Leadership Essentials: Finding Your Own Leadership Style

More broadly, as it relates to your career specifically, on the subject of leadership styles, how did you become aware of your style? Would you describe it in a particular way? Were you influenced by certain individuals in your career in important ways?

Yes. Especially in a big company like Mercedes, that’s where I started my career, obviously at the bottom. When you then go through the different ranks of levels, you learn by doing. You see what you do in a small group of people, with my first leadership role was in a group of 20 people and controlling. We were controlling a specific plant in Germany. There, again, you run into problems here. You have colleagues on the other side that are not wanting to do what you want to do. You have to get your team together to say how can we convince these people to do what the controlling area wants them to do. You establish your style through practice, yes. You do that and when you do it in a normal way and don’t, again, from the beginning ever try to play a role, but really try to be yourself. Then I guess that grows. This is something which I’ve tried to manage through my whole career. Again, that was even in foreign circumstances, as I said before, I’ve been working in countries like Mexico and Argentina and Turkey.

Of course, the culture already says that things are being different. It’s more that you even act as the superior guy who knows everything from the very top. I’ve always tried to avoid that as much as much possible, which sometimes took a while and created some kinds of conflicts. I knew that to my own personality and the way that I was conducting my business, it was essential that I could do my style even in some more difficult circumstances before as I said, the culture in some of these countries are different.