer. I think it’s a really important capability that helps me in my career because I never want to be in the position of asking someone else to do something that I can’t do myself.
6. What is leading by example for you?
It doesn’t mean replacing. Leading by example in our environment because we are constantly hiring new people can mean something as simple as you go with that new sales guy to his customers the first two or three times he goes to those customers and he listens to what you say in front of the customer, he listens to what you do and the questions you ask and the chances are he is making as many notes as a customers initially about this is how you behave when you are presenting this customer to a customer. And I think in a sales role, I mean I hope you are hiring competent sales people who know how to behave in front of a customer but what you never know when you are joining a new company is what are the arguments, what are the most likely objections that we get from customers and how do we respond to those. You can write that down or you can record it to video and give it to someone but actually there is no better way to learn for your new people in the organization to learning by seeing the conversation dynamically played down in front of them. And who better to do that than you as a leader that gives them knowledge and also that gives them confidence in you as a leader. They understand that if they have a problem they can come back to you because they know, because they’ve seen that you understand their role. And, I think people take a lot of comfort from seeing that you understand their job and that you could do that job. Therefore if they have a problem you are going to understand what that problem is.
7. Why is it necessary to hire the brightest people?
In any organization you hire people that are at least as good as you, maybe better; and you have to be quite brave to do that as a leader to hire people who are at least as good as you and maybe they even scare you of how good they are. That is a really important leadership characteristic of great leaders that they are not afraid to surround themselves with hugely talented people. If I go out and hire people who are good but I know I’m better than they are then inevitably what happens overtime is that the quality of your organization goes down. My job is to push the quality of the organization up. So, I’ve got to hire people; I’ve got to find people that are better than me or have some particular skill that I don’t have. Being better than me doesn’t necessarily mean in every characteristic but maybe they speak a language that I don’t speak, maybe they have a technical ability that is better than mine, maybe they are more creative than me, maybe they are more structured than me but in some way better than me in the function that they are going to perform, and if I’m brave enough to have those people around me than there is a good chance that I’ll be successful as a leader.
8. Are there any examples of this competence?
Few years ago I worked for a large PC manufacturer, and they were struggling in the emerging markets with their service infrastructure. They had a perfectly good product but typically there was no infrastructure around the product so people were reluctant to buy it because they were worried if something went wrong with a product there was no support organization, no service organization. We had to change the mentality of our own team that they should not focus simply on selling hardware but they should actually focus on selling service contracts and proposing a message around the product as to here is what happens when it goes wrong because for many products that’s at least as important part of decision making process as the quality of the product itself. We had to model that behavior for our sales teams. I found myself doing two things at the same time: leading the process of actually putting the service infrastructure on the ground, literally leading the negotiations with service partners who were going to deliver on the ground service, leading the negotiation with the teams who would put spare parts into the country, which gave me very first hand knowledge about exactly how good our competencies were across a range of countries in Europe and then taking that knowledge with a sales manager to the customer and deliver on that presentation many many times so that as many people as possible got the message as to what it was that we changed and how I wanted them to change their behavior and the message I wanted them to give across to their customers and letting them see the questions I got as we did that. It was never going to work if we would just have written everything down and say: here is what changed or we put up a website and say click here to see a demonstration of new execution service capabilities in the organization.
9. Why leading by example is so important?
I think the modern manager cannot simply be someone who sits behind the desk and who understands everything about their business, and who tells other people what’s required of them. Because business is changing really fast, and we all have to constantly adapt our ideas about how our relationships with our customers are going to work. I think people have higher expectations today from their leaders that they should actually be out in the field talking to customers, demonstrating leadership in a practical way as opposed to a theoretical way. I worked for another large networking organization and the task of the team I was leading at that time was to build solutions around our technology so that customers could understand relevance of our technology, relevance of our company to their business. I took my leadership role to mean: I had to make that first example of what I meant behind the industry solution, what I meant by showing to the retailer the relevance of my company. I had to do that myself. Having done it myself it was easier for me to say to someone who was responsible for the airline industry or who was responsible for banks, or who was responsible for government departments: “You need to think in that way about your job and you need to think in that way about how you approach your customers with solutions’ stories and case studies rather than simply presenting the technology”. I knew that unless I did it myself and actually showed just how complex you could do it and how compelling a message you could build, it’d be really hard for me to get anyone else to do it.
