Daily Telegraph: Fifty lessons: build up a diverse team: "...I was given the job of managing Shell's global downstream business, the customer-facing business in refining and marketing, which was a very large business operating in about 140 countries.": Thursday 20 October 2005 (Filed: 20/10/2005)
 

Senior international business figures have agreed to share their experience in a series of filmed interviews with Fifty Lessons. This week: Paul Skinner, chairman of Rio Tinto

It was pretty late in my life as a business leader and manager that I began to realise just how important investing in people is.

	Paul Skinner

I say that with a little shock and regret, but it really is critically important for anybody leading a major organisation that they are constantly thinking about the way their business teams are structured and resourced.

It was brought home to me when I was given the job of managing Shell's global downstream business, the customer-facing business in refining and marketing, which was a very large business operating in about 140 countries. In the late 1990s, our structure for managing that business - which until that time had rested on individual national operating units - started to evolve in a way that recognised the global reality of our business. With help from some very good colleagues I therefore spent a lot of time designing a new organisation and putting together its leadership team.

It's very important in a team to ensure that you have the complete range of skills and talent that you need, and you should spend a lot of time thinking about how people are going to complement each other. You need diversity.

Sometimes we think of diversity in terms of gender and nationality; perhaps one dimension we don't think about enough is diversity of thinking. A team of people who all have the same thinking pattern is not necessarily as productive as a team that thinks in different ways. So you need to cover the skills; you need to make sure the people you've got are going to be ready to produce new ideas and innovations.

This organisation proved pretty early on that it had the capability to be effective. But, as the leader of that team, it was clear that part of my role was going to be in spending a lot of time with the individuals themselves, to make sure that they were contributing the best they could to the efforts of the team. That started to take an increasing amount of my time but the return on that investment was very worthwhile.

It applied particularly in the case of people who joined Shell from other companies at very senior levels. When you have people entering a large mature organisation, making sure they are given the right level of support took a lot of time.

But again it was absolutely worth doing because the last thing we wanted for these people who joined us with a very different line of thinking was to turn them into people who fitted a mould, who reproduced the Shell thinking pattern. That's not why we hired them.

A good team of people is a terrific asset. One can almost think of it in terms of any other asset that one might own corporately, or even personally. If something is that important to you, you'd better spend an appropriate amount of time, effort and resource on maintaining it.

Biography

1944 Born

1963 Joined Shell

1966 Chemical business UK, Greece, Nigeria

1979 Head, crude oil supply, Shell International Trading Company

1984 Chairman Shell Companies in New Zealand

1991-95 President, Shell International Trading

1998-99 President, Shell Europe Oil Companies

2000-03 Managing director, The 'Shell' Transport & Trading Company

2003-present Chairman of Rio Tinto