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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he did the right thing by making the manager’s exit a teachable moment. Instead of saying, “So-and-so retired to spend more time with his family,” he publicly addressed the decision at Nielsen’s annual meeting. “I had to make it clear which behaviors were unacceptable and which were rewarded,” he says.
Similarly, as he drove home the mission-behaviors linkage at Nalco, Erik Fyrwald had to deal with an army of resisters. “That’s been tried here before, and it doesn’t work at Nalco,” was a common refrain. Here again, many top leaders had to be asked to move on—more than half of the top 100, their replacements drawn from internal and external candidates. Like Dave Calhoun, this was hardly Erik’s favorite part of the turnaround, but a coach can’t be pleading for buy-in from entrenched naysayers in the middle of the game.
The point is, when it comes to whether (and which) behaviors matter: a personnel move speaks louder than a hundred speeches.
Of course, personnel moves can also be an entirely positive form of consequence in the alignment process. The promotion of people who demonstrate the mission and behaviors is a huge message, and a great source of encouraging reinforcement through the organization. The same is true of outsized bonuses. Money talks; does it ever.
Most often, however, the consequences part of alignment is simply a matter of having a good performance appraisal and reward system in place.
Such a system does not have to be complicated or expensive. It just needs to touch—it must touch—every employee as often as possible, and at least twice a year, in conversations in which their manager tells them, in candid terms, where they stand.
Here’s how you’re helping us achieve the mission, and here’s what you could do better.
Here’s how you’re demonstrating the behaviors we need, and here’s what you could do better.
And finally: Here’s how your salary and bonus and your future here reflect what I’ve just said.
That’s it. That’s the consequences part of alignment. How hard does that sound?
Not very, and yet, you already know how often it happens in real life. We’re lucky if between 10 and 20 percent of our audiences raise their hands when we ask, “How many of you know where you stand in your organizations?” Some of our own grown children and their twenty-something friends, working in respected companies, have never received a single performance review. One of them got a nice raise in her paycheck and actually had to ask her boss why. “Merit,” she was informed, period.
It makes us want to scream. (It made her want to scream too, for the record.)
So much lost opportunity, just sitting there waiting to be seized and turned into success. Clarify the mission, name the behaviors, and then measure and reward people on how well they demonstrate both.
These few tasks aren’t easy. We’d never say that. But, look, alignment isn’t brain surgery, either. Too darn bad that too many leaders avoid it like it is. You’ll never have a healthy organization without it.
Tactics, Starting Today
So now let’s turn to meet alignment’s maker, leadership.
As we noted earlier, leadership is critical for galvanizing the kind of alignment that takes the grind out of work. You can have your car’s tires all straightened out, but what good is it if there’s no one to drive the car home, right? The facts are, in the vast majority of cases, fresh leadership is absolutely inseparable from the creation and installation of a stalled organization’s mission, values, and consequences. They go together because they must.
Later in this book, we will spend an entire chapter on leadership. In fact, in it we will present a new, holistic model we’ve developed from the entirety of our experience and observation, one that defines leadership as the relentless pursuit of truth and ceaseless creation of trust.
But for now, in the context of taking the grind out of the game, let’s talk about some key truth-and-trust tactics. Specifically, let’s talk five immediate action steps. Because if your organization at any level is languishing, spinning, or otherwise not unleashing its full potential, you’ve got to start fixing that problem not next week or even tomorrow.
You’ve got to start today. Here’s how.
First, Get into People’s Skin
Is there anything worse than a pompous, self-important manager, marching around like a little general, barking at his assistant, acting like his only job is presiding over meetings with his subordinates or preparing for the same with his superiors? This officious, corner-office snob type was profligate back in the old days—like when Madison Avenue and Detroit were the center of the universe. These guys were a legion then, and the only time they left the comfort of their offices was to get lunch—together. You’d think they’d all be gone by now, wouldn’t you? Sadly, not by a long shot. We’ve seen them aplenty over the last ten years, same as always, except with the added trick of hiding behind their technology.
Count also in this awful lot the milquetoast manager, so blah and blasé toward the work and the people you wonder why he or she bothers to show up every day.
It’s crazy. If you want to light fire to all the good stuff happening because you’re aligned, you need to get off your duff and get out there, truly getting to know and care about your people as individuals. In fact, really good leaders are like coaches who stand on the sidelines jumping up and down because they can’t contain their excitement about how everyone’s doing, who hug their players when they come off the court, never mind the sweat, and who know what makes each one of their people tick.
Let’s even take this one step further. The best leaders actually care more about their people than themselves. This concept reminds us of a wonderful interview with Don Knauss, the then CEO of Clorox, which appeared in the New York Times not long ago. In his twenties, Don relates, he had been a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, stationed in Hawaii. One day, he says, “I had been up since five in the morning, and I was pretty hungry. I started walking to get in the front of the line (for lunch), and this gunnery sergeant grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He said: ‘Lieutenant, in the field, the men always eat first. You can have some if there’s any left.’ And I said, ‘OK. I get it.’ . . . It’s all about your people, it’s not about you.”
What a great story! Great leaders build trust and credibility with words and deeds that prove, over and over again, in ways large and small, that they respect and honor their people.
Can that feel draining? At times, yes, especially when it’s real, as it should be. But if you want your team to win, that should sound OK to you. It should sound like what you do all the time.
Second, Think of Yourself as the Chief Meaning Officer
How often do you think Dave Calhoun and Erik Fyrwald talked about mission and behaviors during their first 18 months at the helm? Every day? Try in every conversation, up and down the organization. That kind of overcommunication is essential, and not just as you’re launching a change process. It’s essential forever.
Leaders exist, in large part, to give purpose to their teams; to relentlessly, passionately explain, “Here’s where we’re going. Here’s why. Here’s how we’re going to get there. Here’s how you fit in. And here’s what’s in it for you.”
Oh, and just as a reminder, once you’re done explaining all that, you need to do it again.
Remember, your people spend more than 40 hours of every week working. If you’re not helping them make meaning of that investment, you’re wasting their time and their lives. Not to be scolds. But this part of leadership is daunting, we know that. Who likes to repeat things to the point of gagging? Exactly no one. But it’s an essential part of engaging your people and caring for them, just as you would in any true relationship.
And one more thing. It’s not just the top person who needs to be a Chief Meaning Officer. No matter what the size of company, it’s every manager’s job, right down to the team