#02_Dr. Werner Kerschbaum, General Secretary Austrian Red Cross, Vienna Austria

Leadership Backstage

Dr. Werner Kerschbaum, General Secretary of the Red Cross Austria, is responsible for over five hundred employees in the holding and represents an organization with more than eight thousand employees and 75000 volunteers in Austria only. True to the motto “feedback is the breakfast of champions” he is convinced that a good leader needs to improve himself all the time. Especially in a federal organization like the Red Cross Austria, where the regions are very independent, a leader needs lots of humility and a high willingness to understand different perspectives and compromise in complex decision-making processes. With Drissia he talks about his leadership principles and the strong values of the red cross but also about what he learned over the years. In addition, Werner Kerschbaum speaks about the risks for humanitary aid to getting politicized and about long-term-aims in order to fulfill the social responsibility that they stand for.