A CEO’s primary jobs are to know how to manage both internal and
external stakeholders as well as to get the right people to do the right
job. FILE PHOTO | NMG
Many moons ago, I worked as a senior relationship manager within
the corporate banking division of a major bank in the country. I had
done corporate banking for a while by then and pretty much knew the nuts
and bolts of finding structured working capital solutions for private
and public sector institutions.
As luck would have it, I
took over my boss’s role as he was leaving to take on a different
position elsewhere within the group. At our handover lunch, he imparted
his words of wisdom which I carry with me to this day.
“Carol,
you’re about to take over a very high performing team. These guys have
been your peers for a long time. You cannot manage them the way I have
managed all of you. You’ve always known me as the boss, so taking
directions from me was easy. With these guys, you are going to have to
collaborate and influence, rather than command and control.”
I
led this team because my former boss took the time to explain to me
that I was about to take over the reins of a high performing team who
should be allowed to do what they did best, leaving me to juggle the
various stakeholders that needed to be managed to enable the team to
perform well. I got to thinking about this when I saw some idle chatter
at a forum talking about how the CEO of our biggest power utility needed
to be an engineer. Why? Because only an engineer could run an
institution that distributed power.
The same fallacious
argument can be applied to an airline needing to be headed by a pilot,
or a hospital needing to be headed by a doctor. Apart from being very
insular, such an argument fails to take into account that leading an
organisation is less about one’s technical skills and more about one’s
leadership capabilities. Which is why we end up with very many CEOs and
heads of institutions who have been promoted to their precise level of
incompetency and who have triumphantly led those institutions down a
cataclysmic rabbit hole.
A CEO’s primary jobs are to
know how to manage both internal and external stakeholders as well as to
get the right people to do the right job. Regarding the latter, he
needs to ask them the right questions to know if they are doing the
right thing. Too many rights, right? Puns aside a classic example would
be the retiring head of Absa Group Limited (formerly known as Barclays
Africa Group) Maria Ramos after ten years at the helm. Ms Ramos joined
Absa/Barclays as the Group Chief Executive in March 2009 from her
previous role as Group Chief Executive of Transnet Limited. Transnet is
the South African state-owned freight transport and logistics service
provider. Prior to that she served as the Director General of the South
African National Treasury.
She had no executive
experience in the banking industry and led the bank through very
difficult transitions first with the consolidation of all the Barclays
entities in Africa into one legal South African registered group,
followed by the grinding divorce of the group entity from its
London-based parent.
At her time of joining, the
marriage between the Barclays and Absa in 2005 had not been well
consummated leading to two very different cultures, disparate centres of
power and all the ugliness that follows what the acquiring party
(Barclays) called an acquisition of 56 per cent, while the acquired
party (Absa) called it a merger of equals.
Having taken
over from the very dyed-in-the-red-wool Absa stalwart Steve Booysen,
one of Ms Ramos’ first tasks was to establish a team of executives that
would deliver on integrating the two entities so as to derive from the
synergies that were heralded at the time of the acquisition four years
earlier. She also had to navigate the minefield of a growing black
management cadre following the successful implementation of Black
Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiatives in a traditionally white,
male-dominated institution. Her negotiation skills were exemplified when
Barclays PLC agreed to a billion dollar divorce settlement which is to
pay for investments required in technology, rebranding and other
separation related expenses.
The point is this, Ms
Ramos remained as the head of one of the top four banks in South Africa
(and quite likely Africa as a whole), for ten years not based on her
banking credentials, but on her capacity to lead a very complex
institution during very complex situations. So at the next board
interview for a CEO, you as a director need to ask yourself whether the
person seated in front of you can lead or even build a high performing
team. Not whether they have the engineering credentials of the guy on
the ground.
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