#1 - Thomas Meyer - Life learnings for future leaders

Nisha Pillai 00:00:06

Wherever we look, our world is facing a huge range of unprecedented challenges. So if you are a leader right now, how do you navigate your way through this? How do you make decisions in the teeth of so much uncertainty? How are you going to reconnect your people and rebuild your team so that they're fit to face the future? And what does that even mean to be a leader in such an increasingly challenging world?

These and other questions I've been putting to top business leaders from across Europe, and I've had some surprisingly candid responses. So why don't you join me, Nisha Pillai, for the latest episode brought to you by Sherpany of The Agenda.

My guest today is someone who's never been afraid to question himself, and it's led him to creating a personal treasure trove of stories which he calls the 10 headlines, which he shares with young leaders. His name is Thomas Meyer. He's run Accenture in Switzerland all the way from 2003 to the summer of 2020. And he's now on the board of a number of Swiss companies and chairs one or two as well.

Thomas, welcome to The Agenda. It's good to have you with us.

Thomas Meyer 00:01:24

Thank you. It's a pleasure.

Nisha Pillai  00:01:25

Now, the last time we spoke to Thomas, you told me about a crisis really which shaped you. You said back in 1996 you were working on a massive project. It was not doing very well. The pressure led to your marriage breaking down and a whole lot of changes were set in train. Can you tell us more about that?

Thomas Meyer 00:01:45

Yeah, indeed. This was, this was about 10 years into my career at Accenture at that time, Andersen Consulting for the company I worked for basically all of my life. And as you say, it was in the middle of a massive engagement where we really  worked day and night on creating a new car and my marriage broke, my wife decided to leave me with my with our two sons at that time, there were three and six.

It was a massive, massive break, as you can imagine, in my life. And I had big, big thoughts going on in my head. No, what is it that I'm going to do now? Should I continue? Should I not continue? Should I completely change my life? Because apparently the way I worked and the way I lived ruined.

Nisha Pillai  00:02:38

Were you thinking of throwing in your career then and moving into something altogether different?

Thomas Meyer 00:02:41

Moving toward doing something completely different, or rent a restaurant or go on an Alp and nurtured the cows or whatever, something completely different. And there are a couple of things that actually then helped me to go through that.

One was that the firm helped me dramatically to go through that crisis. They gave me some professional support, which at the end, let me come to a conclusion that in this whole thing, there's three things I need to balance in my life, which I really didn't think so far at that point.

And this is obviously the family that is important, the business that is very important. But yourself and you tend to forget to yourself when you are in stress situations, in the business and in the family. There's a whole story that led me do that.

Nisha Pillai  00:03:33

How does it connect to that point that the coach made to you that you have to nurture yourself?

Thomas Meyer 00:03:39

You know, it was when when when we started our sessions, the first thing he said is, well, we're not going to have a session. I give you 10 books, and all you have to do is to read those ten books and we meet again in two months. And on one of these books was 'One Hundred Years of...

Nisha Pillai  00:03:59

Solitude. A hundred Years of Solitude. By Gabriel Garcia Marquez, yes.

Thomas Meyer 00:04:05

As you remember, a very difficult book to read. And  I had 10 of those. And all of them were about families, basically, and people. And then when we came back and had our first session, he said, does anything, did anything change? And I said, well, I was on my own reading books. And that's the first time I've done that in years.

And you see, that is what I mean. You have to do something for you because, you know, when you work like you, it's very clear that priority one in a way, is the business. Then it's a family. You have kids and you take care for the family and it's quite normal that you forget yourself.

And from that on, this became one of my one of my 10 headlines that I started to collect during my career, which from then on I always used when there was a batch of new people joining our company. And I gave them a little bit of an introduction, breakfast, welcome breakfast. And I use those 10 points to talk, tell them a little bit about myself, but also the experiences that I made and what I think was important for me to go through the various pluses and minuses that you experience in a career like that.

Nisha Pillai  00:05:25

So don't tantalise us now, Thomas, give us some of those headlines.

Thomas Meyer 00:05:29

Well, I mean, as a direct consequence of the story that I just mentioned, this one is called 'Business family and you'. So that's one and that helps me to tell the story. Another one is called 'No babysitting'. Then there is one 'Money does not make you get up at five thirty in the morning'. Another one is 'When you smile the sun is rising',  'No bullshit, fewer words, your mistakes' is another one, '10 metre high and fog between you and the water is another one'.

Nisha Pillai  00:06:04

And I want to hear the stories behind some of those headlines before I forget them. How about let's start with 'When you smile the sun is rising'.

 Thomas Meyer 00:06:12

What does that 'When you smile, the sun is rising', goes back to a training session that we had with an external coach as a team on growing your own personalities. And this was at the very end of this training session where we were all sitting in a circle, in a big room, and all of them gave out our experiences.

And when we finished, when we were done, the coach said, well, that's all good and great and thank you so much for your dedication. But let me make one important statement before we all go home. There is somebody in the room. If this person would only smile a little bit, the sun would be rising. And I immediately realised that everybody was looking at me.

So the whole team was looking at me and I was very astonished about that. And then I realised that my natural face, when I'm just very relaxed, it's a very it leaves an impression of a very severe face. And my eyes are blue. And they, so people are apparently getting a little bit afraid of when I look at them, which is totally not my personality, because I'm a humorous person. I know I like interacting to people, etc. and but my quiet face is a very serious face.

And so I need to be constantly reminded to smile a little bit because it helps people to better understand the way I am and the lesson learnt there. It's very important to understand how others perceive yourself, not just from from how you act and how you talk, etc. and how you act, but also from how you just appear, because this can be very, very different from what you yourself believe.

Nisha Pillai  00:08:05

So here's another headline. I wrote it down while you were speaking, 'Money doesn't help you get up at five thirty in the morning'. But I thought that's exactly what money helped young thrusting executives do.

 Thomas Meyer 00:08:16

Yeah. I mean, obviously, when you join a company and are hoping for a big career, you mean people want to make some money and need to earn some money to nurture themselves, their families, etc. and this can be a good motivation.

But I also learnt, particularly at a consulting company like Accenture, that to maintain the level of energy that you need to go through, that the motivation into the continuous exposure of new situations and learning new things, formal things like making money or get a promotion to earn more money is not good enough.

You need to really come to a point where you really like what you do, where you have the passion for what you're doing, and that is your inner motivation. That will keep you on continuing and be a good guide and be a good coach because people start to realise that you really like what you're doing.

It's like when you are in a restaurant and the chef is passionate or you are in a live concert and the musicians, they themselves have tears in their eyes because they just love what they're doing as opposed to you are looking at some musicians, rather, just standing there. They play their tunes and when they're done, they're gone. It's a huge difference in the experience that you make.

Nisha Pillai 00:09:47

And you have to get some kind of joy, some kind of emotional satisfaction from the work. That's what I'm taking away from you. It's a very valuable insight there. One more I'm going to hit you with, which sounded quite strange to me Thomas. 'Ten metres high and fog below you', what was that?

 Thomas Meyer 00:10:06

And fog, and fog between you and the water, supposedly the water at the bottom. This is your ten on the front of those jumping boards and somebody tells you you have to jump and you don't know whether it's really water below or not because there's a fog in between.

That came up to me when, a little bit earlier than this big project that was on, but actually when somebody decided that they have to go to this big engagement, I was working in Switzerland, mainly in the financial services industry for seven, eight years since I started, always for roughly the same partner. And I went back to him and say, I want to do something else. I've done enough insurance and banking. I've seen enough of Switzerland. I want to do something else.

And he said, well, that is my responsibility. That's all I can do for you. But I have a good friend and he will take care of you. And this additional partner then came to me and said, well, we have this nice, very exciting engagement in Germany, France and Switzerland. You will have to travel between those countries and we will send you off there as a technical architect. And here you have to know that I studied Business Administration. Yes, I like information technology. I like all of these things but I'm not a techie and I'm by far not a technical architect.

But nonetheless, so they sent me as a technical architect to Stuttgart or near Stuttgart. And I came to the management of that pretty significant engagement and and went into a meeting with all the leading partners and introduced myself and here's Thomas Meyer and the new tech architect.

And they said, well, very nice that you're here and we have been waiting for you, but the technical architect position is already filled. But we have another one for you, which is even more exciting. You are going to be the head of operations, the head of IT Operations, which was even further away from what I have ever done before.

And I said, well, but I have never done this before. And they said, well, don't worry. I mean, we know you have all the credits. You're a good guy. You will get help from everybody. And it's not straightforward. By the way, it's not just the head of Operations. You also need to help us in the negotiation of a seven year outsourcing contract to run all of these systems for the next 10 years.

And obviously, I was very afraid to accept such a position, but I decided to do so. And they told me, if you have a question or if you need, we are going to help you do. All you have to do is just accept the role and do it. And we promise you we're going to be successful. And and you know I took the challenge and it worked out exactly like that. Despite the personal situation that I went through then for the next three, three and a half years on that engagement, it was the one where I probably learnt the most in my whole career.

It was a roller coaster of experiences and ups and downs, but a really, really great experience. And I really got to know how you know how easy it is to jump, because, you know, there's always going to be people and, you know, if people trust in you, they know there is water below the fog, you just have to jump and it's going to work.

Nisha Pillai 00:13:28

So I'm going to ask you this now Thomas, how do you see the leadership challenge in transitioning organisations from where we are now, which is largely remote, working and working from home to a more hybrid state where the leaders want people back, but a lot of teams and a lot of staff members are not ready to come back? How do leaders persuade people that really, for the sake of the organisation and their own careers, they should be moving back into face to face physical location?

 Thomas Meyer 00:14:00

I mean, unfortunately, like in other situations, like the situations we have in diversity and gender situations, etc., it's probably going to need some rules. It's going to probably need some guidelines like, no, we all agree that we will two days per week, we will meet each other and we'll spend some time with each other.

I think the challenge is probably a little bit bigger because nowadays a lot of people are living really, really value based. Some would even say individual value based and have potentially lost a little bit. The feeling of we know of, not of coming together and doing something together, that is actually more than just doing something on your own and satisfying your own beliefs and on values.

There is something in it of satisfying joint values, joint beliefs and joint objectives. And that, I think is is probably the bigger challenge nowadays to really respect that people have their individual values and situations on the one hand, but also work with them to establish the trust that there again is more to it.

Nisha Pillai 00:15:18

I could talk to you all day Thomas, but you can't give me all day, so let's just conclude this by asking you. Our series is about leaders on leadership. It's been such a good conversation. Can you tell us what it all boils down to? What do you want to leave our listeners with as a final thought?

 Thomas Meyer 00:15:37

Take your time to listen. Take your time to listen, to understand whoever you are working with and be respectful to what I just said to their beliefs and values by establishing trust. I think it starts with listening, and reconfirming and really understanding, but then also be self conscious and have enough self esteem to bring over your own beliefs and have a good discussion on it.

Do not shy away from difficult discussions, have the courage, the courage to me is a very important word that people need to establish, have the courage to enter a discussion to go through hopefully constructive criticism, have the courage to accept that as different opinions but work on your own, and always is the objective to create a little bit more than one plus one is two.

Create a little bit more, and do not shy away, and to not move too quickly into platitudes. Now he or she is that way and he or she is that way, and that will never work together. Have the courage to accept those challenges.  

Nisha Pillai 00:17:00

Thomas Meyer it has been such a stimulating conversation. Thanks so much for joining us.

 Thomas Meyer 00:17:03

Thank you. Thank you so much. Thank you.