Leadership is Responsibility

I just want to take a step back now and ask you, what does leadership mean to you?

Responsibility. Its first meaning is responsibility that you lead an organism – because a corporation is nothing but a living organism – into a direction that you decided is the right way. That responsibility goes, whether you are right or wrong in your decision. It’s your responsibility. You have to show that. You have to say, look, I’ve talked to the management board, but it’s my decision that we sell this part of our business, or that invest that much into that business, or whatever your decision is. Make clear that it’s your decision; make clear that you are responsible. Because that, basically, delivers you with a lot of strengths to the people outside. They know, okay, he’s the guy. He decided it; let’s go for it. If it later turns out that it was the wrong thing, the owner will normally fire the CEO and it’s all cool. Luckily, that never happened to me.

You have to make clear that yes, I lead this and yes, I bear the responsibility and yes, I expect you to follow me on this path. It’s not a consensus kind of environment that we are dealing with. I got the job from the owners and the owners expect me to deliver and I’m going to deliver. This is what I’m doing right now. You have to accept leadership as the same word as responsibility for what you are going to do.

Responsibility, sometimes, it’s really a big burden. When you sell parts of your business, because you follow the best-owner principle and we have done that a couple of times. When you realize you are not the best owner of something, get rid of it. We sold these businesses and, of course, we had 80, 100, 150 people going with them. That was hard, but it needs to be done. Leadership is responsibility. Very simple.

How did you communicate that you own that responsibility, as a leader?

I took everything on, in the sense that I appeared on every fight, every difficult issue that we had. I always popped up there myself. I always confronted the opposition, so to speak. When we had to close down one factory, I went there. I got a lot of boos and swearing from the audience. Of course, the representative of the union, was giving me crap all over and that it was irresponsible to close down the factory and fire so many people, blah, blah, blah. After that whole thing was done and was over, the same guy, I meant him accidentally in Frankfurt and we had a coffee together and he said, we admired you for coming down there. People thought you would never show up and you would send somebody from HR or some lawyers and they would, basically, just tell what the story was. But that you popped up there yourself, was quite something. I said, but it didn’t help very much. He said, “No, it didn’t help at all, but it gave you, in your own company, quite a reputation, in the sense of, okay, I’m not running away from it.” If this is what responsibility is all about, if you have to deliver bad news, you deliver bad news. That is what it is.