Psaridis The Leader Maker

Make the move from Boss to Leader
1. Auflage 2014
ISBN: 978-3-906010-96-0
Verlag: Midas Verlag
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 160 Seiten

Many believe they know what makes a leader and how people should really be led. Harald Psaridis acquired this experience through over 20 years of hard work, and built up one of Europe's largest financial services organisations with a turnover of over fivebillion euros. The man from the real world of work radically challenges accepted management theory and offers concrete solutions which he himself has tested and carried out hundreds of times. This is leading by attraction which draws people nearer rather than pressurising them. His "Frontline Leadership" method takes us into a world as we would want it, where leadership characters are respected and esteemed thanks to their integrity, their values and their sense of responsibility. And who thus inspire their colleagues to deliver their best performance.

Autoren/Hrsg.

Psaridis, Harald

Fachgebiete

• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Literatur für Manager
• Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaftswissenschaften Wirtschaft: Sachbuch, Ratgeber

Leseproben

My story: Why you have to read this book
No-one would ever have believed that the underprivileged child of a migrant worker, Harald Psaridis, would become one of Europe’s best-known leadership experts, because the omens were really not good. The child of a Greek immigrant worker, I grew up in Vienna. Although I was born there, and that was where I felt “at home”, every day my environment wanted me to feel otherwise: I was teased, ridiculed and shut out, because for my classmates I didn’t count as a “real” Austrian; I was always treated as a second-class citizen. My father, who migrated from Greece to Austria in the fifties and who worked as a fitter in a car tyre firm, did his best to support his family financially and enable me to complete my schooling. Not only was our economic situation tough, above all it was the personal attacks and insults which hurt me to the core. During this period, when others made fun of me and teased me, an irrepressible desire grew in me: I didn’t want to be the “second-class” in the eyes of the outside world, I wanted to become Number One, and I’d show everyone. But who exactly were “everyone”? I had no idea. All I knew was that my classmates had come up with every possible variation and corruption of my surname, and that something had to change. Because I’d regularly been given a good thrashing by other kids, and knew what it felt like to get a clout, the first step was to get my physique up to a level which could end this state of affairs. To earn the respect I felt I deserved, and actually purely by chance at first, through a friend I got into bodybuilding. Although I didn’t really have the build or the genetic predisposition to get far in the sport, the regular training enabled me to significantly change my physique. My new body shape (which might usefully be described as “ripped”) now put me at the top of the tree. For the first time in my life I’d got a sniff of something like success, and I wanted more of it. Aside from new outer and inner strength, bodybuilding had another fascinating lesson to teach me, which to this day remains one of my maxims. This sport taught me what discipline really is! Year after year, with no ifs or buts, I trained almost every day and watched what I ate, so that at some point I could enter my first competition. Unfortunately it turned out that I’d listened to the wrong advice about how to prepare just right for competition, which led to my spending my first event not on the stage as planned, but stuck in the toilets of the event hall with unbearable stomach pains. As I listened through the wall to the loud music and the audience’s applause, I made a decision: I would become the Austrian Bodybuilding Champion! Easier said than done. At subsequent competitions I look a good look at the competition and had to accept the fact that I would never make it into the top six. Demotivated by my failures, which really grated on my ego, I was close to giving up and throwing in the towel. Just like that, I went off to my trainer and told him that I would not enter the Austrian championship and that it was all over for me. My trainer replied to this with just one line, which has left its mark on me to this day and which radically changed my life: When someone says it’s all over, it’s only over because they either didn’t even start, or they only set about it halfheartedly. Read this sentence through again and grasp the enormity of this statement! In my case, it kept me awake that night. We often fail simply because we don’t put everything we have into it! Long story short, two weeks later I was the new Austrian champion, and proud as a peacock. I’d vanquished my inner beast, I’d been through the vale of tears, and beyond all expectations I’d won the thing after all. I am convinced that our entire business culture would be different if its leaders would take on board and apply my trainer’s statement: When someone says it’s all over, it’s only over because they either didn’t even start, or they only set about it half-heartedly. After reaching this milestone I had to accept that even at this level there was no money in bodybuilding, so I stayed with my main job in catering. One day a training partner at the gym asked me if I might be interested in a career change. If so, I should have a word with his boss. No sooner said than done... it was a job in finance, and about building something up in the industry. Although I had already been warned off such offers several times in the past, I immediately felt confident and said to myself: Well why not? Give it a go! Thanks to my consistent approach, which I brought with me from sport, within a month I was already bringing new money in and had left the other novices behind. A brand new world was opening up to me: Here performance was rewarded. It didn’t matter what your name was or how much you had; all that counted was that you did something and you did it well! What this meant for me is that I now finally had a chance to be valued for my performance and my results, with my family background having no importance at all. At the end of my sales internship I started building and training my own sales crew, with the long-term goal of creating a genuine team. I found good, interesting and capable people whom I trained in the basics of my business and who generated areasonable revenue for me every month. Business was so good that I decided to quit my catering job, hang up my oven gloves and really put everything into my new business. But at precisely that moment, disaster struck. I’d quit my job and was on the way to a seminar with my best colleagues when it happened: our car had a blowout and we came off the road at 180kmh, rolling several times. I was at the wheel. Up until that moment I’d always looked to the future with hope, but over the following weeks I had to get over not just a broken nose, but also genuine blows and pain. Three of my best workers left the company and turned to other things after a crisis of direction brought on by the accident. They had spent so long conferring with each other that each of them felt they would find their “purpose” in their new calling. All of this would not have been half so bad had I been able to earn enough money myself or through new staff. But what sort of impression would you have had if you had come to a customer meeting or recruitment interview, and your opposite number looked like he’d just gone 35 rounds with the Klitschko brothers. There I sat, with a plaster cast on my swollen nose and two bloodshot black eyes, not knowing what day of the week it was. I was certain that I’d already hit rock bottom and that there couldn’t be much more waiting to happen. But I hadn’t reckoned with my wife at the time. In the week after the accident she let me know she was leaving me, as she had met someone who didn’t work as much as I did. With that, for the first time, I was really destroyed. I couldn’t work and had no income. Everything I had so carefully built up had come crashing down in the space of a few days. All I had left were my dog and my debts. My car was gone and I urgently had to find a way forward. The doctor’s report made it clear that the evidence of my contact with the steering wheel in the accident would be visible in green, blue and red for a long time yet. This meant that my way back into the sales job, where I would have had to visit customers, was blocked for the time being, and I would have to think of other ways to knock my personal finances into shape. With my beaten-up face I might have found work scaring small children, but instead a friend helped me into a position as sales manager in an insurance firm. Getting the job was easy, but what came with it was so extreme that I still have to laugh about it now. Had I only known what was waiting for me in the job I probably would have run backwards back out of the office on the first day. Whoever thought that the function of a sales manager would be to manage sales would probably also think that a tyre iron is for ironing tyres. In brief: instead of heading up a real sales crew I was given the job of leading a band of total losers who everyone else in the company had already given up on as a lost cause, and whose revenue figures lay somewhere between “zero” and “absolute zero”. So I got to work with my seven “dead ducks” and lost two of them on day one. They preferred to leave the company rather than change anything. But I really set about the five who stayed. We worked like dogs and trained new colleagues, so that within just nine months we had worked our way up in the company’s revenue figures from last place to first. This once again showed me just what is possible if you are willing to do what is necessary to reach your goals, and you actually do it. In nine months as a team we had gone from being the ridiculed “five...

Über Autor(innen)

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