Birger Steen, CEO of Microsoft Russia, belives that "the task of a leader is to understand where he wants to go with his or her team, and then it's to be able to move there with the team".
1. What is your strongest leadership competency?
The task of a leader is to understand where he wants to go with his team or her team, and then it's to be able to move there with the team. That process consists of a few things. You have to be able to figure out and make explicit where you want to go. It's a kind of stepping back and saying "Well, what is this place that we need to get to? How could it look like? How can you envisage the future in a fairly complete way?" And then in the second part of the process which is kind of reasoning back to where you are today and saying, "What are the steps that you need to go through to get there?" That kind of envisioning process is something I enjoy. The other thing here is to be able to talk about it, to paint the picture to other people. That’s also something I enjoy a lot, and something that I hope I've been good at and I can continue to be good at. Because that involves the third thing which is to understand what it is, that makes sense to people, what it is that can be engaging, and what is a bigger target, a bigger objective that can unify many different people in the organization and make them move.
2. How to set the right objective?
That in many cases turns out to be surprisingly hard. People are kind of married to what they do every day and here you need really to open up and say, "well, look, the constraint is not going to be that you can't have more distributors because in a three year prospective you may have more distributors or fewer distributors, the constraint won't be that we have only 12 people in our team because in a three year prospective we could have 30 people in our team". This kind of “what-if”, what if you open up the current restrictions on your situation and think about how things might be very different in three-five years time, that's a very important point. There is a big value to get in a fairly broad set of your organization to participate in this process. There are couple reasons for that. One is having been part of the process makes it a lot easier to execute on it and to get energized by it afterwards. The second point is that the picture of where you want to go needs to be painted using information from the environment and I don't think any leader in 2008 can set them alone being this all-seeing, all-wise, knowing-every-thing-that's-going-on person. When you widen the scope, the amount of people that participate, if you do it in a smart way, then the quality of your information goes up. It's about using smartly the wisdom of crowds to help you refine and set the right objectives for the company.
3. Should the picture you envisage be very detailed?
There is one particular way in which it does not have to be detailed. There is a heritage from long term planning which previews for example the revenue will grow 2.756 times. It's required to be very accurate. And this is another thing that hold people back from thinking openly about the future. This is an important thing to unlearn. Being plus-minus 30% right on the right variable is much more important than being a 100% right on the wrong variable, or being 100% right on that next quarter. That way you should not paint a very detailed picture, however you need to paint consistent picture. For example if you are thinking about how you will develop your business saying, "well, we are going to cover all Russia much better than we do today. We are going to be present in all the half million inhabitant cities. At the same time we will reduce the number of resellers by half. Probably it sounds like there are two things here which are internally inconsistent. So your picture doesn’t have to be super accurate but it has to be internally consistent. Consistency is important, accuracy is not.
4. What is important to do after you communicate your vision?
You've painted, you’ve determined the desirable place to go, you've made it detailed enough, and you've communicated it. So it's something that appeals to people and it's understandable. Then it's about getting it moving. You’ve already done your involvement, you’ve already done your communication so people are with you, and then you need to follow up, you need to track progress, you need to make sure that people understand that when they take this step today it contributes to the greater goal in the future and there is connection between the two. You have partial successes, you get to a first milestone, you need to celebrate it, you need to make it clear that this was the first milestone that validates the fact that we are on the right course. It also gives more energy to continue going. Then you need to have very clear accountability. If someone is doing their job well and contributing to the success, they need to be rewarded, and people who don't do their job well, need to leave the team.
5. How do you get people moving in Microsoft?
If you want to move a lot of people, there got to be something fundamentally right and something fundamentally appealing of what you are trying to do. For example, in Microsoft Russia we built our long term aspiration a few years back. We put a headline over it which had an interesting duality. Because we said: “as a subsidiary of Microsoft in Russia we want to make Russia more important for Microsoft, we want the Russian subsidiary to become a bigger part of Microsoft business worldwide”, which means more revenue, more profit, happier customers, more partners etc. At the same time we want to make Microsoft much more important to Russia, which is not evident. But what it does say is, as we expand our business in Russia we want to make sure we do that in a way that has an impact back on society, on the Russian economy that is positive. This seems to be something that encompasses the ambitions of a lot of different people. If you are someone who is coming to work in the morning for your paycheck and for your bonus at the end of the year, there's growth, there is future. If the reason you come to work is because you are chiefly motivated by carrier development, - there's that too. If you are more an idealist and you feel it's important that the work you do contributes to the overall development of the industry or society, or you want to see a clear connection between what you do and what goes on outside your window, - there's that too. You need to have something that really unifies.
