Authentic Leadership

How did that style evolve, as you progressed as a leader? Did you look to refine your style over the years?

I come from a trading environment, so I was basically, educated in a big commodity trading company. In a big trading company, you don’t do small talk, you just talk business. Don’t waste my time with crap. Just tell me what it’s all about and then we go onto the next deal. The environment I was raised in, it was basically, a no-nonsense kind of place. You learned, from a very early age, to communicate the essential core of the message. When I had wrong trading positions and I had to go back to my boss, at the time and say, I’m sorry, but I screwed up here. We had ourselves on long or short and we were wrong by X, Y, or Z. That was the message. You couldn’t come up with excuses. Straight out say, this is the issue. That is something that helped me tremendously, through my career. Cut it short; what’s the problem ideology, in communication. That really worked well.

I realized that people, then later, when I was CEO at Nordzucker, that principle also worked very well there. Even amongst the owners. The owners were, primarily, for example, farmers. Farmers are very often, okay, don’t talk bullshit; let me know what it is you are all about. They always demand that. The moment you do it, they sometimes feel a little bit intimidated or whatever the case may be. But if I summarize everything, this very direct, fast, honest to the core communication, really worked well. For me, it was the best thing.

It’s also purely authentic, in a leader, as well?

Yes, it is. Particularly, I had a couple of times, where I was honestly stuck and had to say, look, I have no clue about this. Do we have any specialists who can help us on this topic? I remember, we once had a case, in 2010, in one of the factories, we had black fungus, inside some water pipes. This kind of black fungus was a very special variety. I had no clue about all this. The question was, how do we clean it? How do we get it out of the system and how do we prevent it coming back? They all looked at me and I had no clue. We should get experts in here and do we have experts inside the company? It doesn’t matter what rank. Tell me if we have someone. It turns out, the next day, we had two chemists in our company, and one was a specialist in fungus and fungi treatments and all that. He was low ranking, young guy, 24 years old. We took him on board. He came to the board meeting and we said, just explain to us what we should do.

I think, if you very openly communicate, look, I have absolutely no clue about this problem but, at the same time, say okay, let’s get someone on board, who really knows what it’s all about, it’s absolutely perfect, because you find acceptance everywhere.

It’s almost as if, if you have the style of leadership, as well, this raw, authentic, really open and transparent, some people could call it brutally honest, it also makes it easier to put your ego to the side and drive self-awareness and say, I don’t actually know here. I don’t know this; this is what I don’t know, this is what I do know. It’s easier to inject humility into the leadership.

Yes, that’s exactly what you do. Particularly if you surround yourself with the best people, if you don’t know things and everyone knows that you don’t know that particular topic, they know someone who knows. It somewhat increases the acceptance amongst your own people in the factories that there is competence on the board. Not necessarily with the CEO on one or two or three topics, but there’s competence on the board, so whatever they decide, it’ll be okay.