Johan Rosenberg, Regional Director CIS & Baltics for Oriflame, is telling us about values he thinks are the most important ones in personal life as well as in professional, and why every leader should have a set of values and live by them.
1. What are the most important values for you?
Openness, honesty, you can make mistakes everyone is somehow a person as well. You don't have to make the same mistakes over and over again; always to do things better, it is something that a lot of people I think would recall in me and it is something what I stand for privately and professionally. As a person things that I did bad personally to someone, I work on that and try to improve it, the same in sports, the same in executing plans, what didn't work so well I try to bring with me and constantly improve. That's an environment that I very much spread around. Like love for people, caring, understanding that the company's results depend very much on people and how well people interact and work together for one goal. You have to enjoy what you do, both, privately and professionally otherwise it's better to do something else. Life is too short to spend time on things that you don't really like and you won't be good at.
2. Many people would say that they agree with you but they didn't have a chance to pick up something that they really like; do you have some suggestions to them?
Well, I think they can always start again. I think it's important at least to try to understand what you like and ask yourself earlier than later "is this really what I want to do?" Of course, it's not easy to change your job like that or to change husband or wife like that but still you should ask yourself these questions because life is too short to do things not 100% somehow.
3. What are the core values at your company?
The core values are togetherness, spirit and passion. Togetherness means that we like being together, we like a team to succeed in a company. We also like to have a good relationship with our partners and customers. Spirit is very much a winning attitude that we are going for, constant improvement and willingness to become the number one. Passion is really that we love what we do: our products, our customers, being together, etc.
4. Is there anything else?
There are also many operating principles. Some of them is respect of quality: quality for our products, quality for our customers, quality for our people. We believe nature is important as well, ecologically, caring for the environment, we stand for those things as well. We are one of the first companies who didn't start animal testing; we never had it since the start.
5. Do you have an example when you preferred to follow principles of your organization rather than not to?
We had a chance to launch a very important product for an important sales period which just did not conform. We were not being able to launch it on time because there was a problem with packaging supplier but we could do it if we would use a material that doesn't conform to our values or operating principles. We would then deliver happy customers because they would get products in time, no one would notice the difference but still we recalled the launch, waited for the right packaging, and then launched the product.
6. In your opinion, is it important for a leader to have values and live by them?
There are so many people and that is a part why you have to be a role model as leader. There are so many people that interpret what you do and what you don't do. These small deviations that might be very uncontroversial but when you go into the details they mean so much more in your day to day life and in a day to day acting in a company. That's why I think it's important to be consistent and to chose these values, and live by them.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on November 27, 2008
