PARIS — According to Sidney Toledano, the 63-year-old, long-serving chief executive of Christian Dior Couture, the most important management trait cannot be learned at business school.
“For me,” Mr. Toledano says, “a leader is someone who is, at the end of the day, making decisions. Schools, even the best ones, can teach you to apply lessons, and sometimes they give you a mathematical formula to make decisions, but it never works, because each decision is different and changes according to the situation. The only way to learn is by listening to someone else make decisions, seeing them balance rationality and intuition. Then, one day, you decide to go your own way.”
This is the essence behind his own management philosophy, which involves as much transparency as possible with both his executive team and his largest shareholder, Bernard Arnault, chairman of the holding company Christian Dior S.A., when it comes to making decisions: “I explain the objective, everyone puts their cards on the table, and at the end, I say, ‘O.K., we will do this,’ and explain why. They might not like it, but they can accept it because they understand it.”
Similarly, when things go wrong, “first, I gather everyone together and identify the problem, and say, ‘This is how we will overcome it.’ ”
Mr. Toledano says the roots of this approach can be traced to his childhood in Morocco, and going to work with his father, who managed a small paper company — watching him handle vendors and colleagues over the phone. Later, at Lancel, the French handbag company where Mr. Toledano was managing director before he joined Dior, the owners Jean and Edgar Zorbibe taught him: “You have to solve problems on the day you have them, because when you come back the next day, you will have new problems.”
He adds that his current boss, Mr. Arnault, also places a premium on transparency: “Agree or disagree, at least you know why he’s going this way or that.”
As a result, when hiring a new employee, Mr. Toledano tends to discount résumés and traditional interviews and focus more on character traits. Indeed, he conducts many interviews on Saturdays, both because the schedule is more relaxed and because the day itself suggests the topic may be relationships, not meetings.
He also likes to take prospective employees to the Dior atelier or the flagship store, and watch them interact with the products.
“Body language tells me more than a résumé,” when it comes to understanding a personality, says Mr. Toledano.
“I am looking for willingness, ideas, responsibility. It’s not about whether they will fit in with me. If you hire only people who are like you, you are making a mistake.”