Episode 1: Leadership within Intralogistics

Hello and welcome back to automation. Answers again. Brought to you from Atlanta, Georgia, being at the modex events. Um, with me is Francisco. Is that good pronunciation? Francisco.

Francisco.

Francisco. The Spanish is not quite, it's like.

The city, San Francisco.

Perfect. Cool. Well, thanks for coming in. Um, pleasure to meet you. Um, I guess just for a very quick explanation, I assume within the intralogistic world, most people will know you, but obviously you've, uh, went to university in Madrid, I think, if that's right. Obviously, um, Spanish. And then you've been everywhere, I think.

Right. So been in Kuwait, projects in chile, Mexico. I think I've missed m a few. Obviously, we're in Atlanta as well. Um, so would you mind just giving a bit of an intro into yourself and where we are today?

Well, my father was, uh, a, uh, spanish navy officer in Chernobyl. Generally, the people that work for the navy, they moved from one city to another.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So that was the story when I was a child. During my childhood, I lived in, uh, Spain, in different cities. I lived in Paris also, and I did high school in the United States. And then I went back and studied university in Madrid. And as soon as I finished, I was deployed in, uh, I found a job.

I went to lisbon, and from there I went to Panama, and then from there I went to Brazil. And that's been a little bit the story until now.

Yeah, yeah. Moving around. Awesome.

Okay. And today's topic as well, we're discussing about, obviously, leadership, your leadership principles, but how you get the most out of teams, etcetera, which we'll go into detail afterwards. But I guess my first question, and maybe quite an obvious one, you've got such a vast array of experience in, uh, different, uh, countries, counties, states, uh, continents.

How does that help? Um, not just specifically you, but how does that help in general? Um, being a leader?

Uh, you become a little bit of chameleon. You have to adapt.

Uh, ah.

And you get a little bit of everywhere you go. Um, and I guess that makes you super flexible with time, and I guess that makes, uh, you have a little bit more awareness and you really, in theory, that, uh, to reach to a point, you can go different ways, and there's no one way that is the right way, another way that it's wrong way.

It's different ways to arrive to the same, same place. Uh, so, yeah, it's, um, you got to have a little bit of passion for that, and you really have to like it. But, uh, um, it gave me flexibility to try to listen more and see details and see other things that might not seem important but become important.

Yeah, for sure.

Yeah. I think that's really important about, I guess, how you adapt into different environments. That's good to know. And I guess as well, how do you then say if you've adapted to the different environments, you understand maybe what's important to this culture versus another culture? How do you go about maybe implementing, of course you don't want to go in, uh, like a wrecking ball or bull in a china shop and completely change the culture if you go to a new country.

But also it's important if you have a head office, maybe in a different location to bring in some of the values and the culture. So how do you, I guess, adapt and help bring some of those values into a new culture?

Okay. So I think basically the general rule is you're not going to change the country or the place. The place is going to change you. It doesn't mean you cannot bring some ideas, of course.

Yeah.

But, um, you know, trying to move from football to basketball and bring the rules of football into basketball is not working. So that's, uh, that's, I would say that's more like a 90%, 85% adaptation, which requires to be very, um, humble.

Okay. Yeah.

Very humble and very respectful and trying to listen a lot and understand a lot, especially at the beginning, more m than coming with your book of how things are done because that's a very typical mistake that happens. So, um. Yeah, it's laughing.

Yeah, of course, I think. Funny you say that. So, um, I'm from London. We've just opened an office in Krakow in Poland. One of the funny things we, it's maybe a bit weird to some people that don't really understand, but normally in our world, it's very busy, the offices, it's very, very loud in most cases.

I went to Poland, I tried to introduce having a radio in the office and that it didn't go down very well at all. No one liked that. So again, like you say, right. It's about bringing ideas, but don't just bring the book and go, this is how we do it.

Because if you force it, then.

So one of the things that I, one of the things that I do when I come to new country or uh, new place, new environment is ask the people locally very m stupid questions like, you know, is this something you would generally do here?

Yeah. Yeah.

And if they say, well, no, we generally don't do this here. Don't do it.

Yeah.

Uh, do whatever is normally done.

Of course, in that environment, yeah. And then build a picture and then.

Obviously go from there.

Awesome. Okay. And then moving, I think, a really, really big factor to leadership. And I guess it really changed dynamically. Obviously, you've been based in Europe and globally, so you're used to managing people remotely, I guess, and in different countries. I guess that was really accelerated within the, well, not just the industry, globally with the pandemic and COVID-19.

So I guess with the experience you've got and understanding the cultures, I guess, firstly, how do you personally manage teams remotely? And then I guess we'll talk about COVID and the craziness of the pandemic afterwards.

Well, I think we have to talk about the pandemic because the pandemic demonstrated that from an operational point of view, you can have remote teams working and doing amazing things with high productivity and low mistakes. And they can do it even from home, of course. So that can happen.

Um, ah, and of course there are exceptions, but generally in most of the businesses you can do this, especially when you talk about engineering, software development and uh, administrative tasks, etcetera. Now, uh, the key is that that is only from an operational point of view. Um, m and that's what people usually that's the easiest part to see.

The easiest part is processes and operations and how many men hours to do this, how many engineering hours to do this. And that then comes the other part, which is really understand empathy at work, understanding the people, uh, receiving a call from another team in another country and being happy to talk to that person or versus receiving a call from somebody in other countries and not, again, how do you make that?

How do you create that harmony? And that's more difficult.

Okay.

And that can, and if you don't have that harmony, you don't have that understanding and you don't have that empathy between the teams. They're not going to be efficient and you're going to have a lot of misunderstandings, uh, and sometimes even different agendas.

Yeah.

So how do you build that? I uh, mean, there are, yeah, it's many things, but I think human beings, we need a percentage of physical interaction.

Mhm.

That needs to come at some point.

Yeah, of course.

I think that's obviously being at modex, it's obviously you see everywhere the advancement in AI and technology. Right. I think especially if you go into a bit more of a specific niche. I think it's a general statement, but if you talk about the engineering and intra logistics world, right.

You don't really need as much manpower on site as what you may be needed to, I guess, uh, pre COVID or before the advancement of technologies. I mean, some of the, uh, booths that you were looking at, uh, or I was looking at. Sorry. They said you can, uh, log in remotely into the WMs and some of their servers and you can have a problem in a warehouse in Boston.

And then you can sign in from Barcelona or from Austria and you can fix it. Right. So I think you write the advancement there and just aids that remote working. Yeah, that's good to see. Um, and as well, you mentioned earlier about getting the harmony, understanding their needs, asking silly or stupid questions as well.

How do you. Not necessarily remotely, but how do you get the best out of teams? I guess two questions. How do you get the best out of your team remotely? And then how do you get the best out of your team when you're all harmonised in the office, of course.

You need the basics. And the basics goes back to having an efficient organisation with the processes that m eliminate barriers to execution that are efficient. You need to delegate. So you've got the basics that everybody knows. The management playbook, uh, we know that. But then you need to work more in the intangibles.

And that's the empathic part. So that comes more to do you have, uh, um, diverse, uh, and equitable and, uh, inclusive environment or you don't. Do you really have it? Do you really allow other opinions, other ways of doing? Are you really open as an organisation? Um, and then it's a little bit.

Something very simple. As I said, physical interaction. I remember in Barcelona, we were having, let's say, difficulties. We were not very efficient working together with the team in Germany. And m I had many people that were interacting and that was before COVID by the way. They were interacting by phone, by email, by conference call, and they were just not working.

They were not on the same page and they were going different directions. Plenty of mistakes, misunderstandings, cost overruns in projects. And then I did something very simple. I just, you know, I was, I was fed up of people coming to my office and complaining about the Germans, right? So I said, listen, the Germans cannot be that.

They can't be that bad.

The Germans cannot be that bad. So I said, okay, we're gonna do something. We're gonna fly. Who are the ten people in the office that interact most with the german team? But it's this, this, this. We're flying there. I talked to the german manager, huh, at, uh, that time and said, we're going there.

We're gonna spend one day, one day when I make a workshop.

Yeah.

I want you guys to take us to have beers.

Yeah, yeah.

And whatever you.

Yeah.

In the city, you are. Ah. And the next day we fly. Yeah, we went there. They were super welcoming.

Mhm.

We had that workshop. We talked. I didn't really care about the content. Then came the real stuff. They took us to a nice german, ah, restaurant where we had some beers. We had all sorts of stories. And all of a sudden, it wasn't this german, uh, guy or this spanish guy who was in the office.

It was. It was Pablo. And we shared stories. And one month later.

Mhm.

The complaining eventually stops.

Yeah.

And one of the managers came and said, you know, uh, Francisco, uh, that idea that you had, that I thought it was completely stupid. Uh, uh. I must tell you that it really worked.

Yeah.

And now I call them physical interaction, not the content. Not focusing on the content that much. Focusing on other things.

Okay. Yeah.

Can I ask, and you mentioned there about, I guess, bringing the team together, going out for beers before and things like that. If I loop back and mention COVID there, do you feel that's been in terms of the culture and in terms of your impact on it, do you feel that's harder or easier?

I guess because I guess, pre COVID, if we're in an environment, you're in the office four or five days a week, the team are all together. You go out for lunch, you go out for dinner, etcetera, you go for beers after work. I guess that's people working remotely, globally, like you mentioned in the example, that's a lot harder.

How do you feel about that? Do you feel it's easier, harder than before?

I think. First of all, this is, uh, working from home or hybrid type of working is a mega trend that will not stop. M m. It's a mega trend that will not stop. My recommendation to the leaders is not, don't fight it. Yeah, yeah, don't fight it. Uh uh.

Because it's clear that from an operational point of view, they can be efficient. Teams can be efficient. Secondly, it's very clear that you are giving back time to the employee.

Yeah.

Because they don't have to commute. It's very clear also that they need to spend less in gas, et cetera, so they can use that money for other things. And it's also very clear it's better for the environment.

Yeah.

Of course, you don't have to pollute the whole city. Uh, you get less pollution. So they can have more work life, uh, balance. So that all those advantages are so clear to the employees and to the society. That's not going to stop.

Yeah.

Okay. That's one, the second thing it's important is, um, also, I don't think, let's not treat the employees as children. Um, okay. My opinion is, um, let's look at performance. Um, and let's not look at how much time they spend at the office. Okay. And because you can have people at the office being very productive, of course.

I remember when the first smartphones came and people would do WhatsApp all the time and the bosses were trying to cheque who's using the WhatsApp or who's in Facebook or whatever. So don't look at the performance. Of course, that's one thing. And, uh, the other thing is, uh, flexibility, um, which has to go both ways.

We are asking many times the employees to do overtime or sometimes to pick up the phone during the weekends. Let's have that flexibility. And then, yes, it's true that physical interaction will be needed.

Of course.

Yeah, physical interaction will be needed. So create spaces for that. You know, do workshops, do you need to look for. But, uh, yeah, don't, don't force it. That would be, I think that would be the smartest way. And there's many ways in which you can do it.

Yeah.

Create that environment. Create also. And let's be, you know, let make the office a great place to be so people go because they enjoy being.

There at the office.

Um, yeah. So that I think will work. Then, of course, there will be people that will be perhaps abusing if you want. They will be always working from home. They will not create those ties with their colleagues. But then it's obvious that their prospects, their career plans, uh, cannot be the same as the business.

Other employees that are interacting more and are creating those connections and that network.

Yeah.

And how do you manage those, those individuals that maybe aren't on the same vision or alignment with others?

I, uh, would. It's a performance.

Mhm.

I mean, you know, everybody's got a boss.

Mhm.

Of course. Yeah.

And the first thing, the most important responsibility of a boss, uh, is say, okay, I'm your boss. Okay, Isaac, you're doing a good job. You're doing a budget that cannot be measured how many times you go to the office.

Yeah, of course you do a really.

Good job because you have created those connections with your colleagues. And you talk to sales and you talk to operations, you talk to engineering, and that makes you super. You know, everybody likes to work with you and, you know, and so if you are probably, I cannot give you that feedback.

I cannot rate you as well. If you are, uh, if you don't make an effort, and you're probably working at home all the time, perhaps you have a personal situation that during six months, you have to stay more at home.

Everybody extends that.

But if you take that as a rule in your, um, career development, your career, you're not going to have the same prospects.

Yeah.

Interesting. And you mentioned, as well, another side effect as well. You mentioned about people, about bringing the culture back with people working remotely and things like that. I think another factor as well, that is very, very hard for any business to scale. You mentioned it's inevitable the way the world is going, hybrid working is.

It's a must, which I believe in. Maybe some businesses don't, but I think we see it from my point of view, being, uh, a headhunter within the intra logistics world. If I pick up the phone to a customer and they say, I need whatever it is, I don't know, a project director, sales director, an engineer, maybe engineers, a bit different.

But if they say to me, it's five days a week in the office, I'm sat there like, I don't know if I can help you. In a lot of cases, we just say, look, I'd love to help you, I'd love to support you, even if you're paying, I don't know, €10,000 over, €20,000 over market rate.

If you have to be in the office five days a week, I think it makes it hard to be impossible. I'll be honest. I think in this day and age, it's not really portraying a level of trust that I think is needed. If you're hiring a senior or any figure in the business, it's because you trust them and you believe in the work they've done.

So I find it quite interesting if you then say, I need to not micromanage you, but I need to see what you're doing in the office five days a week. It's like, do you really trust them? That's what we see. And then I think the knock on effects, which maybe you've seen in the past, are, uh, you can't grow your team, you can't hire, and you've always got that blocker of not being able to grow.

No problem.

So, I mean, have you, I guess, as well, on the subject of growing the teams, etcetera, how do you, um, in terms of the principles and the leadership values, what do you look for when you hire people? Uh, for your teams and how do you help them grow?

Well of course you are looking at their experience and then again you're looking at tangibles, which is experience. How many years you have working in this? What do you know about it? You know about engineering, this business, you know, and then there's something more difficult to evaluate but it's more important, which is the, you know, what is your attitude?

Mhm. Mhm.

You know, are you a um. Generous person? You know, are you a respectful person? Do you feel comfortable talking to people from different environments, different uh, and different cultures? Um. And you know what, as a person, how do you commit with others?

Yeah.

And all these type of intangibles, I think in an interview it's super hard to detect.

Yeah, it's super hard.

We rely more on the hard data that we can prove, but the other, there are ways to identify it. I think it's a lot about. Yeah, it's a lot about the 6th sense. How do you feel so many times you detect things, especially if you um, take time to uh, talk uh, about other things, not only about the specific uh, experience.

Um. Yeah. But more and more and more the world is about. It's about diversity.

Mhm. Mhm.

It's so, you know, you see each time more and more in the tendency is that you will have more and more in all levels of the organisation, people from different cultures working together. Uh, and I think uh, the right behaviours and the behaviours as respect, uh, behaviours, uh, you know, like um.

Not um, thinking that you are right, being a little bit humble. Uh, those things go a long way when you, when you have diverse teams. And this is what we're going to see more and more.

Yeah, yeah, for sure.

And you mentioned your, your 6th sense as well, like you said, um, earlier. Where do you see in terms of your sense and getting the feeling of people and leadership in the industry? A bit of a long term question, but where do you see leadership in general in the next five to ten years?

Do you see? Obviously we've had such a big change since COVID which was maybe overdue, I think some would argue. But where do you see senior figures within the business? Where do you see them going? How do you see them managing people? What do you expect to see?

So I think we are uh, in an employees market. We are not in an employer's market. The mindset needs to change. The employees are in the driver's seat.

Mhm.

M and as a leader, you need to see the employees as your customers. Uh, why would they give their experience, why would they give their time to you.

Mhm.

And not to other leader, uh, or another company? What do you have? What do you have to offer?

Uh, hm.

And that's the type of mindset that, you know, that will be required to be successful. Because if a leader is not making these questions, is not having this mindset, he, uh, Will, the employees will finally show him the door for her.

Yeah, of course.

Of course this will happen. It's an employee's market.

Mhm.

I think that's a good thing.

Mhm.

I think that's a good thing. Everybody wants low unemployment, everybody wants opportunities.

Yeah.

And the more technological the company is.

Mhm.

The more it's going to be this way. And I think if we look at the material handling system, it's relatively small market compared to other markets. And the companies are relatively small. We're generally not talking about uh, tenths of billions or bigger. We're generally talking about companies between 500, uh, million and 2 billion or 3 billion revenue.

It's relatively small company. I think in terms of leadership, probably we are lagging behind compared to other more mature, ah, sectors. Um, so there's a lot to do. It's a very demanding business, of course.

Yeah.

It's very tough.

Mhm.

It's 24/7 so, um, a lot of recognition, um, for most of our employees, they, uh, really need to put a lot of effort into this. So, yeah, this is a little bit interesting.

And how, if I live back to what you said there, you mentioned where you said about creating a culture where challenging is essential, that's needed. You need everyone from different cultures to bring their experience to really help, uh, the leader or the senior figures make decisions and really challenge why.

If we talk about intra logistics, why are we putting this material handling system for this customer? Previously on a similar customer. We've done something different. As an example, I really challenge, uh, the overall, that's how you improve and that's how you strive for greatness. Right. So if I bring that back, how do I challenge you or how do you challenge someone?

How does that work? Because I think it can become, but, uh, depends on the environment and culture. Right. You don't want it to be confrontational, but you also want to make sure you're in an environment where your team can really put their point across, I guess bang their heads together and then come out with a solution.

How do I challenge you is the question.

Well, I think it's about awareness and how do we make our managers and our leaders be more aware of things um, ah, and um, ah, you know, for instance, uh, and it has to do, it's easy to have diversity because diversity is a KPI. I'm going to hire this many people from this minority and these many people from this, uh, from this gender and these many people from this country, and all of a sudden you have diversity.

You can do this. That's easy. Okay. Now, having inclusiveness, mhm. That's super difficult.

Mhm.

You know, because, you know, there's a tendency of thinking, especially the leaders, the people in that have power in the company, that the way of doing things is the way of doing things.

Yeah, yeah, of course.

Uh, but then you see things. For instance, let me put an example. You know, if you here in north, in the United States, you go to a meeting with, uh, management team and they expect to start the meeting, have a discussion and they make a decision.

Mhm.

Um, if you don't make a decision, everybody's frustrated. Okay, that's here in Spain. Um, we make a decision with the management team.

Mhm.

We said, oh, you know, no action because we didn't reach an agreement. Maybe we have to call for another meeting.

Yeah, yeah.

Is this super urgent? No. Okay, we'll go for another meeting. We don't care. We're super happy.

Mhm.

You know, for the Americans, big frustration. Well, you know, we came here, we spent 2 hours and no decision making. Uh, we wanted, yeah, okay. We want. So, you know, what's right, what's wrong. No, it's not right or wrong. There's different ways, different ways to do it.

Yeah.

You know, and then, so you need to raise that awareness. People don't understand it that they say, you know, you think it's wrong, I think it's right.

Yeah.

The other way around. And perhaps we can learn from each other, can respect each other, because we can, you know, try this manner.

Yeah.

And then we try another manner and that's difficult. You need to raise the awareness.

Mhm.

Of the team and have this type of stupid, sometimes stupid discussions.

Mhm.

You know, for, oh, how interesting. And then you start, and then you raise the curiosity. Oh, now I get it. So now it's not that you are lazy and you don't want to make a decision or that you're a bad manager and don't want to make a decision. It's because for you, it's all right, not urgent.

We come back, uh, next week and we'll decide. And like this many, many examples, m um, and raising the awareness. M cultural awareness. It's super important. Then after you raise the awareness comes the curiosity. After the curiosity comes the understanding. Once you understand there's a respect.

Yeah. Yeah.

Because in reality you're not gonna respect if you don't understand it, of course. And then when you have the respect is when you have each other's back, of course. Uh, it's a long process generally, but, yeah. Uh, but when it happens is super powerful.

Yeah.

Super powerful. Because then teams really enjoy, um. And they get the best out of every place.

Yeah.

And people are super engaged.

Excellent. And what would you say, sort of probably final two closing questions here. Would you say that is. Or what would you say is the secret to having a winning team, a high performance team from a leadership perspective, what do you want to see? Um.

In my experience, uh, my experience, uh, in super difficult, stressful, um. Teams that have to manage titanic tasks or normal, uh, business to business, uh, situations. Always, uh, I've had more, uh, success when I had a team that have each other's back. The supportive type of environment versus the competitive type of environment.

I think the competitive type of environment. Um, it's fear of mistake. Um, the competitive type of environment lens tends to. Not having the full transparency. Tends to create a lot of tension in the organisation. A supportive environment. Knowing it's when people dare to do things.

Yeah.

They're not afraid of making mistakes. So you can go the extra mile. I, um, think. I think that's, in my opinion, the most important. Create. You know. You need to have the right players in the right places, of course. But create a supportive environment. You know. Isaac, I've got your back.

Just, you know, go for it.

Yeah.

And then you have a winning team.

Awesome. Good to know. And my final question. You can't say your home country. Of all the countries you've been to, where or who has the best food? Where's the best food? You can't say your home country, though.

I cannot say the home country. I must say that, um. I really enjoyed Vietnam.

Vietnam, okay.

I ate many, many, many things that I cannot even say because I don't know the name.

But it was good.

Uh, it was fantastic. And I went there to eat food with my, uh, vietnamese partner. Um, because I needed to create that empathy. And that took a lot of time. And that was very successful. But in the meantime, I learned a lot about vietnamese culture and vietnamese food.

There you go.

Awesome.

Good to know. Well, thank you so much for watching, listening. Hopefully to see you, uh, on the next video. And I'll, uh, talk to you very soon.