Simon Hu: Leader's role and responsibility

Curated by Alibaba Business School

Simon Hu, Partner of Alibaba Group, is now the President of Ant Group. Simon is well known within Alibaba Group for his excellent managing capability. The following are excerpt from the latest dialogue on the topic of leader’s role and responsibility between Simon and some newly promoted leaders in Alibaba Group.

Simon Hu

The core function of leader is to “make people move forward“. How? Leadership is required in the first place. leadership is the ability to influence people. Second, there should be principles. In my opinion, when leading a team, the following principles are required:

First, team management is for motivation, not for punishment. Learning to find potential people is the core of building an efficient organization. Today, you guys as leaders are not to prove that your ability is better than that of your subordinates, but to hope that they are better than you in all sub fields. The stupidest leader is to use a punishment mechanism to criticize every day. A good leader is a spur. Praise and criticism are both needed. Leaders should keep managing the team by means of encouragement and make people move forward.

An excellent leader must have an excellent team. To build such an excellent team relies on either hiring or training excellent talents. The first core lesson of a leader is how to build an excellent team and give it the corresponding team DNA — who you are decides what the team is.

Second, what we need to do tactically is to set effective goals. Our KPI setting is as follows: plan for three years, and do for one year, which means you need to see the development of your team in a longer term. Let the team members themselves set the KPI rather than you do, so that they will agree more. I hope you can manage well of the process:
1. Help solve the difficulties which your subordinates meet during the progress;
2. What’s more important is to prevent leaders from being lazy. I hope leaders can take management responsibility, understand the whole business progress and help the team in time.
3. As for performance management, performance review is an effective way to prove one’s management ability. The core principle of performance review is No Surprise. Employees should not know their score is 3.25 until the last day(3.25 means an employee does not meet the expectation in Alibaba).

At the same time, in the process of performance review, we must be sincere. Performance is for motivation, not for punishment. A good performance review can be regarded as a good incentive.

Third, to learn to communicate, the core is to present facts and reason. The key job for a supervisor is to appreciate the employees. Many employees leave because of the leaders. They think that they are not understood, nor appreciated, nor accepted, and are suffering from unfairness. If a leader treat them fairly and communicate with them effectively, most of our colleagues will make progress.

Leaders should learn to listen, especially when people encounter difficulties and challenges, listen to them more. Sometimes you even don’t have to speak. It is a good emotional outlet to just let people finish speaking.

Alibaba’s team building culture was originally for communication. Now many teams turn the team building into tourism and neglect communication, which deviates from the original intention of the team building mechanism. Of course, we should let communication happen frequently during usual time. We encourage leaders to chat with our staffs and communicate with each other. We also encourage employees to chat after work, which will be helpful for emotional venting and communication.

Fourth, daily follow-up, timely praise and spur is the foundation to build an excellent team execution. And I suggest you praise publicly while criticize in private. Public praise can effectively motivate the team. Criticism is not to simply deny, but to point out the problem, put forward expectations and give guidance, encouragement and help.

There are four basic requirements for leaders:

First, learn to offer to pay. It’s a virtue to take the initiative to pay. Learning to pay will make your management easier.

Second, learn to SMELL the problem existing in your team/organization. Management is not a job which could be done merely through your computer or DingTalk. You must walk into the team in order to really understand the employees and drive efficient implementation of the organization.

Third, you should learn to encourage, which is the best management means.

Fourth, learn to overcome your own inertia and indifference. If an organization is not well managed, it must be leaders’ fault. We should be alert to indifference and inertia in the process of management. When you feel that there is something wrong with the organization, e.g. teams do not cooperate with you and you feel powerless but do not change. That’s because your indifference is working. As a leader, the business of the organization is your business, and you have the obligation to ask for help to solve the problem. We advocate Do it Today, this is to drive us to overcome the inertia of management. Today, to build an efficient organization, the core path is that leaders must overcome inertia and indifference.

To conclude in one sentence, I think the best management concept is “set yourself as an example”. Who you are decides what the organization is. It’s the same in a family. Children are what parents are. So walk your talk, set an example, what you say is what you think, and what you think is what you do. This is the best management.

I believe that every colleague who is going to the management position has a dream, hoping to take on greater responsibility. Today, you have a team and everyone in your team has his/her dream. Helping them move forward, driving the development of the organization with our belief in the mission and vision, overcoming our inertia and indifference and setting ourselves as examples will improve our management level. I believe you can build and efficient and warm teams.

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