Sofia, December 22 (BTA) - According to Philippe Rouvrais, General Manager for Modis Bulgaria, a good manager is one that has a team that performs and brings the expected results. Rouvrais was among the 10 finalists in the Manager of the Year competition of the Manager Magazine and talked to BTA as part of a series of interviews with all finalists.

Watch the interview here (in English).

Following is the full interview:

Question: Mr Rouvrais, What makes the good manager?

Answer: Thank you for the question. I would start by saying that a good manager is one that has a team that is performing and brings the expected results. That is more the outcome, but I think it is one of the signs that someone is a good manager. I would focus also on some skills and some values that the manager should have, to be a good manager. The first one would be to try to find ways to inspire the team, giving them the opportunity to unlock their potential and spending time to value each individual's contribution to the success of the team. It is important that the manager gives the people the opportunity to speak up. You could make a parallel with chess. It doesn't make sense to play chess with two pieces, you need to use all the pieces from the chess set and each piece has its role to play.

Q: You have very large experience in Bulgaria. Is it making business in Bulgaria rather hard or rather easy, do you have enough support? What are the main challenges in the business environment in Bulgaria?

A: My first challenge in the Bulgarian environment is that I unfortunately do not speak Bulgarian yet. Putting aside the language, I am working in a multinational company, with multinational clients and the advantage is that everyone speaks English. I would say it is easy to do business in Bulgaria. There may be some difficulties on the administrative side, maybe a little bit of slow processes in the administration. From the business perspective, it is very good, it is easy to do business, easy to speak with the people, and to connect to people.

Q: Are you optimistic in the short term, let's say a month or a year ahead?

A: I am definitely optimistic, if I look to the future. And in the past we have grown very, good. We are planning and there are signs that we will continue growing in a quite important manner in the next months for sure - for the next six month, maybe three to six years.

Q: What are the main problems for business in general and for your company in specific you would like to see solved?

A: It is not a problem to execute business in Bulgaria. The difficulty I would like to solve is not a Bulgarian problem, in general it is a global problem: the lack of skills. I would say it is needed maybe to open more seats in the universities, to open new universities, and to start preparing the country in the next five, six years to have more valuable resources, valuable skill-sets.

Q: Is the university level enough for that or one has to start before that, let's say in high schools?

A: For some of the skill sets, yes, we need engineers, we don't need people who would study five, six more years in the university. We actually have a lot of young people who finish high school and are trained for positions that are not very technical, for instance with good language skills. We actually do look at all the levels, not only at universities, but also technical schools, high schools. But definitely I would insist on the lack of resources at the higher end - lack of engineers, lack of digital experts, software developers.

Q: Could you share something more from your perspective?

A: From Bulgarian perspective? I would say that looking at my experience in the past I have noticed that Bulgaria in the past ten years definitely has become more and more a certain and solid destination for businesses, for multinational companies. We are always talking and thinking about IT, but more and more engineering companies are implementing businesses in Bulgaria, too. Industry also is much more present in Bulgaria. If we go back to some difficulties we are experiencing, I was talking about lack of skills. And this is not only Bulgarian problem, it is a global scarcity of resources. The digital transformation, which has been ongoing for the last couple of years and is projected to accelerate in the next five-ten years, is generating the need for resources that do not exist today. We have to reinvent the right programs, the right courses in the universities to make sure that universities are actually ready and preparing our people in five, six, seven years to have the right skills to deliver their work. I think this is something that is very missing, again not only here in Bulgaria, but maybe companies and businesses could focus more on partnering with universities, with high schools, with technical schools, to help them align the academic curriculum to that the market needs. On the other hand, companies like us ?lso have the responsibility to implement training and maybe to create technical universities for their people. And we are doing this more and more - finding people on the market with the right skills, the right approach, the right attitude, the right presence and training them technically. That takes some time, some investments, but by doing that we also create stickiness with the people. If you create stickiness with the people, you keep them. And in Modis Bulgaria this is very easy - a great majority of our management team, over 80 people, have tenure over ten years. The people stay in the company when they feel they are taken care of and they have the opportunity to grow.

Q: And this is part of the art of the business, actually.

A: The art to grow skills, yes. That may be the connection with the painter. We are drawing something and we are drawing what we need for tomorrow.

Q: If we go back to management as a process, could you make a parallel between managing a company and some form of art. Or a particular art form, for example - a picture, a symphony?

A: Yes, a symphony. An orchestra would be a good example in this case, classical music maybe. Or photography. I think there are a lot of connections, a lot of similarities between art and the management environment or the necessity to stage a situation in a company. Just an example from photography for instance: If you want to do a nice photo, a good photo, you need to discover the environment, to check if there is enough light, to understand if you would be able to take the picture in the right way, to expose correctly. It is all about discovering the environment, taking the right decisions, putting the right elements in the right places and then executing good results for a nice picture. Management is the same - it is about the right skill sets in the right place, with clarity on peopleТs roles and possibilities. And if that works, the team produces good results.

Q: Do you think that some qualities, developed through art, could be useful in business?

A: Definitely. Maybe creativity first. I myself am not an artist at all. I like art. I think art is creativity , freedom to execute a piece of work. I think that is something that is very often missing in the work space, in the working environment. And I would like to make the connection between freedom to actually invent something, to create something different. I think in the workspace in our business it is very important to attract people that are capable of innovating, of creating new solutions that do not exist now. I would say that is similar to the job of a painter, an artist, who has to think, to create, his painting before actually executing it.

Q: How do you see the connection between business and art?

A: There is a connection. Maybe in the everyday life of the business there is not much of a connection, but I think the business environment should have a role to play, to promote art for instance and to bring art to the workplace. By the way in Modis Bulgaria every year we have a Christmas party, at least before Covid, and we have events with our colleagues. Very often, when we have events, we systematically invite artists to produce something, to bring some value and maybe transfer to our people that they should be creative, that they can be creative. By the way, they have skills and it is worth it for them to unleash those skills and to be productive and bring some results.

Q: What could learn art from business?

A: I would be very careful answering that because the definition for an artist is someone who is free, free to create. It is very difficult to bring a freedom to create into an environment that is structured, has processes, defined rules. Maybe a company could do that - to bring some structure, maybe defining rules, processes, but I personally would say it is counter nature for an artist. If an artist is not free to produce, to innovate he is not an artist anymore.

Q: What is your favorite form of art?

A: I like a lot of different forms, but if I have to choose I would say music. I love music from all styles Ц classical music, from the 60-s, 70-s, I was a teenager in the 70-s and the 80-s, so . . .Photography, painting, art in general.

Q: And which is your favorite music group?

A: Difficult question, because I could put a list of 20 maybe. Let's be a little bit old-fashioned: Yazoo. ES/

Source: Sofia