This is a YouTube video titled "The Benefits of Diversity in Your Team and Career with Mark Kirkland" containing a monologue by Mark Kirkland recorded in June 2023. In this talk, Mark shares insights on career development, coaching styles, the importance of giving people space to learn and fail, and the value of building a diverse and cohesive team.
If you're at the start of your career, don't just stick with AAA or AA company, you know, see some other things. And the reason is because I probably learned more in Constellium than I did in Philips and Bombardier put together. Just because being close to the edge makes you A more key for your whole company, but B sharpens your senses so you start realizing the cause and effects of things. I think how you coach people depends a lot on the individual. I think some people, you know, you need to guide very carefully. Other people you can give a project to which you know, you possibly already have an idea of the answer, but you let them discover the answer and that's a good way of them learning about the process. You know, I have a lady who works for me in corporate finance, Christo Sayun, who was always a little bit reticent to touch things that I was working on until I said to her, well, I'm going on holiday next week, you finish doing the Bond deal. And she did it in an amazing way, but just giving people the space to do things and telling them, look, I'm not going to interfere, but if you want me, you can call me, right? And that way she took ownership and ran with it. But I think you need to give people the space to fail as well as succeed. And failing is not necessarily failing because hopefully you're there with a safety net. But failing is a way of learning so that people learn what actually went wrong, what didn't go right, et cetera. I think it's very important to have a team that works well together, that actually gets on with each other. My team is very diverse. We're in Switzerland, three French guys, a Belgian lady, a Vietnamese lady. We have an English guy who's Bangladeshi as well. We have lady from Britain, I should say. She doesn't identify herself as English, although by her accent, she's English for sure. We have a German who works in the team and we have a Swiss and we have a Scot who has a Swiss passport. So, I mean, it's very international and we all get on rather well together. So when I go out and hire somebody, I'm looking, does this person fit in? The team is number one. Do I like the person? Do I trust the person? Is the person motivated? Are they driven? These are the types of things I'm looking for.
