Cracking the Leadership Code. Alain Hunkins
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leaders—that is, the adults. Even as a kid, I knew there had to be a better way. I could see the difference when I went to visit my friends. My friends' families would talk and listen to each other. They'd do stuff as a family together. Why couldn't my family be more like them? Why couldn't my mother and grandmother lead us more effectively?
Much of the time, my home life was like a toxic work environment. There was either yelling or a complete lack of communication. As a young child, I strived to please my mother and grandmother, thinking that if I did whatever they asked, then they'd be appeased and things would get better. As I got older, I realized that no matter how well I followed their instructions, my behavior didn't change their behavior. When I was the “good employee,” I still got the toxic treatment. Eventually, I checked out. I mentally and emotionally detached.
That primary stressful setting affected me greatly. I became highly attuned to other people's emotions and behaviors. I studied psychology and theater—disciplines that focus on human behavior and motivation. I learned about group dynamics and facilitation skills. And although I couldn't use all those skills to help my first “workplace,” I've been putting them to good use ever since.
What I've learned is that if you dig deep enough, there's always a story behind the dysfunction. If you can find a way to bring that story out of the shadow and into the light, there's the potential to change things. You can be freed up to lead with a story and not be stuck leading from the story.
In my case, I didn't really understand what was going on with my mother and grandmother until I was an adult. They'd hidden their stories from me when I was a child—maybe in an attempt to protect me. But their stories influenced our every interaction nonetheless.
I learned that my mother and grandmother were both Holocaust survivors. They had their lives torn apart by the horrors of war. Their crime? Being Jewish and living in Nazi-occupied Belgium during World War II.
My grandmother gave my mother away to the Belgian underground resistance to hide her as best they could. At the age of seven years old, my mother had her hair dyed blond and was given a false identity and address to memorize in case of capture. She was moved from orphanages to foster homes to convents to barns every few months. This went on for three years.
Meanwhile, my grandmother was hidden separately. But eventually she was discovered, arrested, and imprisoned in a Nazi concentration camp. She was one of the lucky ones; she was liberated at the end of the war. When my mother and grandmother were finally reunited in a Red Cross displaced persons camp, they pieced together the terrible truth: nearly all the rest of their family had perished.
You can imagine how living through such experiences would change your attitude and behaviors about the world. My grandmother lived the rest of her life vacillating between shell shock and rage. She could not move beyond her past. Yet she also served as the matriarch and head of our family—the person responsible for steering the rest of us and influencing our decisions.
I view my grandmother with compassion and can entirely understand why she behaved the way she did. However, no matter how much I loved her, there's no question that she was my first exposure to toxic leadership.
Ever since, in my personal and professional life, I've been driven to understand what actions:
Produce or destroy trust
Improve or stifle communication
Build bridges or walls
Create engagement or apathy
Create high performance or high dysfunction
Each person in an organization carries his or her own history. In working with clients and learning their stories, I've seen patterns emerge—specifically, patterns in behavior. I've seen how these behaviors are reinforced by leaders and solidify into a company's culture. This culture would then in turn influence interactions each employee would have with coworkers, colleagues, and customers. This translates into the experience of “what it's like to work here.” Although these forces are invisible, they impact on everything around them.
CRACKING THE CODE
I've watched countless leaders struggle, waylaid by the same behavioral traps over and over. Try as they might, they can't get out of the story and solve these problems on their own.
But every so often, I meet a leader who, like Neo in The Matrix, sees through the complexity and gets what leadership is all about. Matt was such a leader.
Matt was a district manager (DM) for a global fast-food restaurant chain. He'd been with the company for 23 years, and he was not just a DM. He was the DM. That is, he was the number-1 top-ranked and -performing DM in the entire company for the past two years running. Out of 100 leaders, he was at the top of the chart.
That “chart,” by the way, is no mere metaphor. In Matt's company, every DM knew how they ranked—daily—on a “hot list” (a battery of performance measures) against their peers. These metrics included the following:
Revenue per store
Cost of goods
Customer satisfaction
Drive-thru wait times
Employee retention
Matt wasn't always number 1—or even close. For years, he ranked in the bottom half of the hot list. Something had changed in Matt, and I needed to find out what it was.
It's been said that “success leaves clues.” Matt was a potential role model for his 100 peers. I wanted to make sure they'd learn what he already knew. I asked Matt, “What do you do now as a leader that helped you to become number 1? What is it that your peers in the middle and bottom of the pack aren't doing?”
That question was no accident. A key to leadership development is to focus on behavior—what you say and what you do. He replied,
Every single DM has got a lot to do. Each one of us is managing 8 to 10 stores. With all the numbers on the hot list, it's easy to focus on what's not measuring up and be in constant fix-it task mode.
That's what I did when I started, I'd hustle from store to store in task mode. I'd come in and look for what was broken and instantly try to fix it. I thought that was my job as “the big boss.”
What I've learned is that people don't appreciate me breathing down their necks. They don't want a fixer: they want a leader.
I've been doing this for a long time now. Over the years, I've realized that the key to making the numbers is to stop focusing on the numbers. My job is to focus on the people—because it's the people who make the numbers.
When I first started out, I used to walk past people on the restaurant floor, and I didn't really pay attention to them. I just saw them as worker bees. Then, when they'd up and quit, I had no idea why. I was totally clueless. They might have been really upset or unhappy, and I would have completely missed it.
The key to all of it is making people your priority. If you do that, not only will your results improve, your life will get a whole lot less stressful.
Everything Matt said made sense. But it wasn't enough. It was positive, but vague, like a feel-good, self-help book. He wasn't sharing the specifics of what he said or did that made the difference. During a pause, I jumped in to probe deeper, revisiting his point about focusing on the people. “When you're focused on them,” I inquired, “what is it that you say and do?”
Matt stopped for a moment and took a big breath. He replied,
When I come into the store, I spend time with my people and ask them about their lives outside of work. I really listen to what they say, because how they answer tells me what's important to them, whether that's their kids, or a sports team, or whatever. Then, the next time I come in, I can start the conversation by asking about that topic, and we bond over it. By starting