View from the Top
Andrew Mackenzie’s timesensitive secrets to success
The Scottish CEO of BHP Billiton has a background in science, a love of language – he speaks five – and a strong belief that different is good and preparation is everything. He sits down with Kirsten Galliott. How do you define good leadership? A willingness to learn. I’m very curious so I naturally find out about other ways of leading. I’m also quite experimental so I’ll try different styles of leadership to see what works and what doesn’t. With different people? With different circumstances. You change roles depending on the circumstance you face. I think you’ve got to be open to being coached and getting feedback and to be very self-aware. Then you put together a toolkit of the most effective expression of yourself, to move the job you’ve been given forward. Have you learnt from previous CEOs you’ve worked with? Totally. As a leader, you have to be humble if you’re trying things. I never have a perfect day. Leadership is as much about what you don’t do as what you do, where you get to the end of the day and say, “I could’ve done that better.” You make mistakes all the time. How do you gauge feedback on your leadership style? We have [formal] processes for that – 360s and so on – but I think there are a couple of things you can add. First, as a strong leader, you develop very good self-awareness – some people might call that a sixth sense – where you say, “Yeah, I know that worked” or “Yeah, I know that didn’t work.” And you can read between the lines in emails. Second, you have a sense of body language because you’re also learning about your own. As you lead, your body language is critical. You also want [to encourage] an environment where people feel they can speak up and even criticise you. But if you overindulge in feedback, you can come across as being a little insecure and it’s a bit weary for the organisation because they want a degree of strength from you. Do you find it tricky to manage people who are not self-aware? How do you deal with them? I’ll change that question around a bit because success and leadership mean you need to blend together a whole list of [people’s] styles. We are very committed to diversity of thought and people with different backgrounds and how they spark off one another. They all bring a different approach. If you can blend that all together, you get a far more powerful result. So I don’t really like to go down the negative line