Andreea Axenie, Teleperformance: “We need to find the right balance between reaching company goals and keeping people happy”

“If you want people to follow you, you need to exhibit behaviours that are worth following. If you want people to behave in a certain way, you need to show them what is the way. If you want them to be hard-working, you need to be hard-working. You cannot be a lazy person and expect your team to be hard-working. You cannot expect your team to come at 9 AM, and you come at 10 AM. You need to do the things you are asking your team to do or even more sometimes and exhibit the behaviours you are expecting them to follow,” Andreea Axenie, CEO for Romania, Teleperformance said during People Empowering Business Forum 2023 organized by The Diplomat-Bucharest.

“Follow the leader is not a joke. People do tend to follow the leader and there is an element of mimicking. If you look at successful teams, they tend to mimic the behaviours of their leader. Sometimes they are not aware of it. They feel like it’s something worth following and, sadly, they also tend to mimic bad behaviours. When there is a manager with a bad behaviour, the whole team starts to behave in that way.

If you want to deliver results, you have to maintain your authority and that is where you need to find the fine balance: how to say no and still keep the people happy. Maintaining a behaviour that you are proud of is very important because people can respect your arguments and your answers.

Middle managers are to ones who are making the most critical decisions that are impacting the people wellbeing, the work-life balance. For example, are we approving people’s vacations when they want them? We need to find the right balance between reaching company goals and keeping people happy.

We do get a lot of pressure in leadership positions, and we have to figure out how not to cascade that pressure. That is the biggest challenge for leaders in 2024 because they still need to cascade information, they still need to share the KPIs etc, but not the pressure they are getting with it. You need to motivate yourself, get resources within yourself to motivate the others.”

Full recording of the conference: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5y4LQs5x6Ng&t=3385s