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James Petter, Vice-
President for EMEA,
Pure Storage
What makes an effective leader?
I’ve been here four years and when I first
joined we were 10 times smaller in terms of
headcount and revenue than we are now. I
think the thing that’s made myself and the
organisation successful is honesty, rolling
your sleeves up and showing people you
should never ask someone to do something
you wouldn’t be willing to do yourself,
treating people with respect and simplifying
whatever message needs to be delivered
rather than having to deliver complexity.
How do you respond if one of your
team points out where you are
going wrong?
I’m a very open guy. If you told me ‘James
you are talking rubbish’ I’d say ‘Fine, let’s
talk about this and work out where I’ve
made a mistake or where something is going
wrong and how we can fix it’. We’ve had a
few examples of that; we’ve done stuff in
certain regions that maybe we shouldn’t
have done and we’ve course corrected. In
Dubai we had a bit of a false start initially, so
we course corrected, we hired the right guy
and now we are really starting to go.
Ego cannot be brought into this equation. I
would rather have my team tell me ‘James
you’re talking rubbish’ rather than nodding
and saying ‘because of your title and what
you do you’re correct’. It doesn’t work.
www.intelligentcio.com
“
HUMOUR IS ONE
OF THE CRITICAL
FACTORS I THINK
A LEADER HAS
TO HAVE.
You’ve also said you have to earn the
right to be decisive. What did you
mean by that?
You have two ears and one mouth for a good
reason. So when I first came in I did a lot
of listening. That was assessing the people,
assessing what we were doing, before taking
decisive action because there were some
changes that needed to be put in place.
If I hadn’t done that and had bowled in and
within two weeks said ‘we are doing this,
this and this’ people would have said ‘why?’
but I actually provided them with a pretty
comprehensive plan around ‘this isn’t right,
here’s why’ and here’s the actual plan we
will put into place.
That was around three months after I’d
started and then we’ve seen the growth, and
I’m not saying it’s down to me because it’s
down to hiring great people who then hire
INTELLIGENTCIO
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