People First: Leadership from Semavi Yorgancılar’s Pen

Greetings,

When Mr. Gökhan asked me to write something about leadership and/or share my experience and memories, I put this question to my assistant AI: how many books have been written about leadership? From the sources it could reach, it said at least 50,000 😊. Well then — how am I supposed to convey to you, in a single blog post, a subject about which 50,000 books have been written?

But the truth is this: there is no standard definition. In two months I’ll turn 67; I have 50+ years of business behind me. Over that long span, what kind of leadership and management did I practice — was I successful? Was I not? Was every decision I took the right one? Of course not!

As I wrote this piece, I asked myself: if you had to describe your leadership model in one sentence, what would you say?

Without ever compromising your values, creating maximum value for your organization and social environment in the context you find yourself in — and in our country, that context changes a great deal.

When a leader becomes a leader

We understand when a leader becomes a leader: in hard times, in chaos, in an earthquake, in a fire, in crises. If the leader can calmly take their ship to safe harbors, they become a true leader; otherwise, no one remains on the ship.

How? When we say “how,” values come into play. Building this word, embedding it, and most importantly, in my view, internalizing it takes many years, and it settles into every organization’s DNA one way or another.

If you ask me what the most important criterion is, I say TRUST. If your customer, your employee, and your supplier trust you, then the work becomes much easier. Otherwise you deal with crises and try to hold the team together, to drive them toward the same goal — which is not possible in such an environment.

Culture: be the leader of your work

The last thing I’ll mention may well be the most important: CULTURE. The kind of leadership culture we build matters a great deal. Mine is very simple: “be the leader of your work”. Whatever you do, you are the boss, the leader of that work; do it in the best way possible.

If you create such an environment, the whole company can breathe easy, the level of leadership develops, and over the years we become an organization that produces dozens of leaders.

I’d have liked to give you examples from my experience; but then I thought writing it this way was more right. Because time changes so quickly that yesterday’s solutions no longer matter at all today.

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Final word: PEOPLE FIRST. But truly and sincerely.

Take care,
Semavi Yorgancılar
Yorglass Chairman of the Board