We speak with Mr. Alexey Isaykin President and CEO of Volga-Dnepr Group about Strategic Goal 2020 “100 leaders of new generation trained for the strategy implementation”.

 – What is your definition of a Leader?

– In my judgment leaders are those who lead the way for their fellow employees and team mates using that what they have inherited from parents, what they acquired from education and through professional activity. All what helps persuade and involve other people. I think that there is no universal formula of a leader. Everyone uses the set of tools that is available under the circumstances. It is quite obvious that leaders should not be ‘mural athletes’ that one can easily imagine. Without doubt they are all different in terms of their appearance and personal qualities. And these people who differ from each other by sight and inner resources are united in their lead role by the following:

1. Ability to imagine the future and easily see the ‘picture’, make it convincing and attractive. In a recent lecture read in the TOP-Class school of management the invited lecturer Mark Kurzer, a recognized physician and creator of a medical clinic network, spoke about a very important thing that he noted as his individual leadership quality. He said: I am fond of simplifying things. Complicated things should be delivered in an easy manner and made clear. That is an indication of a good professional, but not my regular advantage as a leader.
2. A very significant leader’s quality: being able to choose the way of achievement in continuingly changeable environment. Ideal conditions are never ever possible; the way paved to the selected objective will never remain the same. There is always something that forces you to make a break, change the route but you should keep your mind turned to the objective. The leader’s role here is to see the obstacle at the right time, give a clue, together with the team mates find the way how to overcome the trouble and remain self-consistent and focused on your target.
3. There is no leader without a team. A really significant leadership quality – leaders must have an “eagle eye” – ability to identify those individuals who will help achieve the set goals and objectives, who you can rely on in various situations, the ones who you identify as successors. It is the team that makes the leader. Leaders are no ‘lone rangers’ by any means.

 – Do you believe that one can develop himself as a leader?

– Probably yes. Judging by my own experience I was not a born leader. My leadership was required and forced by existing circumstances. Bearing this in mind I may say “yes”: one can become a leader even without having natural leadership capabilities. And even if you are not a natural born leader but a self-trained and self-made leader and you are the best of the best, still there is a question. If a natural born leader is placed in the environment where he has to demonstrate his best leadership qualities he will surely deliver better results. The question is what level of leadership performance one can achieve as a result of all such self-making efforts.

At the same time there are certain people who absolutely have no front running capacity, who are untypical of any leadership that is why we have to understand that we must not, so to speak, remake left-handers into right-handers. We should better aim our efforts at searching those who do have the necessary aspirations, those who will be eager to develop their strengths rather than spend their life fighting weaknesses.

 – Do you believe it is possible to incubate corporate leadership culture, and if such culture can be established what is the environment that will help leaders to appear?

– Basically, yes. But we must specify what the structure of such culture is. A leader by his nature is one among men; it is a very specific talent like for example being a musician. But people who can do a job well are not many. For example ‘heaven born pilot’, ‘God inspired violinist’, ‘every inch a Seller’. We say this to stress that a talent is given to quite a few. When we speak about the culture of leadership we mean that there is an understanding in the company that without a leader the company will not grow. And the company must have sufficient number of leaders. How many will suffice? One per a thousand? Ten per a thousand? That is what we must figure out. On the other hand there should not be too many of them either.

Leadership culture also provides that employees playing other but not less significant roles than the leader’s role (for example, line managers, function managers, function experts), should understand the rules of relationship, under the leader’s management they recognize authorities and rules established by the leader and work for the sake of a common objective. So summing it up I should say that the leadership culture does not require that all the company employees should be leaders. It is estimated that those who lead are supported by those who are led.

We should also understand that organization is a living body. And what is life? A continuing struggle between death and birth: we are alive because new-born cells outnumber die-away cells. And consequently new born leaders should outnumber the leaving leaders. And they should not necessarily be from the same world. They can change roles. It is absolutely natural that once a human reaches a limit he or she will transfer to another social role. In my understanding this is one of leadership culture components meaning that leadership is not a life-long title, not a cradle-to-grave ‘penalty’. This is a role performed by a human for some time and which can be later changed for another. Job rotations are natural. When we speak about the most widely used management model it is a line-function model where everything is clear, but when it is supplemented with a project management form it becomes evident that you are a leader of line-function structure. But if you find yourself in a project you may be anybody else but the leader and therefore you will have to demonstrate your ability to perform an expert’s role and report to the other leader. If you have no understanding that you are not a life-long leader you will have difficulties in doing so. In making efforts to characterize our culture we see that some of our managers who understand their role as a life-long reward find it hard to re-adjust themselves and switch over from one role to another, although this is not innovative. Combat Manual includes a formula: he who can obey, can command. If you know how to act when being a subordinate then when you are promoted to a managing position you already have a rough picture of what your ‘soldiers’ feel. You easily understand each other. It is much more problematic when you make no such transfer and there is no understanding of quality of your relationships. When ‘Boss – Employee’ relationships occur I see that a man in one role does not sympathize with and does not understand the man in the other role who he has to deal with.

– Which leadership-forming elements exist in from corporate culture and which are missing? Which of them would you like to be added?

– Unfortunately the responsibility avoidance behavior is too much present in decision making process. This mainly refers to the management team. If we look at both roles of the manager and the leader then I would compare it with traditional Russian nesting doll Matryoshka. Leaders must be able to do everything that a manager can do plus foresee the future, motivate, inspire, create teams. Leader and Team – these words go well together but Manager and Team is not that much close combination, Manager and Staff suits better. I will clarify: if a Staff or Collective Body has all the roles detailed, I mean who is in charge for what in accordance with their specialization, cooperation, division of labor etc., the team, in addition to such division, will have solidarity, unity in achieving common goals based on the same values, I mean natural consolidated cooperation.

My belief is that through systematic education we will resolve the problem and ensure that the management class, which is a nourishing layer, a medium, which must be the leaders’ birthplace, will on mandatory basis include in its characteristics wholeness, ability to take decisions and assume responsibility for such decisions. Another manager’s characteristic is the understanding that results are achieved by well managed and organized collective work. What we lack is such natural responsibility, manager’s obligation to manage the self-likes. I must note that this is a characteristic of all companies. Managers who have grown up from different specialist areas are more focused on subject matter than on the people who are involved in the process. For example engineers concentrate on hardware, while economists and financiers on figures.

So what we are short of is responsibility for management actions and we lack desire to furnish this responsibility with decision taking professionalism. In order to achieve the result many managers do not preoccupy themselves with any effort to cooperate with people, set up team work and then turn the work into conscious labor. I am surprised to see how many managers do everything possible to achieve the result without resorting to assistance from their colleagues.

– What should we do to make our corporate culture generate more leaders?

– It seems to me this will surely happen when we enlighten our colleagues to the level where they begin to conceive emergence of leaders as an imperative and natural process and make all effort to assist it. When your team mate tells you: “Look here. You do it well. What if we recommend you to take a leadership course? We feel comfortable communicating with you. You have potential”. Or response from the Manager saying: “Let us try, you will definitely do it!” This is a mutually encouraging situation; this is no jealousy but rather an understanding that everyone is good when playing his or her role properly. I think people simply do not believe that their managers and leaders are far from being almighty, that their capacity depends on the extent of cooperation that they create. If you are unable to unite your colleagues, organize and inspire them to reveal all their abilities, so you are also limited by the same ‘ceiling’: wherever you fly in your dreams everything is limited and contained within the level of cooperation that you have established with your colleagues. And in this regard you are absolutely dependent on what you managed to reach by the joint effort. When you are alone you will never do what you can do together.

 – The Strategic Objective is 100 trained leaders. How do you understand the word ‘trained’? When an individual is ready to be a leader?

– When he or she is knowledgeable, when the knowledge has passed through experimental tests, various tricky situations and when a person has a minimum set of skills demonstrating the ability to use the knowledge, there is a kind of pre-start excitement but no fear to get into water and swim across the river.

 – What do you think about figure 100 — is it relative or absolute?

– It is both absolute and relative. It is absolute in order to let us have a pre-start indicator usable as a reference point. Relative because we will have to find a certain number and it will depend on many factors, which are hard to predict. What is obvious now is that we have a long list of activities, a long list of projects waiting for leaders and project teams which are yet to come. This speaks to the fact that we must set the ‘assembly line’ in motion. It is very important that such leaders’, managers’ and team mates’ reproducing ‘assembly line’ is based on the principle of timelessness. It should be tuned to a long marathon operation. And the Corporate University should select such long runners every time a project stage comes to completion. Bring them up step by step. This is the backbone of a real long life.