Contents

1. People Management
2. Author’s Profile
3. Chapter 1. Introduction. Are Books Useful?
4. Chapter 2. The Most Important Lifehack in Human Management
5. Chapter 3. A Person Cannot Be Trained
6. Chapter 4. Everyone Around Here Is the Same, Except for Me
7. Chapter 5. Human Management Is a Profession
8. Chapter 6. A Shareholder Is Also A Profession
9. Chapter 7. Employees as Fellow Travelers
10. Chapter 8. Being Yourself or Myths of Leadership Styles
11. Chapter 9. Teal Utopias
12. Chapter 10. Myths of Motivation
13. Chapter 11. Who Are All These People?
14. Chapter 12. There Is No Way to Do Business without Strategy
15. Chapter 13. Formal and Informal Techniques of Influence
16. Chapter 14. Parents and Children
17. Chapter 15. Employees Take More Risk
18. Chapter 16. Fear Is the Best Way to Ruin Everything
19. Chapter 17. Paralysis in Decision-Making
20. Chapter 18. The Dunning-Kruger Effect
21. Chapter 19. The Comfort Zone
22. Chapter 20. Culture Eats Strategy, or Vice Versa?
23. Chapter 21. Late Arrivals and Social Media
24. Chapter 22. Rebellion on the Ship
25. Chapter 23. Testing
26. Chapter 24. Good Employee, Bad Employee
27. Chapter 25. Non-material Motivation
28. Chapter 26. Success that Causes Failure
29. Chapter 27. Training and Talent Pool
30. Chapter 28. A Few Brief Thoughts
31. Chapter 29. How to Manage Top Managers
32. Chapter 30. Conclusion

Author’s Profile

Svyatoslav Biryulin, born in the Soviet Union, worked for many years in Russia in senior management positions. Svyatoslav’s total management experience exceeds 25 years, 14 of which he worked as CEO of companies with an annual turnover of 200+ million euros ($200+ million US dollars) and a staffing level of more than 1,000 people.

His managing experience was acquired in the former countries of the Soviet Bloc in Eastern Europe and this distinguishes his books from standard American textbooks written mostly for U.S. readers. However, when managing people, one must consider local specifics including cultural characteristics and values that are not always the same as those of the U.S.

Since 2014, Svyatoslav has been developing its own consulting company operating in Russia, Slovenia and the ex-Soviet Union countries. Since 2016, he has lived in Ljubljana, Slovenia. The company is engaged in consulting in the field of strategy. In Slovenia, it works under the KVAN Svetovanje brand.

Svyatoslav Biryulin has already published four books in Russian. All of them are devoted to strategy and organization management. Here we are presenting you one of those books which addresses issues of leadership and people management.

This book is devoted to human resources management, but it is written not from the point of view of an HR-director, but rather from the position of a person who has led people most of his life. The book is not a compilation of popular industry theories, but rather a comprehensive exploration of the management experience, including the honest narrative of his own mistakes and failures.

The book is addressed to a wide range of managers, i.e., people who manage other people. The number of subordinates does not matter. It will surely be interesting both for beginners and experienced directors.

See more: http://www.eng.sbiryulin.com

Translator – Dmitry Beschetny

Editor – Nick Sabin

Chapter 1. Introduction. Are Books Useful?

There are thousands, or perhaps even tens of thousands, of HR books in the world. This comes as no surprise. Peter Drucker said that people and money are the two main sources of resources for business. People bring ideas and competencies that, with money, become tangible and intangible assets. All other resources are obtained by some combination of these two. All the major business books are either financial or human.

You have to read these books. Many popular HR books have great ideas that you can use in your work. Many books have published millions of copies in Russian.They have sold well and, apparently, have been at least partially read.

However, in my life I have met only a few or maybe a few dozen people, whom I can definitely refer to as really professional leaders. During my tenure as a manager and general director of large industrial and trade enterprises, the biggest one of which had more than 3,600 employees, I hired and fired dozens of top-managers, and only a few of them were true professionals. In my life, I have met many businessmen and CEOs who managed major companies but only a few of them really taught me something.

My own experience of effective people management also consisted of trials and extremely painful mistakes, rather than “book” knowledge. Why is that the case?

A lot of books are written in the U.S.

We, liberal and educated people, like the idea that all people are equal. Including me. We are outraged when people are harassed because they belong to a particular group, whether it is a group based on skin color, place of residence, eye shape, religion, or political opinion. We like a world in which every homo sapiens has a complete collection of human rights, which they enjoy within the rule of law.

But equality of rights does not mean similarity of souls, minds, views and characters. Nature didn’t make us the same. It made us equal in rights, but not identical in personage. We should all, whatever happens, have the right to express our views on elections, to choose the gender of our partner and to move freely around the world. But these rights do not yet make a man and a woman the same: a Japanese and a Brazilian, a Russian programmer and a Swiss watchmaker, a Serbian journalist and a New York artist. God made us different, and that’s good. Of course, we are almost identical biologically, but our way of thinking and behaving was much influenced by our parents, our societies and the cultural environment in which we were born and raised. And not only the cultural environment of the country, but also that of the city, family or community in which we grew up. For example, I was born in Russia, so the Russian language is my native language, but I do not feel comfortable in every community in my home country.

But not only is each individual person different. People living in different countries have different characteristics. I have lived, visited and worked in different countries and I know for a fact that every country, despite the fact that it is usually inhabited by millions of different people, has its own peculiarities. In particular, the peculiarities of doing business and how to behave at work. Doing business with the Chinese is not the same as doing business with the Poles or Germans. Not in the sense that some of them do business badly and one of them does business properly, but in the fact that they do it differently. They don’t treat their jobs the same way either.

I like to read American human resources literature. Some books describe the relationship between subordinates and superiors that I would love to build myself. I used to build it as a young MBA graduate full of fresh ideas and illusions. But life has made a drastic adjustment to my ideas about human resources management around here, and I will share this experience in the book. Of course, I never fully believed that all companies in the U.S. are set up like Google, or that Google’s top managers are driven exclusively by humanism. Some of the corporate scandals that broke out clearly indicate that it is not the angels who run the place either, and not the lambs who work there. However, on the whole, the average American employee’s working capacity and responsibility are higher than those of employees in the countries of the ex-Soviet Union. The approach to work of European employees is different than those in the USA. And the experience accumulated by American managers cannot always be applied on our soil.

This does not mean that reading foreign literature, particularly American literature, is useless. In some ways people from Connecticut are different from people from Zagreb, but in other ways, they are similar. Good American books have something to teach, which we will talk about below. But one cannot blindly accept everything written in them as a guideline written in stone. You should parse the ideas outlined in them through your own experience and through the culture of your country.

Chapter 2. The Most Important Lifehack in Human Management

The most important lifehack in human management is that there are no lifehacks in human management. And if you’re offered one, don’t believe it! There are many useful (and not very useful) hacks, but the techniques for applying them depend on the specific team you manage and the situation you are in. In other words, you can master hundreds of techniques related to human resources management, e.g. feedback, goal management, non-financial incentives through competitions, but this is not enough. You need to be experienced, intelligent and wise enough to understand which one is appropriate and effective at the given moment in time. And that’s very, very difficult.

Why is this the case? Because all people are different. This assertion often irritates entrepreneurs who think that all people are the same, just one lazier or more motivated than the other, but they are wrong.

If you’ve been running a construction company and you’ve been doing it very effectively, your experience isn’t good for managing a team of programmers. If you managed a young, ambitious and creative team, your experience and self-confidence might be shattered when you take on the team of pre-retirement managers. If you read at least a hundred of the best books, it will be of little help to you if you are moved from the office in the capital’s metropolis to the backwoods.

As it was mentioned in Chapter 1, all people are different. Each of them has their own interests and background which is different from yours. Each of them has been influenced by their own environment, and if one of them has completed a florist’s course somewhere in Berlin and the other one in Mathematics and Cybernetics in Belgrade, they have different views on many issues. There’s no single lifehack to run this whole motley crue.

A manager who tries to apply his previous experience in completely different conditions will fail. Managing people is a separate science, a specialty that you will have to study for life. Each new team, each new generation will, if not overturn your previous experience, then at least significantly expand it, and, no matter how successful you have been before, new management situations can raise questions to which you have no answers.

Moreover, the bad news is that even the same team will have changed over the years, and the methods that have been applied for 20 years may not work now. Once, we advised a company that was created by an ambitious student who hired a number of guys who were just as hungry for success. Together, they created one of the most successful companies in their industry, turning the market upside down with their innovative ideas. But now the founder of the company lives abroad most of the time, and his top managers, who have grown passive, only pretend to agree that change is necessary, yet internally they strive to preserve the status quo and hamper any conceivable reforms. The team is almost the same, but the people in it are not the same anymore.

The good news is that, despite everything, management experience tends to accumulate. A man who has led people for over 20 years adapts faster to a new team than an inexperienced one. But this is not because he has more managerial life skills or methods in his head, or at least not only because of that. He just, as a more experienced and wise man, already understands that all people are different, and spends more time supervising subordinates and trying to understand their inner motives and attitudes than forcing them to his own comfortable patterns of behavior. He listens more than he speaks, and he looks for ways to use the strengths of the team he has been given, rather than fighting their weaknesses”.

In other words, he understands human nature.

What is, in essence, human management? It’s an influence on people to get them to act in the desired way. And if you don’t live in an era of slavery, there are very few ways to force people to do what you want them to do. They can easily disobey your orders, write a resignation letter and leave, and it is not yet known which one of you will be worse off. That is why the formal control levers, such as position, status, a “Director” sign on the office door are of less and less importance. Moreover, the situation is deteriorating. We are still accustomed to discipline, and subordination to leadership is in our DNA. We’re easy to manage. But teenagers argue even in schools with teachers, questioning their knowledge and experience. We wouldn’t dream about doing that when we were their age. And when they grow up, they will argue with you and your leadership, and your exclamations of “Well, who are you to argue with me?” will be answered with, “Well, who are you to be in charge of me?”, as they sign their resignation notice.

One day, I left the company where I had put together one of the best teams in my career. I had worked hard to create an atmosphere of open dialogue there, and we had tried to avoid bureaucracy wherever possible. I had a small office, and my staff often came in to seek advice or discuss a work-related issue.

At my new job I was given a room the size of the Piazza San Marco in Venice, one of my assistants (there were three of them) brought me a cup of coffee on a gold tray, and papers to sign in a red velvet folder with the letters “CEO” engraved on the cover in gold.

I wasn’t a very experienced director at the time, but I was smart enough to realize that any altruistic offering of democracy here would be interpreted in exactly the opposite way. In the eyes of the staff, the director was supposed to be lazy, self-confident and a bit of a jerk. Of course, I gradually managed to change some of the local culture, but it took a long time.

The art of human resources management, unfortunately, will have to be mastered for the rest of our lives. Not forgetting that yesterday’s experience can be erased in a new country, in a new city or just in a new company.

Chapter 3. A Person Cannot Be Trained

Cats don’t submit to training. Well, at least that’s what the experts say. I have never personally tried to train cats, but I have tried to train people, and I can say with authority that this activity is absolutely empty and pointless. People don’t submit to training either.

What I am talking about in this chapter may seem obvious at first glance, and many experienced managers know it for sure. But personally, I have spent many hours trying to get people to act in a beneficial way that they are not accustomed to, so you might find it useful.

An important caveat concerning not only this chapter, but also the entire book, is that I’m not asking you to be saint-like. You don’t have to be Mahatma Gandhi to be a good manager. Personally, I am not against a degree of healthy cynicism in management. We can dislike some of our subordinates, be of a not very good opinion about their mental abilities, but still effectively manage them and achieve results.

If you are an entrepreneur and manager, what is more important for you to achieve results or to be in harmony with others? If the latter, in my opinion, you’d better change your field. And if the first, you will have to accept the idea that one of your subordinates will not make you feel greatly admired. If you, according to the classic management theory, have six to eight subordinates, one of them will inevitably be less sympathetic to you. But you must still influence them so that they act in the company’s best interest.

Another thing is that managing people who make you feel depressed just with their presence, is exhausting. In such a case it really is better just to let them go. And from a practical point of view, you will not be able to effectively influence the employee you want to eliminate. But in general, you need to get used to the fact that some of your subordinates will be difficult for you to communicate with.

An inexperienced manager puts more emphasis on formal staff management tools: orders, staffing and instructions. They try to squeeze the employees into the box of the organizational structure, to force them to act in accordance with the job descriptions but not their personal nature. This method can also be effective, but only when it comes to junior staff, especially in a large company. You would not delve into the family difficulties or personal life of each cashier, if you own a network of supermarkets. You would instead require them to strictly comply with the company rules and regulations. But it is vital for you to understand, on an interpersonal level, your top managers. You must clearly see their strengths and weaknesses, understand their inner psychological motivations, and set them tasks that do not contradict their attitudes. Once again, not for the sake of humanity, but for practical effectiveness. If your subordinate is an introvert, do not set them a task that requires a bright leadership behavior, they could not cope with it. And it is useless to offer people who would rather socialize and spend their time with idle chatter the opportunity to head the project office as it requires consistency and perseverance. This task is guaranteed to fail.

We’ll be talking about this a lot throughout the book, but if you’re a businessman or a top manager, you’ll have to spend more mental energy understanding the personalities of your subordinates than any other issue. After all, business is made by people, and if you are surrounded by the wrong type of people, in terms of your personality and your ideas, no matter how powerful your strategic vision is, it will be difficult to succeed. You need to know the internal motives of subordinates. What motivates them? The position? Their bonus? Their status? Personal praise? You should know what they do well and what they don’t do well, and if possible, entrust them with only the first one, and not the second one. You need to understand what’s keeping them in your company, apart from natural inertia. Because if they’re really quality managers, you probably don’t want to lose them.

Examine your employees, closely observe them, and organize their tasks according to their personal characteristics. The task assigned to a staff member with the appropriate talent will be accomplished both faster and more efficiently.

Chapter 4. Everyone Around Here Is the Same, Except for Me

If you have managerial experience, you have already faced a situation where your instructions have been interpreted in a bizarre way that you would never have thought of. I, too, have been in a few such situations, especially at the beginning of my career as a director. I was left grabbing my head, seeing the consequences of actions taken by my direct subordinates who misinterpreted my words in the instructions given to them by e-mail or orally.

“How could I have been so misunderstood?!” I was distraught. At the time, I thought I was surrounded by mentally incompetent people. Although, in fact, I had no one else to blame but myself.

Once I watched (thankfully from the outside) as a supervisor berated a subordinate, and not just a subordinate, but his closest ally and deputy named Vadim. The business was a chain of restaurants, and they were preparing a new café, which was due to open a week later after the completion of renovations. The work was led by Vadim.

“Vadim,” said the supervisor, “I don’t understand. Is this what you think quality is?” The entrepreneur was indignant, digging up an extractor grille with his fingernail, which he didn’t think was level enough. “And what about this, is this good quality?” He was pointing to a paper towel container. From my personal point of view, the container was like an ordinary container. “Vadim, we’ve said a hundred times that we should maintain good quality in our company. Is that good quality?” He was pointing to what I thought was a pretty decently painted wall. Vadim’s confused rather than guilty face showed that he clearly had a different understanding of the terms “good quality.” Their dialogue has clearly upset both of them.

At the dawn of my career, I was also such a leader – on the move, in the corridor between projects, typing a short note or a text message, making orders, and then angry that my orders were executed incorrectly. I once, sensing the high seasonal demand for Czech cornices, instructed my purchasing department to double the usual rate of purchase. They did that honestly. But the cornice wasn’t sold without a special bottom bar. For those who assembled and sold the units, the word” cornices” meant a set of” cornices + bottom bar”. But the purchasing department worked with individual items, and for them the “cornices” meant just cornice. And the bottom bar is the bottom bar – a separate piece. And that’s why they didn’t double the volume of purchases, and we failed the season.

I was also very frustrated if the employees who were in difficult, unforeseen situations did not do what I would have done myself, if I had been in their shoes. The way I would have chosen to solve the problem seemed to me quite natural and the only one possible, but for some reason people acted differently. It was only after many conversations with people in an attempt to get a deeper understanding of what was happening, of exactly what motivated them to make certain decisions, that I gradually realized that each person has their own system of values and references in their head which is different from mine.

It is common for a person to be convinced that all the people around them are the same as they are, but not as perfect. It seems to them, especially because of inexperience, that the people around them have the same “play” in their heads as they do. And that is why he or she expects others to behave according to their roles in the play, which, however, is written exclusively in their own head, and played in a completely separate theater. This is how a marriage usually breaks up – we “write” a role for our spouse, but they have their own plays, within which they have their own roles, and they have the starring role. Worse yet, they have written roles for us too, and our life companions want us to play them in strict accordance with their scenario, not in the way we want to play them. If the conflict between these roles becomes protracted, relationships either end or become only artificially maintained. In a similar scenario, there are conflicts between parents and children as parents write an imaginary role for children that they refuse to play.

An experienced and wise leader understands that each of his subordinates has their own drama playing in his head, with their own heroes and villains, princesses and dragons, princes and beggars. And if the manager wants to join this drama as one of the main actors, they will have to make some efforts to try and convey to the subordinate their thoughts, ideas, expectations and demands in an understandable language.

This is where the managers often interrupt me with indignant questions “Why are we the ones who have to adjust to the subordinates? They’re the ones who have to adjust to us since we’re paying them money, right? Did Steve Jobs adjust to his subordinates?”

Let’s look at this from a hypothetical point of view. You are a manager, your task is to guide the project, develop the business or launch a successful startup. You won’t do it alone, you’ll be surrounded by people who will do this project with you. However, let’s say that you are hesitant to try to build dialogues with them in a mutually-shared language, and you demand instead that they totally adapt to you. In practice, this m