Data and Servant Leadership
On the latest interview episode of T-CAST, Alex and Jason joined Robert Sieger for a conversation. Robert wears a lot of hats. He has been Chief Information Officer, Chief Technology Officer, and VP of Technology and currently employed as a CIO at Boomerang Carnets. Unless you are up on some of the finer points of international law you might be wondering what a carnet is. As Sieger describes them, they are a passport for stuff. Most countries have pretty tight controls on what you can and can’t bring in and out of them. This exists at least in part because of the desire to control trade. However, there are certain businesses that frequently bring goods in and out of a country with no intention of selling them.
An example based on some of Boomerang’s clients is news crews. These have a large amount of equipment that go with them into a number of different countries around the world. The carnets that Boomerang provides are essentially a way to record the movements of that equipment in order to ensure CNN or FOX isn’t selling random camera equipment to the locals.
However, this conversation wasn’t about such esoteric matters. Robert is also a strong advocate for servant leadership. Sounds good, but what is it? Servant leadership is simply the idea that the leader should be empowering others to help them be their best. Part of the way this works is that it is really a two way street. The leader helps those he leads be their best and they in turn help the leader be his best. This requires a certain degree of humility on the part of the leader, who has to be willing to hire and develop people who are smarter than him in certain areas. He has to then be willing to learn from them. This is certainly true in regards to the technology world in which Siegel operates. He doesn’t need to know every aspect of coding and website design, in fact, he can’t. What he can do is direct all of the necessary elements to accomplish the specific goals of the company. Taking the time to also develop the people, to understand them, their talents, their desires, and their ideas helps them, helps the leader, helps the company and of course helps the clients.
A cynic will say that all sounds great in theory but does it actually work in practice? Can Mr. Sieger produce data to show that his approach is effective? As it happens, he surely can. When he joined Boomerang, Robert took a poll of its users asking how they felt about technology and its responsiveness and impact on their lives. The results were less than promising. He took the information from that poll and worked with his team. He also began taking the same poll every year and the results are now uniformly positive. He was also able to bring in a phone upgrade $30,000 under budget simply by really listening to his team.
That is what truly separates the real servant leader from a pretender. He actually listens. He does not just have a suggestion box, or an open door policy that everyone can tell is just lip service. All you have to do is have a real conversation with people and then if they have a good idea, follow through on it. Don’t just smile and nod. Yet, few take this simple approach, a fact that baffles Sieger, and frankly us as well.
Robert was also able to take this approach to the rest of the company, getting the other VPs on board with servant leadership. Even that took plenty of patient listening. The VPs all had their own issues to deal with, which might require differences of approach, differences that you might not be able to detect unless there is real listening going on.
Sieger takes this approach even when team members don’t perform up to standards. Should an employee make a mistake, he gets coached and so long as it is addressed, that’s the end of it. In fact, the correcting of the mistake or behavior becomes a positive come the next performance review. Should there be a chronic problem, a plan gets developed in conjunction with the person to figure out how to correct the issue. Most times, this corrects things and the employee improves. Though sometimes, there will still be someone who has to be let go. As they say, you can lead a horse to water but can’t make him drink.
Robert Sieger represents exactly what a leader should be. He seeks not to control but to serve, treating people like people and not cogs in a machine, getting information, and ideas directly from them. This makes Mr. Sieger another excellent data champion.
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