Leadership: Team Building & Delegation

How do you think about leadership? What does leadership mean to you?

Number one, it’s a lot about team building and surrounding yourself with the best possible team you can, given the constraints that you may have. You may have salary restrictions and you may want to employ people who come from another industry, where they have benefits that you can’t offer them. I remember when I was building up customer finance, what I really needed was some young bankers. But banks pay quite well and offer quite a lot of side benefits to their employees, and that’s something we couldn’t do. You had to look for people who were, not necessarily, looking for significant financial benefits, but looking for a different lifestyle, such as moving from the city to live in rural France or in a city in France that was more pocket-sized.

Not an easy thing to do, but whatever position you have, you may have some constraints, in terms of what you can offer. But subject to that, get the strongest candidates you can, get the strongest people you can. I also used to, before I selected somebody, call in my most senior direct reports and get them to interview the candidate too and then we’d sit down afterwards and discuss whether the individual would fit in. If we all agreed, then that would be an easy decision. If there was some significant dissent, then probably, we would pass on that particular candidate, because I didn’t want somebody to come in and be disruptive.

Teambuilding, I think, is one of the most important parts of management. Then, once you have the right people, delegation. Let them do the job; don’t micromanage them. Don’t constantly second guess. Let them get on with things. Thirdly, as I already said, open door. Leave your door open. Make sure that they know that you are always available for exchanging views, discussing problems and do the same thing yourself. When I had a doubt, I would call in some of my most senior people and say, look, we’ve got this, we’ve got that. I’m not sure myself what we should do; what do you all think? Have a debate about it and, often, you’d find that it wasn’t that difficult, once you’d got a few alternative views and the thing could be discussed. That, again, is part of management. Not to isolate yourself and take all the decisions on your own, but to involve the people that you trust. That also creates a degree of loyalty amongst your team.

It’s almost having the humility to go to your team and ask them for answers?

Sure. I was trained as a lawyer, but I was never trained as an engineer. I was never trained in HR or finance, so I needed my specialists around me, to give me the advice on areas in which I was not, myself, trained or experienced. Over the years, of course, you do learn a lot of those issues, but when you have a finance director or you have an HR director, then use their knowledge. Use their knowledge and their own networks and their own departments both, in the case of China, locally, but also they were able to get input from their opposite numbers back in head office, where there were a lot more resources.

So using all the resources available to you, rather than making your own decisions and just imposing them is, I think, for me anyway, a better form of management. It does require you to have confidence in the people you have around you and for them to have confidence in you. Loyalty is a two-way street.

How did you deal with coming into such an engineering, arguably, technical industry and product and market, being a former lawyer?