News

Who Are You Grateful to for Who You Are?

Following the last year’s change of ownership, MONETA financial group with over three thousand employees is currently going through major internal transformation.

It is no longer a subsidiary managed by a distant oversees multinational corporation. Now we are accountable for our results to several thousand shareholders. They expect us to become digital leader of the Czech banking market and support Czech households, small businesses, and entrepreneurs.

For some of our employees this change also means they will need to learn to better handle their personal responsibilities.

To achieve our challenging objectives, there can be no time for internal corporate games in our company. I mean the popular “Hide and seek” or even more popular “Sorry! (but do it yourself)”. On the contrary. One of our priorities is to ensure that each employee can take responsibility for their actions and decisions.

It may sound like a normal thing that when a person is competent and qualified to make decisions, it is what they will do. But the reality is often very different.

Thanks to my fifteen years of experience in various corporations I know, that some people in companies prefer to transfer their responsibility to a colleague or manager.

In MONETA Group, the decision-making competences are now being systematically moved to lower management levels to enable our colleagues act faster to get ahead of our competition. One of our top priorities inside our organization is, therefore, to motivate the existing employees to take responsibility.

When choosing new colleagues, we try to select those with good understanding of what responsibility means in real life. We ask them many tricky questions during an interview to identify these important qualities. One of my favourite is: "Who are you grateful to for who you are?"

The answer is surprisingly simple and almost shamefully self-centred. Everyone should be grateful to themselves. Yes, it is you and only you who have been building your personality minute by minute for the past few decades. Everything else are opportunities, possibilities, obstacles, challenges, support of your friends and family.

But the basic and yet main responsibility starts with you – to accept how you perceive yourself, what you do and with what respect you treat others, how you move forward.

When hiring new colleagues, we prefer those who can show they have taken responsibility for the things around them. Who have a clear plan. Who know where they are going and what goal they follow. Because it is still truth what Henry Louis Mencken, American journalist, writer and cultural critic once said: “But if a sense of duty tortures a man, it also enables him to achieve prodigies."

by Klára Sokolová, Senior HR Manager MONETA Money Bank