Adam Bryant, Corner Office New York Times; Interview with Stephen I. Sadove, chairman and chief executive of Saks Inc., For the Chief of Saks, It’s Culture That Drives Results:
"Q. What were your biggest leadership lessons?
A. I used opportunities to get involved and develop relationships with a diverse set of people, as opposed to the narrow group of people I was dealing with day-to-day, and that made a huge difference. It shaped my philosophy in terms of the importance of relationship-building. It really underlies my entire philosophy of how to run a business.
Q. How did you learn that?
A. In many instances, I was taken under the wing of people who gave me an opportunity, and also showed some attention and interest where they didn’t necessarily have to. Back at Harvard Business School, I remember a couple of professors there who paid some attention, and in some cases it really led to my love of marketing.
I was also a reasonably good tennis player back in my college and graduate school days. And when I started work at a company called General Foods, people were always looking for tennis partners. If you were a good tennis player, you were heavily in demand. I found that things like that allowed me to meet people that I otherwise may never have met.
I’ve been amazed over the years how relationships that come out of one thing go toward something else. So somebody I might have met through a charity then becomes somebody who knows somebody and it leads to a relationship.
If you give positive vibes, if you show an interest, by and large a lot of people will react. Not everybody, but people tend to react. When people show an interest in reaching out, I tend to react to them.
Q. Were you always comfortable in leadership roles?
A. I was the kind of person growing up who was able to play in different circles of people. I was never a great athlete. I was a good tennis player, but I also was on the math team. I was able to move from one circle of friends to another. So you could be with the top-of-the-class people, but you could also be just as comfortable with the athletes who maybe didn’t care as much about the academics.
I always felt the natural impulse of wanting people to work well together, to get whatever the end result was — winning the game, getting the team to work together, working on the newspaper, whatever it might be.
When I got to a business environment, it was a natural feeling that hey, we’ve got to win. But there was also a belief that I had, even early on, that there were a lot of others who performed as well as I did. What started differentiating me was that I would do what was needed to get a job done, but also make time to come up with new ideas.
I also grew up in a very diverse environment. My dad was with the World Bank in Washington. All of our friends were of international background. You had people from African countries, India, Indonesia.
So I grew up in a world of lots of interesting people, and you really valued learning from them and talking to them. I grew up valuing lots of different kinds of opinions and people of different backgrounds. I was relatively comfortable with adults because we always were entertaining. So you never worried about being uncomfortable in a setting like that, or shy.
Q. What about other mentors?
A. I learned a lot from some of the senior executives at General Foods. There were so many smart people there and you watched how sharp people thought about business issues. But I think that what I really learned there was the value of collaboration, the value of one and one equals three, and not having all the answers yourself. I don’t think it was someone telling me, as much as seeing how much value you could get if people work together.
I also found so many examples where people were working in silos. To me it was just obvious that if people worked together you would get a better result than if you were working independently. The first 10 years of my career I found that getting people to think differently, and moving from what I call a vertical organization to a horizontal organization, was transformational.
Q. How would you say your leadership and management style has evolved?
A. I spend more time with people and people issues. I obviously work with business issues, but I try to go out of my way in mentoring, coaching and developing young people. I tend to care a lot about the people and the relationships that they have, how the team is operating, the culture.
Q. Give me an example of how you spend time with these people.
A. I’ll take 30 or so high-potential employees and spend a day with them. And I’ll talk to them about culture, I’ll talk to them about helping. We’ll call it a C.E.O. forum and work directly with them about issues like leadership, philosophy of leadership, and real business issues that we’re facing.
Q. What’s your philosophy of leadership?
A. I have a very simple model to run a company. It starts with leadership at the top, which drives a culture. Culture drives innovation and whatever else you’re trying to drive within a company — innovation, execution, whatever it’s going to be. And that then drives results.
When I talk to Wall Street, people really want to know your results, what are your strategies, what are the issues, what it is that you’re doing to drive your business. They’re focused on the bottom line. Never do you get people asking about the culture, about leadership, about the people in the organization. Yet, it’s the reverse, because it’s the people, the leadership, the culture and the ideas that are ultimately driving the numbers and the results. So it’s a flip.
What I try to teach people is, don’t ask the first question in terms of numbers. Let’s talk about the people, let’s talk about the culture, let’s talk about the ideas and the innovation.
I learn so much from the people in the organization all the time, and I also learn from students. Once or twice a year I’ll go teach at an M.B.A. class up at Columbia, and I love talking to the students because they’ll challenge you and make you think differently.
I think some of the best ideas come from people who aren’t stuck in their ways. I always tell people new to my organization when they come in, I want you, in your first three or four weeks, to jot down every time you have an idea or a question about how things are done, and then stick it in your drawer. Just whatever it is, why are they doing it this way?
I don’t care whether it’s good or bad; I don’t want you to even talk to anyone about it. Just write it down and stick it in the drawer. And at the end of three or four weeks I want you to look at the sheet. Maybe you’ll say: “Now, I understand that. Now it makes a little bit of sense to me.” Or you may look at it and say, “That still doesn’t make any sense to me.” Then I want you to sit with me and we’re going to talk about them.
Invariably, I find some really good ideas that make you say: “Why are we doing it this way? It makes no sense at all.” I’ve seen little things, big things, waste in the system and a lot of duplication of work. Things like that come out of it.
Q. What’s your best career advice?
A. Early in your career, find the time to do the out-of-the-norm. Do whatever’s required to do the job — run the budgets, execute the promotions. But you’re never going to differentiate yourself just doing what everybody else can do. Find the time to build relationships outside of your own chain of command.
Q. How do you give feedback?
A. I like giving feedback every day, on the spot. It’s important that people know how they’re doing. I’m not really big on year-end feedback. If there are problems, we’ll make sure that they understand the issues that they have to deal with. But I really much prefer it being on-the-spot feedback, as opposed to just waiting for everything to build up and then you have the big blow-out. I don’t see a lot of value in that.
The reality is that people don’t like giving feedback. By the way, there’s a flip side to it, which is that people don’t like to necessarily hear feedback, and even when they’re given feedback they oftentimes don’t hear it. Sometimes you’ll hit people between the eyes and then you’ll see that they didn’t think they got any feedback.
Q. How do you decide when it’s time to let somebody go?
A. I tend to be very half-full versus half-empty, and so you want to give the person another opportunity. You want to see if they can shift their behavior 20 degrees. I’ll probably be more inclined to give them another shot. And more often than not, it doesn’t work out, and I’ll say, “Boy, I should have let them go earlier.” You learn from it, and I’m much tougher today on that than I was.
But I’ve seen some wonderful successes, too. So maybe four out of five don’t work out. But that one that’s a homerun — giving them a little bit more time than they otherwise might have had — may make it worth the other four.
Q. How do you hire?
A. Well, clearly you want somebody who has the intellectual capacity, strategic thinking and the skill sets. But I’m looking for a cultural fit with me. How collaborative are they? How inclusive are they? How willing are they to listen to lots of different points of view? Do they have diverse interests?
Q. So what questions do you ask?
A. What do you like to do for fun? If you had a free evening what do you like to do? Where do you like to travel? What kind of people do you like to spend time with? Who are the people you admire? What have you been reading? When you get a sense of what people are involved with outside of work, you can really start to understand a person.
Q. Anything unusual about the way you manage your time?
A. I make time to wander around a lot because you find out what’s really going on when you pop into people’s offices. But I always have a purpose. It might be, what are the new ideas you’re thinking about for driving creativity or innovation? If I always ask about new ideas, then people will figure I must be interested about innovation. In the last year, I was asking about new cost-saving ideas. But I love wandering around the floors. One of the biggest risks of a C.E.O. is being isolated."
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/30/business/30corner.html?scp=2&sq=corner%20office&st=cse
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