Innovative leadership is intelligent rebellion

Basically, the key to leadership today is disruptive, rebelliousness. I would like to refer to an interesting review that Gabriel Huarte made of my book, where he talks about how this new style of leadership is an excellent combination of intelligent rebellion, and I think it is very interesting to think that it is time to go against the current and ask ourselves: why have we been doing certain things in this way and we cannot do them in another way?

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I went from a stage, how to put it mildly, of hatred towards compliance, to think that it does more harm than good; but then I matured and understood. And also at times I fled, it is natural to flee as the first reaction to change, even to the change of the existence of an organization. I think of some of these Argentine companies that have grown a lot in recent times. 

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For example: Mercado Libre, when it started, did not have a Compliance Officer and suddenly decided to list on the Nasdaq, and some time before that they had to put someone in charge of ethics or Compliance and start doing a lot of things to be able to comply with the rules, which must have upset a lot of people inside. Surely they had to have been terribly connected with the ultimate goal to be able to do that, i.e., I want to be listed on Nasdaq. So, in order to do that I have to pay these prices and repeat it to them like a mantra over and over again. 

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What is intelligent rebellion? I think it is to understand that the world is full of grays, that it is not that things are extreme, that what you think is terrible, is not so terrible. And also, that what you think is wonderful is probably not so wonderful. And it applies to that salesman who came up with an incredible argument, it applies to that Compliance Officer that we just hired and we think they do weird things.

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It once happened to me in a company, we had a Vice President of Ethics and a Director of Diversity. One day the two of them showed up walking side by side, going somewhere. They weren't chatting in the hallway, they were very determined. And the person I was talking to said, "They're going to fire someone. And that, but why? Because I came from an entrepreneurial spirit, where we walked everywhere and talked, I didn't understand what was going on. They want it to be seen that they are going for an office, they want the whole organization to see that this is happening. I don't know if they kicked anyone out or not, I don't think so, but the interesting thing is the impact on the culture. And I kept thinking about how this was born, and maybe what happened was simply that, two years before, they were walking one way and a week later they found out that they kicked somebody out. But, because you don't explain things, the inference was that when these two people go to somebody's office, they get kicked out. So it generates a sense of fear, of horrible police. 

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There is another piece of advice I would give in general: if we don't fill the information gap, the information gap fills itself, and it will fill itself in the worst possible way. If we don't say clearly what we are doing, why we are going to do something or what happened, people will assume the worst. And I'll leave you with something that I learned on my journey: I as general manager, I would call one or two people every day to talk to me randomly, not randomly, with some judgment of mine, but unexpectedly. I would say: "Hi Juan, you have a little while, come back later in the afternoon, talk to me", and what I achieved with that was to generate that they were not afraid to talk to me.

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Why did I do this? Because it had happened to me in other organizations where I worked, if the general manager called me it was to challenge me, it was because I had done something wrong. So you have to change the way you act, why? So that they see that it is not wrong, to dissimulate, to show us to be more human, that we are not the monster that is hidden. Beyond handling confidential information and being busy, the interesting thing is to be close to the people, not far away, under lock and key.

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This article is an excerpt from the Podcast "Compliance, leadership and innovation" by Compliance Without Borders

Listen to it here

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