We are talking with Steven Fisher, Managing Director, Corporate Bank Head, Citi Russia & C.I.S., about inclusion and communication which are, in his opinion, parts of commitment. We also talk about changing environments and how companies should react in such situations in order to survive.
1. The inclusion process is very important to create the commitment but there are always some people who made suggestion that was not taken to account, how do you handle this problem?
It's part of the process. The more you reach out to people, my guess is the more diverse opinions will be, you should expect this, and it's the role of the manager or the leader to evaluate all the different opinions and understand which are relevant for the particular question on hand, and therefore some may not be relevant. I think it's important in that situation to communicate back to those people who've made the certain comments, to thank them of course for their involvement because you do want people to be able to actively participate in the process but to communicate back. I think communication is a two way direction and therefore you seek feedback but you should also be giving feedback at the same time. Both processes should be frequently implemented and not just one way communication, and that I think will reduce the risk of not being seen to value other people's opinions, of curtailing the communication process. It must be two ways. Always.
2. I heard few times the reference to the process which is used in scientific research that it's a process which is also used in decision making in companies, what do you think of it?
I fully agree. I think that a lot of the good ideas and decisions made were the benefits or came from other people bringing these ideas up. Other people observe processes that one person cannot, or other people may observe or be sensitive to certain issues that another group of people may not see, and therefore if they were encouraged to speak up, if they felt that by communicating something it could be changed then you have a very strong process. In a democratic tradition everyone should speak up and have the right to not be scared to speak, to have the right to feel that their opinion will be valued, and if you have that environment, if you have that trust, if you have that mode of communication, you will have much more productive environment and you will generate more ideas and you will have better results.
3. What do you think about creating vision and making people be a part of this process?
People can plant a seed, and I think that's very important. And, you can plant many seeds but in order for the plant to grow strong and to prosper it has to have a lot of leaves and be watered frequently. I think that analogy is very important here. Yes, we need vision leaders; Bill Gates started in a garage with an idea of an operating system and it expanded and expanded and more and more people joined this vision and it branched out and it grew. It's an excellent example of a vision that started from one idea but expanded into a whole new paradigm of life. This cannot be done by one person but one person planted the seed and enabled through an open architecture of thinking to allow the idea to blossom, to grow, to incorporate more ideas, to envelop more ideas and opinions, and to reach out. I think it's a growth process and one should never have closed architecture, one should always show leadership, not be afraid to have ideas and to suggest the way to go but to always recognize even from the beginning that once you communicate an idea you should be open to allow that idea to develop and this development should and must come from people in addition to yourself.
4. Do you have some examples when you applied this competency?
There are many examples where sometimes you have to make a hard decision or you have to change your path. For example, in many situations, right now we have a financial crisis affecting the world, and one of the decisions we had to implement was to, basically, better manage our business to add more discipline because the access to capital was much restricted. It forced us to reduce in some cases the amount of customers we were working with. We were required to prioritize how we would use our more limited capital for the most important clients. So, some hard decisions had to be made to actually overturn an earlier strategy which was based on expanding into the target market, and rapidly seeking more customers. One would say that "did you change your strategy, did you do an about face, did you contradict what you committed to do a year ago, " and I think the hard thing was to understand that one has to have a flexible approach, and situations change and therefore your strategy needs to change as well during this time. Sometimes that's hard, you need to communicate with people and explain why have things changed, and why do we need to consider to adapt a different strategy which perhaps could appear completely opposite to what we decided perhaps even just a year ago. These changes occur very often, and these challenges are never ending. Nothing is ever permanent, and therefore one of the factors, one of the issues behind commitment is also a commitment to understand that things change, your strategy must adapt; the people you work with must also adapt to new circumstances and a new strategy, built to counter the effects of a new situation.
5. How do you explain people that this change in strategy is required?
The challenge is first to communicate and to explain if we have a new situation, if we have to play by new rules, if we have to recognize new shortcomings or challenges to our business model, we need to adapt. Animals need to adapt to changing environments to survive. Businesses need to adapt to changing environment also to survive. It's a matter of rapidly recognizing a changing environment again using the same tools we talked about: courage to change, ability to communicate, using techniques of inclusion and feedback to get the widest possible opinions when you need to make a decision and in this case it's a decision to change but these same tools will do you well in terms of opportunity and in terms of challenge.
6. How do you make decisions about change?
It's a matter of having a decision making architecture that allows you to react, that allows you to be flexible, and to move quickly because in the business world as in another environments the slowest moving animal sometimes is the one in the worst situation. So one needs to move fast, and in order to do that you need to have the right architecture to allow you to do that, and when you look inside that architecture you go back to these core beliefs, a commitment to a longer strategy, the ability to obtain diverse opinions, collect information, process this information, to have a transparent decision making process as best as possible. That allows you to adapt. In today's world or in any situation one always has to recognize that there are changes and you need to be able to cope with those changes and benefit from them as best as possible.
7. In "Good to Great" book where it's all about discipline one of the 11 great companies was Fannie Mae....
Who was once great may not be great forever. Look at IBM, IBM was one of the greatest corporations in America until the beginning of the 1980s. Their business model faltered; they didn't innovate and change quickly enough and they lost many years but they went through another process and reinvigorated themselves. Nothing lasts forever and it gets back to what we said that change is inevitable, you need an architecture to allow you with discipline to quickly react, to recognize when the situation and environments are different, and to change, to adapt to those new environments, and seek out new opportunities, and also deflect challenges. There are countless examples of this in every country, in every period of history, with every leader some of which led a country to greatness but stayed around too long perhaps, and took the country back down. So, many opportunities, or many examples of change and how you have some good stories and some unfortunate stories.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on January 22, 2009
