John A. Graham
CEO
Invida Group
What do you need from HR to help support you in your role?
There are two ways HR can help. One is obviously to keep the current workforce you have in place to make sure the people are keeping up with the growth of the company, so that their skills evolve with the needs of the business. But you also want to bring in people to complement what you already have. On top of that, we always have cultural differences, especially in Asia. That becomes an additional challenge, which management has to deal with, and HR plays an important role at facilitating it.
Most HR departments are obviously very close to the workforce, both from a recruitment and performance management perspective and so HR is very important in getting feedback from the majority of your workforce on where your company is going or how they see the vision of the company. Especially for senior management, HR acts as an ear to the ground of the workforce.
What do you look for in a candidate?
We’re in a fast-growing organisation that is in a fast-growing market. We are looking, to some extent, for people who have an entrepreneurial streak.
But because we’re also a relatively large organisation and becoming multinational, we need people who have experience working in a more rigorous environment and understand that a certain amount of bureaucracy is necessary, but also have a healthy disrespect for bureaucracy, because they know how much of a burden it can be.
What do you believe is your single most important task as a leader?
As a leader, you can’t lead without people and, by definition, you’re not leading anything unless there are people behind you.
The primary focus for me and our senior management is our people and people management.
If I think of the CEO role, it is probably as a salesman more than anything else. You are basically selling your vision of the company to your employees, selling the capabilities of the company to partners and selling the growth story to investors.
And, when you are selling anything, there is an interaction between two human beings and it requires a lot of trust on both sides for anything to move forward.
I think our most important task is to focus on people, whether they’re in the company or external. And the most important asset of the company is its employees.
