The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career. Suzy Welch
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turn, galvanized the entire organization. R&D turned its focus to improving the product’s features, creating 26 patents to meet customer needs and slow any copycat competitor moves. The sales team introduced new training, goals, and incentives. At the same time, a new 3D TRASAR service center was built in India, staffed by 40 “water doctors,” engineers assigned to monitor units around the world, spotting and resolving problems before customers even noticed them.
And so the company’s new mission was born: “We deliver clean water to Nalco’s customers in a way that makes our customers more economically successful and the world more environmentally sustainable.”
Did that mission rouse Nalco to hit its goal of 20,000 units within two years? It did indeed.
“People suddenly knew why they were coming to work,” as Erik puts it. “They were excited about helping our customers succeed in a way that helps save the world. They saw a future for themselves. You cannot believe the great ideas that started popping.”
That’s the beauty of a good mission. It gets everyone focused and fired up.
And that’s when behaviors start to matter.
Matter a lot.
If a mission is a company’s destination, behaviors are its transportation, the means of getting there.
We all know what this connection doesn’t look like, right? A company spouts a mission that talks about customer focus, for instance, but in real life, its frontline employees hate customers. OK, maybe they don’t hate-hate them, they just disdain them for getting in the way of what they’d rather be doing, like getting home by five. Or a company has a mission that crows about speed to market, but its managers have, let’s say, a high tolerance for bureaucracy. Or a company has a mission all about delivering innovation, but the people who run things demote or fire anyone who takes a risk and fails.
Not good.
Good is when the alignment between mission and behaviors is seamless. In a company with a mission about customer focus, employees ooze empathy. They hand out their cell phone numbers so they can be reached after hours. They take complaints about poor service personally. If they had their druthers, they’d go home with every product and try it themselves to make sure it was working perfectly.
Maybe we exaggerate a bit, but you get what we mean. Mission and behaviors have to be two links in the same chain.
Now, if you’ve ever read our books or columns, you may be wondering at this point why we keep using the word “behaviors” instead of “values.” After all, for about a decade, we’ve invoked the word “values” in the same context. “Values” was, you might even have thought, our favorite word.
It was. But we’ve found “values” can be a confusing word. It’s too abstract. Too often, people hear “values” and they think you’re talking politics or culture, as in “family values.”
No.
Plain and simple, we’re talking about how people behave at work and how their behaviors bring the company’s mission to life. So “behaviors” it is.
And, to return to the topic at hand, the only reason to talk about behaviors at work is that leaders need be very public, very clear, and very consistent about what kind of behaviors are needed in order to achieve the company’s mission.
Back to the Nielsen story. Right after Dave Calhoun announced Nielsen’s new mission, he also announced the three behaviors that would make it come to life. The first was open-mindedness.
That was a change, to put it mildly. “People thought we were a market research company,” Dave explains, “and what kind of people succeed at a market research company? Really smart people who perfect their algorithms and don’t want anyone to see those algorithms because they could steal them.
“But if we were going to dominate the space of knowing everything about the consumer, we needed people who were open to data from every source and willing to work with everybody, not just the people who understood their algorithm.”
The second behavior was a passion for integration. Nielsen’s growth lay, Dave believed, in its people loving—not liking, loving—the process of mixing, matching, and synthesizing market research coming at them from every angle, largely thanks to the explosion of big data.
Growth also lay in Nielsen’s capacity to make sense of all this information for their clients, and so the third behavior identified to drive Nielsen’s success was simplicity.
“The digital world is getting overwhelming; all the data out there can just about drown you,” Dave explains. In such situations, people often find a way to argue two sides of a case. That just muddies the waters for everyone. “If we can make a recommendation to a client in a simple, understandable way, and with conviction, we will always win.” (And win they certainly did. Over Calhoun’s six years as CEO, the company’s market capitalization tripled.)
Erik Fyrwald and his team at Nalco similarly established the key behaviors necessary to drive the company’s new mission. The first was a crusading passion for saving water. Not an “Oh, that’s kind of cool” kind of passion, a “Can I tell you what I do at work? I save the world by conserving water” kind of passion. “We wanted people who got really excited every morning when they turned on their computers and saw their meters,” Erik explains. And by that he means the meters all over Nalco’s intranet that constantly showed how much water the company was saving cumulatively and per customer.
The second behavior was a hunger for growth. Not single-digit growth, either. Nalco’s mission, Erik determined, called for growth junkies, people who saw opportunity with customers previously considered out of reach and in markets that scared everyone else away. In 2009, when most companies in Nalco’s space were backpedaling in China for fear of its economic deceleration, the company brought in a strong, proven growth leader to run Asia. He moved the company’s headquarters from cozy Singapore and built a new building in Shanghai, complete with a customer and employee training center, a technology hub, and sales and marketing facilities. Employment jumped from 200 to 800, with Nalco’s increased commitment enabling them to recruit outstanding candidates, Chinese engineers who wanted to improve the environment through water treatment and productivity in the heavy manufacturing industries.
Around the same time, Nalco also unleashed its oil and gas unit to aggressively pursue global growth in water-related chemistry applications. (To get a barrel of oil, you also need to deal with four barrels of water to be separated, cleaned, and safely returned to the environment.) The company was quickly able to expand its business with customers doing deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, but it also moved to successfully forge new and productive relationships with customers farther afield, in locations including western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Angola, and Malaysia. “Our oil and gas leader was an incredible role model of entrepreneurship and pursuit of growth,” Erik notes, “and he got his team to feel the same.”
Clearly, his example, and that of many other believers within the organization, took hold. By 2010, Nalco’s revenues and earnings were both growing in the double digits.
Making It Real with Consequences
With mission and behaviors in place, all that’s left for alignment is the piece of the system we’re calling “consequences.” Maybe that sounds punitive, but it isn’t. Sure, consequences can be negative, as in demotions or removals. But far more often, consequences can be positive, as in raises and bonuses. Either way, though, our point is the same. You can huff and puff and holler all you want about mission and behaviors, but if there aren’t organizational mechanisms to reinforce them, you’re like the proverbial tree falling in the forest.
No one hears you.
Now, the loudest negative consequences mechanism, obviously, is letting people go. Most leaders hate using this tool, and they should if they’re normal human beings, but sometimes when there’s an obvious mission or behaviors disconnect, it’s necessary and best for both parties.
Dave