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In your staff’s opinion, what three words describe you?
- Supportive, trusted, committed.
Leaders stand out from the crowd with their countless accomplishments. In your view, what are some other key characteristics that make leaders different?
- The most effective leaders focus more on delegation than centralisation. Good leaders should build capability in individuals. Leaders should understand how to best combine and leverage those capabilities as a team.They need to create an environment where people are passionate and feel they contribute to and are responsible for outcomes.
To build a strong leader, job rotation is very important. Working across different units helps create a well-rounded leader. For example, a person with strong experience in finance may get promoted to be the CEO who has to work across different units, say handling clients. If he/she hasn’t had handled clients before, most likely he/she is
going to struggle as a CEO.
Some people fail miserably in leadership roles, even though they fare extremely well as individual contributors. What advice would you give these people?
- Becoming a leader is about the judgment between do-it-yourself and enabling a team to do it. Don’t follow the same recipe you use even though it is successful for you, as it may not work for your team. There are some things you can translate from your experience, but not everything. Leaders need to understand how an individual can be successful as a person and how to help them build their capacity. As an individual performer, you make decisions yourself. As a leader, you actually need to share decision making with your team.
How do you allocate your time between these key areas – clients, staff, company strategy, marketing, finance, and operations?
- Every company has clients. I always have time for existing and new clients and also allocate time to internal activities e.g. staff development. Spare time for new thinking as leaders need to think how their current and future business relates to existing business. Reserve time for “blue sky” thinking. That involves asking questions such as: What are the services no one is providing but clients are looking for? How can we reshape the industry? Look for different timeframes, present, plans for the short term, but also consider what could be the long term, and think out of the box.
Leadership involves risks. What kind of risks are you generally willing to take? Why?
- Entrepreneurs are risk takers. Leaders don’t necessary need to be risk takers, but they need to be able to think about risk. Risk is inherent to their decision-making process. For example, do you put in capacity before or do you get the project first? It’s not necessarily about what is riskier; it’s simply do you understand the risk involved in both strategies? Can you manage them? And which one do you prefer? If leaders need to take risks, they need to be aware of the risk they are taking and the trade off between risk and reward.
How do you keep yourself motivated?
- It’s less about keeping myself motivated, it’s more about seeing the results of my work. By looking at the development of my staff or seeing change, the success of our clients, or improving the community are really rewarding. Everyone has a boss, providing feedback to a supervisor is one way you keep yourself motivated, which is called managing upwards.
How do you keep yourself physically, mentally and emotionally active?
- Normally I go to the gym, run on a treadmill every day and I practise Muay Thai once or twice a week as I find it combines aerobics, discipline, and the coordination of different organs. I also spend time learning more about Thailand. In addition, I play soccer for a veteran league.
How do you cope with disappointments?
- Very quickly learn from disappointments but without losing focus on moving forward. You should assess what went wrong - for example, why did we lose a project? However, don’t over-debate the issue or spend too much time thinking about how different life would have been if we had won that project because it will not happen. Let’s leverage that learning next time.