Are you a Boss or a Leader? Before the Meeting Adjourns, tell me What You’ll Do Next

This interview with Bill Flemming, president of Skanska USA Building Inc., was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant

In his team approach, Bill Flemming, president of Skanska USA Building Inc., wants every meeting to end with a clear understanding of what was decided. “What are you going to commit to doing when you leave this room?” he asks

Q. Tell me about your approach to leadership.

A. First, I work for the people below me. They don’t work for me; I work for them. Because if I don’t do a good job in leading and setting strategy and helping them do their job, they’ll probably fail. Second, teamwork is key in this business. This is not an individual sport. I see many leaders who are somewhat egoistic. To me, it’s more about the team. And in my early years in this job, I focused on organizing the senior leadership so that they’re moving more in the same direction.

Q. What did that involve?

A. The first step was acknowledging that I wasn’t going to do it. I’m part of the team, not the guy who’s going to lead everybody in how to change it. I realized that we needed a facilitator to do that. So I brought somebody in just to teach us better interaction.

Q. What were the best questions put on the table by the facilitator?

A. Why do you want to be part of this team? Why do you want to be in this company? Why do you show up at work? What’s in your box? And when I say, “What’s in your box?” it means “What drives you?” and I don’t want to hear the party line that you’re doing this for the company.

And what commitment do you have to your partners? We each had to come up with a personal commitment to our team and talk about our responsibility to others on the team. That drove people together fairly quickly. The interaction in the group has been different.

Q. Any feedback over the years about your leadership style that prompted you to make some adjustments?

A. Sure. I can be somewhat short with people. And the reason I’m short is that I’m urgent. We don’t always have a lot of time, particularly in this business. So it may seem like I’m short and dismissive, but I act that way because of the urgency to get things done. You can change how you do things, but it doesn’t always change who you are. You have to be reminded. When you get a 360 review, it’s often three to five pages long. I boiled it down to about three or four things that I want to focus on, wrote them on a piece of paper and I keep them inside the cover of my tablet notebook. So when I’m at a meeting, I see those three or four things and it’s a good reminder.

Q. Anything unusual about how you run meetings?

A. I’ve noticed in management meetings that you have to drive them to a decision and remind everybody about the decision. Sometimes people will try to change a decision after it’s been made. You can’t leave a meeting with the possibility that that might happen. So you have to have a little more formalized approach, and be clear about what was decided.

I like to conclude meetings with two things. One is: “What do you think of this meeting? Was it time well spent?” And two is: “What’s your commitment to this team? What are you going to commit to doing when you leave this room?” In other words, that’s the personal commitment to your group when you leave. I find that to be fairly important.

Q. That can chew up a lot of time, though.

A. It’s time well spent. I’m not saying we’re 100 percent successful every time, but I think that’s a good way to conclude a meeting. I find that with business meetings, if you don’t pay close attention, they can just wander.

Q. Any other specifics worth mentioning about your management approach?

A. When people ask me a question, I don’t always answer it with, “Yes, this is what I want you to do,” or, “This is what I’d do.”  Instead, I’ll ask them, “So what do you want to do?” I don’t want you to just announce the problem to me and expect me to solve it. You tell me what the problem is, you tell me what your proposed solution is, and I’ll give you feedback. I don’t always want to give you an answer on what to do. I want you to think about what your answer’s going to be. I’ll always have an opinion about something, but I want people to form their own opinions.

I’ve seen organizations where the boss makes all the decisions. That’s not leadership; that’s a boss. I don’t want to be the boss, I want to be the leader. So I want to get you to help me figure out what we’ve got to do here. Because if you’re deeply immersed in the problem or the issue, you probably know a lot more about it than I’m going to know. So what do you think is going to work?  I can give you some insights based on my experience, and I can give you a different view, but you may be more intimately involved with the issue than me.

So that’s another technique I use. It’s captured in a quote I once read about leadership from Russell Ewing, a British journalist, who said: “A boss creates fear; a leader, confidence. A boss fixes blame; a leader corrects mistakes. A boss knows all; a leader asks questions. A boss makes work drudgery; a leader makes it interesting. A boss is interested in himself or herself; a leader is interested in the group.” 

Q. Let’s shift to hiring. What questions do you ask job candidates?

A. One thing I like to ask people, which I find puts them on their toes, is, “I want you to tell me your most successful trait and your worse trait, and explain why they would help you here or impact your performance here.” You will see lots of different answers and squirming on that. And there is no right or wrong answer, by the way.

Q. But people have a lot of canned answers about their weaknesses — they’re perfectionists, they work too hard, etc.

A. You can sift through those fairly quickly. I’ll say: “Those are a given. Now tell me what the real answer is here.”  And sometimes the person will dodge it two or three times because they really don’t feel comfortable. Or maybe they’re not quick on their feet, and that tells me something in itself.

Fuente: The New York Times