Many moons ago, I worked as a senior relationship manager within the corporate banking division of a major bank in the country. I had done corporate banking for a while by then and pretty much knew the nuts and bolts of finding structured working capital solutions for private and public sector institutions. As luck would have it, I took over my boss’s role as he was leaving to take on a different position elsewhere within the group. At our handover lunch, he imparted his words of wisdom which I carry with me to this day. “Carol, you’re about to take over a very high performing team. These guys have been your peers for a long time. You cannot manage them the way I have managed all of you. You’ve always known me as the boss, so taking directions from me was easy. With these guys, you are going to have to collaborate and influence, rather than command and control.”

 

I led this team because my former boss took the time to explain to me that I was about to take over the reins of a high performing team who should be allowed to do what they did best, leaving me to juggle the various stakeholders that needed to be managed to enable the team to perform well. I got to thinking about this when I saw some idle chatter at a forum talking about how the CEO of our biggest power utility needed to be an engineer. Why? Because only an engineer could run an institution that distributed power.

 

The same fallacious argument can be applied to an airline needing to be headed by a pilot, or a hospital needing to be headed by a doctor. Apart from being very insular, such an argument fails to take into account that leading an organization is less about one’s technical skills and more about one’s leadership capabilities. Which is why we end up with very many CEOs and heads of institutions who have been promoted to their precise level of incompetency and who have triumphantly led those institutions down a cataclysmic rabbit hole.

 

A CEO’s primary jobs are to know how to manage both internal and external stakeholders as well as to get the right people to do the right job. Regarding the latter, he needs to ask them the right questions to know if they are doing the right thing. Too many rights, right? Puns aside a classic example would be the retiring head of Absa Group Limited (formerly known as Barclays Africa Group) Maria Ramos after ten years at the helm. Ms. Ramos joined Absa/Barclays as the Group Chief Executive in March 2009 from her previous role as Group Chief Executive of Transnet Limited. Transnet is the South African state owned freight transport and logistics service provider. Prior to that she served as the Director General  of the South African National Treasury.

 

She had no executive experience in the banking industry and led the bank through very difficult transitions first with the consolidation of all the Barclays entities in Africa into one legal South African registered group, followed by the grinding divorce of the group entity from its London based parent. At her time of joining, the marriage between the Barclays and Absa in 2005 had not been well consummated leading to two very different cultures, disparate centres of power and all the ugliness that follows what the acquiring party (Barclays) called an acquisition of 56%, while the acquired party (Absa) called it a merger of equals.

Having taken over from the very dyed-in-the-red-wool Absa stalwart Steve Booysen, one of Ms. Ramos’ first tasks was to establish a team of executives that would deliver on integrating the two entities so as to derive from the synergies that were heralded at the time of the acquisition four years earlier. She also had to navigate the minefield of a growing black management cadre following the successful implementation of Black Economic Empowerment (BEE) initiatives in a traditionally white, male dominated institution. Her negotiation skills were exemplified when Barclays PLC agreed to a billion dollar divorce settlement which is to pay for investments required in technology, rebranding and other separation related expenses.

 

The point is this, Maria Ramos remained as the head of one of the top four banks in South Africa (and quite likely Africa as a whole), for ten years not based on her banking credentials, but on her capacity to lead a very complex institution during very complex situations. So at the next board interview for a CEO, you as a director need to ask yourself whether the person seated in front of you can lead or even build a high performing team. Not whether they have the engineering credentials of the guy on the ground.

 

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Twitter: @carolmusyoka