Wolters Kluwer’s Nancy McKinstry on Working in Many Cultures (original) (raw)

Managing Globally, and Locally

Dec. 12, 2009

This interview with Nancy McKinstry, the C.E.O. and chairwoman of the executive board of Wolters Kluwer, was conducted and condensed by Adam Bryant.

Q. Do you remember the first time you were somebody’s boss?

A. I became a manager when I went to work for Booz Allen Hamilton, the consulting firm. I managed junior people, and I quickly realized these folks were eager to please, very bright, but had literally no business experience. So my first lesson was to be very clear upfront about what I wanted because if I didn’t say, “I want you to go off and do these five things,” I might not get back what I needed.

Q. How did you learn that was important?

A. I’d been a research assistant for a professor, who was this brilliant guy, but not always the most articulate in terms of what he was trying to get at. So I learned early on, in my own experience, that you could produce better results if you knew where you were headed and what somebody wanted.

Q. Is that a part of your leadership style today?

A. Yes, especially now that I’ve been running Wolters Kluwer for over six years. I had been running North America and was dealing exclusively with Americans, and then I went into this global job. What I’ve learned is that every culture is very different in how they make decisions. So that ability to understand how they interpret what you’ve said to them, and how you interpret what they’ve said back to you, and what are the rules of engagement about how you’re going to make a decision, is very important.

Q. Can you give me a couple of examples?

A. In the Netherlands, where our company is based, what you find is that people really want to be heard early on in the process. So if you just go to someone and say, “I want you to go take this product and enter this new market,” most likely the first response they’ll say is, “No, and let me tell you how that won’t work.” What they really want to say is, “I’m not going to commit yet to that objective until we have a chance to really sit down and explore how we’re going to do that, what your expectations are, and how we measure success.”

So what I’ve learned in Holland is that if you invest a lot of time upfront to explain what you’re trying to accomplish, get people’s feedback, then when they do say yes, the time to implementation is really fast. But if you don’t invest that time up front, you’re going to get such resistance that you’ll never get to the end.

Then, when I work with my Italian colleagues and the Spaniard colleagues, what you find is they can’t always tell you how they’re going to get something accomplished, but they manage to get it done, and providing them the latitude is important.

Q. What other leadership lessons have you learned?

A. The first thing that I learned was results matter. At the end of the day, no matter how much somebody respects your intellect or your capabilities or how much they like you, in the end it is all about results in the business context. You have to be able to demonstrate that you have proven you can drive something forward. So when I talk to my team, I use a football metaphor — every day, we have to come in and advance the ball.

The second thing is that you have to have a direction for a business. How can you possibly motivate somebody to work hard and sacrifice time with their family, etc., if they don’t have an understanding of where you’re trying to go? So I believe very strongly in setting a direction for the business, creating the plan, and really allowing people the opportunity to get engaged around that.

Q. Can you talk more about what you learned from those early years in consulting?

A. Most companies hire consulting firms when they don’t know how to solve a problem. So you’re forced into these situations where you’re trying to solve incredibly complex problems across a wide range of industries, and the client is spending a lot of money. So you’re expected to almost perform miracles. So what that taught me was not to fear any new problem.

I truly believe to this day that I can solve any problem. Every day you were confronted with these very complex products. One day you’re working in chemicals, next day you’re working in the car industry, next day you’re working in media. So what you brought to the table was your ability to decouple a problem and analytically work your way through it.

Most of my clients were at the C.E.O. level or at the senior vice president level, and I developed a great respect for their intellect. What you realized is most of these folks were very thoughtful and they listened more than they spoke, and their passion was evident in their commitment to the business.

Image

Nancy McKinstry, C.E.O. of Wolters Kluwer, the information services company based in the Netherlands, says, “Every culture is very different in how people make decisions.”Credit...Earl Wilson/The New York Times

Q. What qualities are you looking for when you hire?

A. I look for a couple of things. First, I like hiring people who have overcome adversity because I believe I’ve seen in my own career that perseverance is really important. And if you can overcome some obstacle and keep moving up the field — again, it’s tremendous. In any business you’re going to be confronted with challenges, and so how you overcome them becomes important to your ability to just drive the results forward.

So when I interview folks I will ask them directly: “Give me an example of some adverse situation you faced, and what did you do about it, and what did you learn from it?” The people who I’ve hired who have had that ability to describe the situation have always worked out, because they’re able to sort of fall down, dust themselves off, and keep fighting the next day. So that’s one thing.

Then, second, I look for people who are good problem solvers. Again, I think that’s from my own experience — if you know how to solve problems, you have a shot of performing at a higher level. You obviously need some subject-matter expertise, but I’d rather have someone who’s really strong on problem-solving, and maybe a little less on the subject-matter expertise, because we can teach them that.

Q. How would you answer your own question about adversity?

A. I grew up without a lot of money. My mother was a school teacher and my parents were divorced when I was fairly young. So I watched my mother have to support a family on a school teacher’s salary, which wasn’t very much back in those days, and I watched her persevere. What I learned from her is the value of education and that hard work can make a difference.

Because we didn’t have a lot of money, I worked all the time. So when I was in college I worked two or three different jobs to fund my way through. So that ability to keep a lot of balls in the air and keep adapting to situations to try and make things happen every day was something that stuck with me.

Q. Are there other questions you ask job candidates?

A. One of my favorite interview questions is, “If I had four of your direct reports sitting in a room, how would they describe you?” Just the adjectives they would pick are always pretty instructive. Then I turn it around and say, “If I had four of your last bosses in the room, how would they describe you?”

Everybody obviously is always going to put the best light on it, that’s the nature of an interview. But you do get a sense of the individual in that process, and that kind of becomes instructive about how they think, how they operate in a team environment, how they would fit in with the culture of the company.

Q. What surprised you most about the top job?

A. Everything you do is evaluated. I remember doing some meeting about our strategy, and the press in Holland wrote that I wore a suit that had the same color as the KLM flight attendants, which I didn’t realize when I bought the suit. I remember thinking, “Here we were talking about the plans for the business and that’s what they focused on.”

Q. Any other examples of that intense scrutiny?

A. People watch little things. I have two children, and as part of my expat arrangement, my children get to fly back to the United States twice a year, and they’re allowed to fly business class. I said, “No, they’re going to fly coach.”

I remember somebody from the H.R. department coming to me and saying, “Everybody really likes it that you make your kids fly coach.” And I said, “Well, how do they even know?” It was the people in accounts payable. I think people have this image that CEOs kind of live high on the hog, and I said, “No, of course they can fly coach.” But it was remarkable that people kept mentioning that to me within the company.

You realize that what they were really saying is, “We like the fact that you’re one of us and that you’re going to sacrifice as much as you’re going to ask me to sacrifice.” In the end, that’s what it really meant to me.

Q. Any other favorite stories about your leadership experience?

A. When I was at Booz Allen, I had been working for one of the largest insurance companies in the world. I was 25, and I was presenting to the C.E.O. and his executive team. It was right after lunch, and I’m up there presenting, and he fell asleep. Not one of his colleagues was trying to wake him up, which was my hope for the first few minutes.

And I thought, what am I going to do? He’s the most important decision-maker in the room, and this was a critical problem they were trying to solve, and I’m sort of looking over to the partner for some cue. He didn’t know what to do, either. So I said, “Okay everybody let’s take a break.” We took a five-minute break, somebody got him going and we came back and we solved the problem.

But that’s a quick example of how you could have just frozen at that moment and not done the appropriate thing. People have to respond quickly, even in silly examples like that, because they happen all the time. Good leaders have the ability to think on their feet.

SKIP ADVERTISEMENT