#57 On ne peut pas diriger sans se comprendre soi-même avec Florent Menegaux, CEO de Michelin

Hello to you.

Michelin is a completely global company, 132,000 employees present in 175 countries, and it has existed since 1898. There are several trades, not just tires. In fact, there are about 20 different trades within the company and about 25 different types of business. So we distinguish the major trades from the types of business. In the types of business, you have tires of all sizes and shapes, and what we call composites, polymer composite solutions. And you also have associated services. In the trades, they range from digital to industrial to research and development. And I often use this figure to show the immensity of possible careers at Michelin: you have 350 trades just in research and development.

Yes, that's right. But besides, I've been at Michelin for 30 years and I discover new things every day. So that's what's fascinating.

At the start, I always wanted to do things, to transform things. I understood that alone I could do a certain number of things, but that when we were several, it was more effective. So quite quickly, I realized that with several people we could do much better, much faster, go much further. So quite quickly, I became aware that I liked that – I liked being part of a team and then leading teams. Then progressively with experience, failures, rebounds, we shape our experience in leadership, and leadership for me is a path of development. We defined at Michelin an ideal leadership model, and we expect each person to behave as a leader at certain times and to follow their own development path towards this ideal leadership that we never really reach.

For us, we defined five major dimensions, and it's a model called I CARE: I for Inspiring, C for Create trust, A for Awareness, R for Responsibility, and E for Empowerment. Actually, I misspoke between English and French. The R is actually for results. So inspiration, self-awareness, awareness of others, attention to results, responsibility of individuals, and trust without which human relationships cannot function properly. Within that, we defined a certain number of chapters, and each person has a particular stage of development. For example, at the beginning of my leadership in my first experiences, I talked too much, I explained to people what to do and how to do it, and nature was helpful. I learned to listen much more and ultimately have a less strong and less present voice.

There are several. The one that sustains me the most is when I go into the field to our factories or commercial countries and meet people – characters of Michelin, what we call 'bibes'. Listening to their journeys, their feelings. I have in mind recently a young woman in Thailand who works in a factory and has young children. I asked her, 'And you, what is your personal dream?' She was moved to tears saying, 'Actually, what I want is to be able to ensure a better future for my children.' That touched me a lot. And I have many like that every day.

Well, I live with myself for many years, and in fact I am beginning to better apprehend my faults, my emotions, etc. So I think I have progressed, but we are probably not where I should be or where I could be. But life is a path. Life is continuous development. What we tell everyone at Michelin is that you are subjects in development, and Michelin is your development platform, and you will make of it what you will.

I am first a person with everything that constructs a person. I have my scars, my flaws, my doubts, my fears, and at the same time I have all my experience and all my acquisitions, all my relationships. So yes, a person is always a subject in development, and that's what's interesting about human nature. I also needed a lot of help in my development path. I had a lot of coaching, especially before taking on my role as president of Michelin. I was intensively coached over several years to help me understand who I was. At Michelin, we work a lot on this, telling people that for you to be in relationship – and a company is nothing but relationship, a fabric of human relationships – for you to truly enter into relationship and for it to be productive, you need to be OK, the other person needs to be OK, and the relationship needs to be OK. The probability of these three OKs being synchronized is very low in fact, and it requires work. And you cannot take care of the other if you have not taken care of yourself first, because in fact you always project onto the other your own doubts, flaws, biases. So yourself you always project onto the other, and you imagine the other is close to you. But in fact the other is a universe in itself. So it's a delicate subject. In the leadership model we work on at Michelin, we tell each person: you must spend time with yourself and understand that if you don't learn to manage yourself, how can you hope to manage others? If you don't understand yourself, how can you hope that others understand you? And understanding oneself is huge, immense. I am still at the surface of the subject myself.

At our company, we have formally a three-dimensional matrix. But in reality, when you look at Michelin operating, it's a neuronal organization in which people are interconnected, interdependent, and with relationships that form a bit like a network of neurons depending on the subjects to be handled. So you also have informal networks, and all that must operate. So the subject is: we have an executive committee, you have responsibilities that may differ, but each person is important. The whole subject is to convince each person that they are in fact all of Michelin, and so when they act in their area of responsibility, they will bring all of Michelin along. So the production operator behind his machine in the factory, if he detects a quality problem, he can stop the factory. He has the authority, because if he thinks there is a quality problem, he must stop his machine, and if he stops his machine, it will stop the other machines in cascade, and that's not a problem; it's even his responsibility. And when he does it, we relieve him of that responsibility by saying, 'There are no consequences for you; you did your job,' and we usually thank him. It's the same in cybersecurity, for example. It must absolutely not go up to me to decide to stop a system somewhere in the world because of a cyberattack. So we have teams that we train to be able to make the decision to cut all connection circuits, potentially stopping all of Michelin's information systems. So it's a huge responsibility that people will take, and we relieve them of that responsibility by saying, 'No, it's your job, your field of action. If you don't do it, it's much more serious, and if you do it by mistake, it's not serious. We'll manage the consequences together and afterwards it will go up to me to see in what order we restore the connections, but in no case should you be weighed down by the responsibility when you disconnect.' Because very often what happens is that people, at the moment it happens, have so much awareness of the consequences that could result that they hesitate. But there are many more consequences when you hesitate than when you don't. So the whole subject of empowerment is that: putting people in responsibility and at the same time giving them the protections, the authorizations, and the protections that go with it.

I understand. I'll answer the second part first. I have no lessons to give. Michelin's universe is its own, and Michelin is at its own stage of development. I share my experiences with other CEOs but I refrain from judging. We share feelings, experiences. And when we say things work or don't work, we forget that these things are also a function of context and stage of development. The same thing in a different context might not work. Leadership models are the same. In a neuronal organization, it builds itself permanently, and it's sometimes difficult because you have many connections. When you are interdependent, it's not easy because you have to compose with others constantly. So we are in permanent learning.

Yes, the inspiration model is the human body. What I find incredible is life, and I'm very interested in how the human body is made. When you look very closely, the human body is made of completely disjoint cells, atoms. But the skin is extremely flexible and at the same time rigid enough to hold. And it regenerates permanently. Life is what inspires me. And notably, it doesn't need the brain to regenerate. That's what's interesting. The brain has a particular function and responsibility, but it doesn't manage everything; each cell carries the entire DNA of the human body. That's incredible. So when we tell every individual at Michelin, every person who works, every bibe, 'You are all of Michelin,' it's the same concept as the cell. It's a cell of the Michelin body that carries all the DNA of the group.

Well, we try to use images, but yes, of course. The human body is a good image, something so close to everyone that everyone can understand it. For leadership and organizational models, the human body is a beautiful model. I say it often so I'm delighted.

There are two very difficult decisions. One decision that often occurs in companies is deciding to close an activity. Closing an activity is an extremely heavy responsibility because you know it will have human consequences. That is really the difficult decision, heavy, difficult to bear, and because it has a form of injustice towards the people in the activity that will close. But a company is a living organism that must constantly adapt to circumstances, its markets, its customers, its environment. So it's normal, a bit like the human body, that activities have a lifespan. Then there is another very heavy decision during Covid. It was March 2020, one Sunday afternoon. I received a call from our global industrial director who told me, 'Florent, listen, I can no longer ensure the safety of people in the factory. Covid is spreading very fast, I can't handle it anymore.' I had a short technical discussion asking, 'Have we tried this, that?' And he said, 'No, it's too fast.' To put in place the necessary processes for people to come to work safely, we had to stop the factories. At that moment, I saw Covid spreading because Michelin is present in all countries, so I saw the epidemic spreading. Once we started deciding to stop factories in Europe, I knew that all factories in the world would stop. Michelin manufactures products, so when all factories stop, all of Michelin's activity stops. So I said to him (Jean-Christophe Guérin), 'Leave me a few hours to think about it.' I consulted different people and then I said to myself, you need to put things in order. Michelin's purpose is to offer everyone a better way forward. If when they come to work they are not safe, it cannot work. So we stopped the factories. Four hours later I called Jean-Christophe back and said, 'We stop all factories to put people in safety, and we'll see after.' So it was a difficult decision, but ultimately easy because it forced me to come back to the essential: it no longer makes sense for people to come to work if they are not physically safe at the workplace.