Managing Russian Teams

A flash of red, a spray of ice, a zigzag of perfect passes, the puck plunges into the back of the CSKA net at the Luzhniki ice-hockey stadium. Meanwhile, at the Bolshoi, the corps de ballet executes a graceful series of pirouettes across the stage in perfect unison. Several time zones to the East, in a cloud of flame and smoke, another Russian-made rocket streams away from the Baikonur launch-pad laden with satellite technologies and the latest space tourist.

Judging by their competitiveness in the arts, sports and sciences, with their military discipline, asceticism and dedication to years of training, Russians’ team-work would seem to be a model to be emulated. But the qualities that underlie some of Russia’s greatest achievements have escaped business management. Here, the fundamental features that would normally be associated with a successful team – good communications, trust, collective responsibility, leadership, and a conviction that a team is greater than the sum of its parts and that more can be achieved by working together than by not doing so - is lacking in Russian business culture.

You can see it everywhere: appointments missed, chaotic planning, mistakes, misjudgements, misunderstandings, rows, tantrums, sulking, finger-pointing, blaming others and above all top-down, short-term, decision-making which leaves companies exposed to the vagaries of the market. At the same time, there is a positive side of this spontaneous and often intuitive approach: pragmatic and creative solutions and rapid results (even if not those desired). Yes, things do somehow often come right in the end, but it’s usually by accident, luck or fate, and you certainly can’t plan it, or predict the outcome. Such is the contained anarchy lurking below the surface of many business operations in Russia that it would be fair to ask: “Can teams really exist in Russia?”

The answer is of course yes, but team dynamics are quite different from those in developed market cultures, and in particular the Anglo-American tradition. If in multinational corporations, team skills are highly valued and the subject of years of continual training, in Russian companies they need to be created from scratch and are not widely considered part of the array of management processes leading to a more effective organisation. If in US corporations, modern management structures have created sets of checks and balances which encourage an open exchange of ideas, promote lateral communications and push decision-making down, in Russian companies, communication is largely vertical, with decision-making towards the top of the pyramid. If the ultimate goal of a business unit in a Western company is to balance the needs of the customer with the expectations of the shareholder, in a Russian company, teams exist to implement the will of the General Director, who in turn, is in place to fulfil every whim and fancy of the “Oligarch” – one of the handful of tycoons in whose hands have been bestowed by a former “Tsar” billions of dollars of national assets.

As elsewhere, business culture reflects political culture, and it is not surprising that the distinctive features of Russia history are writ loud and clear on today’s management practices. Centuries of top down, autocratic power structure, lack of democratic institutions, and a highly bureaucratised and regulated society have taken their toll on the willingness and ability of the individual to take responsibility, and have replaced this with the art of sycophancy and pokazukha, doing things for show. Eighty years of Soviet power, exercised by a ruthless secret police, have discouraged open speech and debate, and destroyed individuals’ trust in public institutions and, outside the immediate close circle of friends and family, in each other. Decades of forced collectivisation have put paid to any true belief in the value of teams. In the thirties for example, the Stakhanov brigades – “teams” in the mines which encapsulated the aim of the Party to overfulfill the Five Year Plan - were believed in by the people until they were proven to be a lie; and in the seventies and eighties, team spirit was finally eradicated when students were bussed to the countryside na kartoshku to gather potatoes or forced to participate in the subbotnik, the annual neighbourhood clean-up on Lenin’s birthday.

The subservience of the needs of the individual to the needs of society have created a culture whereby collective structures - government, companies, groups, teams - are perceived to be at odds with the interest of the individual – so the individual is honour-bound to find every opportunity of gaining personal advantage over the system. Russian literature is full of romanticised examples of the fast-thinking crook, such as Gogol’s Government Inspector Khlestakov, or Ilf & Petrov’s Ostap Bender, who, with charm and humour, fleece all around them and show social institutions up for what they are – a lie. Pragmatism, gaining short-term advantage (if possible personal), playing the game while at the same time undermining it, a preference for form over substance, and a disregard for rational thought, planning, process, collaboration, are the characteristics of Russian management. Trust and confidence are in short-supply – towards the leaders, towards employees and above all towards oneself. With over-dominant leaders and weak subordinates, Russian hierarchies comprise both Master puppeteers and their puppets. To make matters even more complex, each individual, at whatever level of the organisation, possesses a healthy mix of both traits which are applied at will depending on circumstances and whom the person is addressing.

Furthermore, there is the simple economic reality of the labour market in Russia which affects the ability to create and cultivate sustainable teams: in the current climate of rising inflation, shortage of qualified managers and a swiftly moving labour market, there is little loyalty to employers: with a high turn-over of staff, teams often do not exist long enough to be able to be formed. And as the economy and companies grow, so do teams within them – there is constant pressure on teams from the constant influx of new employees and organisational restructuring.

It is hardly surprising that in this environment, building teams is a challenge. As a team leader, you may assume that your instructions are understood and will be interpreted and implemented in the spirit in which they were agreed with the team, but unless you take the trouble to check at regular intervals, your project may go in completely unexpected directions. As things go progressively off-track, you get pulled into micro-management - every single detail has to be checked and double-checked. Is each team member consulting with the others? Are they working together to find solutions? Do they have a common understanding of the purpose and goal of a particular activity, or is each person just concerned with their own piece of the puzzle? And at what point can you, the leader, withdraw from giving instructions and pull out from the daily “knocking of heads together”, allowing people to take the initiative and move forward together under their own momentum? Can you stop “fire-fighting” and get on with defining broader strategy and longer-term goals? How can you create a self-motivated team which can implement the strategy with precision and confidence, and without constant supervision? Where do you start in trying to overcome this bewildering array of behavioural peculiarities?

Brook Horowitz