Q. What were some early influences on your leadership style?
A. My father was a freedom movement advocate. He worked with Mahatma Gandhi. He spent years in jail because of his efforts to fight for India’s freedom, and he would write speeches and my mother would deliver them. Then, when he was with our family, once in a while I would attend meetings that he was hosting. He would speak up in the middle of the conversation if he heard somebody making things up or falsifying things to make themselves look good.
And I just cannot put up with injustice and political maneuvering myself. As people around me get to know me, they know I will never knowingly do anything unfair or unjust. I make mistakes, but I am also very quick to admit and correct them.
Q. Other important leadership lessons for you?
A. I have learned that leadership is all about demonstrating and exuding confidence. One of my former bosses used to say: “There will always be uncertainty in your life, doubts about yourself, about the decision you’re about to make. Keep it inside. Process it. But don’t let it show on your face. You need to come out with a confident but simple description of the problem and tell people a simple three-step process for how we’re going to get out of the problem. Because they need to know that the leader is in control.”
Q. You mentioned the importance of simplicity.
A. That same boss told his direct reports: “Whenever you’re going to talk to investors, to management, to the board, or at quarterly meetings, I want you to write it first. It may be five or six pages. Then I want you to write one page. Then I want you to write half a page.” He used to say he hated PowerPoints: “Where is the power and what’s the point?” He also would say to us, “If you cannot explain it to me without slides, you haven’t understood your problem.” That still resonates with me.
Q. What qualities are you looking for when you hire?
A. I want to know how hungry they are. Are you hungry to get to the next level? Every day you come in the office or wherever you’re traveling, you make progress. And the next day it starts from ground zero. That’s the No. 1 thing I’m looking for. Next, I’m looking for whether they will bring the best out of the teams — and not just the peer groups, but people below them and above them.
And I’m looking for people with courage. The higher up you go, courage becomes the No. 1 thing. If I don’t have courage to listen to my instincts and my colleagues’ critiques, I’m not going to make the right choices because generally the right choices are a little tough to execute.
Q. So what questions do you ask?
A. Everybody in their life has gone through the good, bad, the ugly. How did you manage the worst part? What did you learn? Then I’ll say: “If I were sitting with your boss over a beer, and I were to say, ‘I’m interviewing John for this great job and he’s fantastic. He seems to be great at this and this, but. ….’ ” Then I will ask, “What would that but be?” Some people don’t want to answer that, but some of them actually go on to tell me five “buts.” I’m looking for honesty. I’m looking for self-confidence and people who are secure in their own skin. Another thing I generally ask is, “What would your subordinates say about you?”
Once I have decided that I want to hire somebody, there’s a final step, where I’ll invite the person and their spouse to join my wife and me for dinner. It’s a social dinner. It is an interview but it’s a not interview. And I learn things that I couldn’t learn any other way. Let’s say I’m interviewing a man. I’ll watch how he interacts with his wife. I’ll ask some of the same questions in front of his wife that I asked him before. Is he afraid to say again what he said to me? It’s amazing what you learn.
Here’s another question I’ll ask: “Tell me about a time when you had to give an assignment to your team and it didn’t go well. What was the process? What did you learn from that?” They might say they didn’t give a clear explanation of the challenge, the problem, the difficult situation. Or maybe they didn’t have the right team in place, and didn’t get enough support. But I’m listening to whether they see the big picture. If they start talking about two or three fall guys, that’s a red flag.
Q. What’s your approach to minimizing politics at your company?
A. I’ll give you a typical example. When you meet with your direct reports as a group, everybody’s contributing, and there’s good team spirit. But then you might be traveling with one of them, and he might start criticizing a new colleague in subtle ways to indirectly build himself up. That’s politics right there. When they do it I’ll say: “No, no, stop right there. He is new, he is still learning, you have to spend time with him.”
As the leader, I can either encourage politics or stop it. If you show you have no tolerance for it, and encourage people to work together, they start to figure out that Dinesh doesn’t have time for politics.
We’re a big matrix company, and there is a lot of room for politics because matrix means you might have two bosses. If there’s a problem, a conflict, I’ll often go to the source. I don’t talk over the phone. And maybe over dinner I’ll do some coaching, talk straight, give them some advice on how to work well with the other individual, and encourage them to talk to each other. I’ll tell them, “Give him a call, talk to him more, and don’t try to solve difficult issues over e-mail, because e-mails can cause serious misunderstandings or even disasters sometimes.”
When people talk, they generally sort out things. So you bring them together. I often say to people: “In our company, we don’t want any politics. If you see or smell anything like politics, kill it.” I say it constantly. That doesn’t mean we’ll be 100 percent politics-free. Politics means human, and human means politics. My hope is that the politics can be contained.
Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/13/business/harmans-chief-on-how-to-reduce-office-politics.html?partner=rss&emc=rss