Successful Perspectives EP 34: Pierre Santoni | Boardroom by EMIR

Thanks, Trevor. Good morning everybody, good day everybody, whichever time of the day you watch this. Thanks for the opportunity.

I've done a lot of thinking over the years about leadership throughout my life and my career. I think leading by example is the most basic tenet of what I'm about. I come from a society that is strongly driven by family values, and families always have a leader you try to emulate. I've tried to translate that into my professional life as well. So primarily, lead by example. I think a good leader is a good person, and there's no way around that. Leaders have to choose to lead as well. It's something that you want to do. You cannot be a good leader, an effective leader, unless you deliberately want to lead. We have many examples in the business world of leaders that were forced to take on that mantle and just failed because they didn't want to do it. After that, in no particular order, I think integrity is extremely important. Do the right thing when people are not looking. It doesn't matter. You have to behave. As a leader, I always try to think that no matter where you are, what you're doing, you have to behave as if people are watching you all the time, because you're watching yourself all the time. I want to be able to get up in the morning and look myself in the mirror and be happy with what I see and how I feel about myself. So integrity is extremely important. Doing the right thing. Accountability goes with that. We have to be accountable to each other and to ourselves, whether in our professional life or personal life. I think accountable organizations are the ones that perform the best, and that's extremely important to bring into your leadership style. Collaboration and communication are next. They go hand in hand. You have to be able to communicate what you're doing and bring your team together. Leadership is about making people better around you, because nobody is as good as a team. No single person is as good as a whole team together. No individual is as smart as a whole team of brains putting themselves to task. So in that respect, collaboration and communication. I communicate to a fault. My wife tells me I talk all the time. Well, that's how it is. You have to be able to express how you feel. Honesty is an important trait, it goes with integrity and accountability. And then of course, drive. We are business leaders, we have to be driven to achieve results. I don't think anybody could be an effective leader unless they have that inner drive to achieve things. That's extremely important. People who know me realize that about me quickly.

Pretty much every day, in a sense. You just think about how, as leaders, as business leaders, we work with teams. We're placed in situations every single day where we have to challenge ourselves, we have to always question what we're doing. It's a continuous improvement process, as a leader and as a company. But there are certain milestones at which points you kind of think, all right, career points where you want to do something else. You start thinking about what you can do differently, how you can improve, what you really need to work on to be more effective and to reach that position that you're trying to get into. With milestones, birthdays, New Years, things like this, where you try to take resolutions and what you want to do going forward. But ideally, it should really be every day. It should be a continuous process.

Well, like everything, first of all, thank you for the kind words. I think I do believe that I do have natural leadership abilities. I don't necessarily want to blow my own trumpet, as we say, but as I mentioned, I come from a very family-driven society. I come from a family of military officers, so I've had a lot of examples of leadership in my family very, very early on. I think that kind of permeated through my character. Over the years, I found myself in positions of leadership somehow without even thinking about it. Then little by little, it sinks in: all right, I'm in this position, that means I could do this, I could lead people. Then I found that I was effective in communicating and exhibiting the traits that I mentioned earlier. You don't succeed all the time, obviously. You have setbacks, you question yourself, you always put yourself in a situation where you're challenged. I think if you want to be effective and you want to grow, that evolution is something that helps you take these natural abilities and build upon them to become a more effective leader, a more effective person. So it's a little bit of both. There was a natural ability there, I believe, and then I certainly did work on it quite a lot and did a lot of thinking around that over the years. But I would say at the beginning, it sort of happened.

Absolutely. I mean, you think about the dictator-type leaders. That is a style that I don't think was ever effective. You can't lead by fear. It's an oxymoron. You can't do that. You have to lead by example, as I said. People have to want to emulate you, and that's how you succeed as a leader. It's the same for corporations. For organizations, there is no good organization without good people and good culture. Both go hand in hand. If you have good people and good culture, the results will happen. I think there are many more examples today in the mature world that we live in of leaders that have shown great examples of how they can impact positively what's happening in the world, as opposed to just looking at their own corporate balance sheet and scorecards. So yes, we've seen great evolution over the years. I think it's all sinking in at the moment. The world is changing. We're on the cusp of tremendous disruption. And thank you for bringing inspirational speakers to the Amir gatherings. I think we've all really enjoyed that. Speaking to all the people in the room, that drive that kind of thinking into the audience and into us, it really makes you reflect upon what you want to do and what you should be doing as a company and as an organization. So it is evolving, but it's evolving for the best, I think.

It's interesting. I think of it as not necessarily a career advice, but it started from my mother: do your homework. But it's extremely important. Be prepared. In a business life, in a professional life, put in the work. Do all the groundwork you need to do to be able to get into a situation where you know what you're talking about, you know what you have to do, you have a strong basis for all the arguments that you put forward. Improvisation is great, but there's no substitute for doing your homework. I think a lot of people forget that. They think, oh, I'm just going to go in and do what I can. But if you want to be successful in your career, do your job, do what you have to do. And the most important thing about your job is be prepared.

Exactly. If you're prepared, you're a lot more confident in a situation, and then you can improvise. It's a combination of everything. You have to have that basis, and then you adjust. But if you don't have that solid basis, you're not going to be effective.

Thank you, Trevor, for the opportunity and the conversation. Always enjoyed. And thanks for everything that you do at Amir. I mean, we really enjoy it. We communicate in our company everything that we receive from your organization, up and down, and it's extremely helpful. We all learn a lot from that. Thank you.