Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (12 page)

Singing is a big part of the culture in South Africa, so a number of restaurants in our system there have songs they’ve made up to celebrate the company’s principles of good customer service. It’s a pretty amazing thing, but what’s even more amazing is what I witnessed when I went to visit Malatji’s restaurant: She and her team finished their song with a cheer. The team chanted to Malatji, “We believe in you!” who then chanted back, “I believe in you!” I saw this myself,
so believe me when I tell you they didn’t do this just because the boss told them to. I could feel their passion as they continued to chant back and forth like this until tears were literally running down cheeks.

I have never seen a more obvious example of the power of belief. We all want someone to believe in us; we all want to believe we have an opportunity to make our own corner of the world a little bit bigger, a little bit better. And if you don’t think belief is important, consider this: Malatji’s team has won just about every company award possible and her business has been so successful, that they are on track to open five new restaurants this year alone.

If your goal comes out of nowhere, you’ll have a hard time believing in it. This notion takes into account everything we’ve talked about in this section so far about the leadership mind-set. You have to have a realistic picture of who you are and what you’re capable of (
chapter 2
), you have to have a good sense of the knowledge you’ll need to accomplish your goal (
chapter 3
), and you have to have faith in the people who will help you accomplish it (
chapter 4
). If you’ve worked through all those things, then you should be in a good position to believe it can be done. And in the next section, we’ll talk about how to start turning that goal into a reality.

Self-reflection

Exercise

As you think about your Big Goal, what are five beliefs that give you the intentionality to achieve it? For example, a marketing manager who wanted to come up with a bold new campaign that would increase market penetration came up with these beliefs: (1) My people have creative minds; (2) They want to do good work; (3) They are capable of big ideas; (4) Customers will respond if we communicate with them in the right way; and (5) We are offering a superior product.

•   
  Being yourself
  is the best way to exhibit the kind of integrity a leader needs to get people to follow.
  
•   
  Being an avid learner
  means that you prioritize knowledge and ideas over ego. Doing this will make you more open to hearing and respecting the ideas of others, which will make people more willing to come to you with good ideas.
  
•   
  You unleash the power of people
  by believing in them, in their good intentions, and in their capacities to succeed. If you don’t start with this belief, people won’t follow you very far.
  
•   
  You have to believe
  in your own capacity to get big things done. No one ever accomplished very much by starting off with the attitude, “Well, maybe it will work out.”
  
•   The lessons of all chapters in this section don’t apply only to you. As a leader, you want to encourage those you lead to adopt more powerful mind-sets as well.
  All
  members of your team should be striving to be their best selves, to become avid learners, to build the potential of those around them, and to believe in the potential of the entire team to accomplish big things. That’s the best way for all of you to reach your goals.
  

The preceding summary is intended to remind you how the lessons of this section will help you take people with you. To further reflect on these lessons and put them to work for you, go back through your answers to the Exercises and Self-reflection questions at the end of each chapter. Next, answer the following questions, which will help you determine where you need to focus your efforts the most as you build your skills as a leader.

•   What are the biggest aha’s you picked up about yourself while reading the chapters in “Get Your Mind-set Right”?
  
• Of those aha’s, what are the two or three that, if you worked on them, would have the greatest impact on your Big Goal?
  
•   What will you start doing differently tomorrow as a result of what you’ve learned in this section?
  

No one said that Taking People with You was going to be simple. The stories that follow are from people who have been through my leadership program and have had their own difficulties in maximizing their potential in a particular area. Everyone has a unique set of strengths and weaknesses. The more you understand what yours are, the better chance you have of building on your strengths and compensating for your weaknesses. I hope you’ll take some inspiration from how Robert and Joanna did something about those things that were difficult for them to overcome.

Robert on “Being Your Best Self”

I consider myself an introvert, so being myself in a group situation has always been hard for me. But after listening to feedback about my leadership skills from people both above and below me, I started to hear a common criticism: People wished I was more open with them, that I was more forthcoming about what I was thinking and what I was feeling about things. Before hearing that, I thought that talking about my feelings in a business situation was not very relevant at best, and self-indulgent at worst. But when it came time to assess my own skills in this area, I couldn’t ignore what I’d been hearing.

I had to force myself, even to the point of discomfort, to become more open and let people in more. But I’ve realized how important it actually is for an organization to connect with its leadership, and it’s very hard for them to do that unless they understand the values that actually drive that leader.

Joanna on “Unleashing the Power of People”

As a team leader, I was supposed to do these one-on-one sessions with each member of my team as a status report/performance review. I realized that after I scheduled these sessions, things were coming up that were pulling me in different directions. So I kept canceling the sessions to deal with whatever was at hand. The problem was, I had always told my people that they were my number-one priority. But how could they believe that if I kept canceling or pushing back their one-on-ones? I really had to look closely at what I was doing, acknowledge the message I was sending, even when I didn’t mean to, and work on adjusting my actions to match the priorities I had set forth. I had to figure out how to change and not let everyday stresses get in the way of being the kind of leader I wanted to be.

In this section, we will switch from thinking to doing. I trust you’re now armed with the right mind-set to accomplish Big Goals, but what do you do to make them happen? Obviously, you’ll need a plan to take people with you.

My friend Larry Senn once shared with me a simple Senn Delaney model for developing a plan, which I’ve used over and over again. It has three basic parts, which, though they reinforce one another, need to be considered in the order in which they are presented:

1. Strategy: With your team, you need to clearly identify where you’re going and what you want to get done.
   
2. Structure: You need to reinforce your strategy by putting the right resources and processes in place so your people can help you execute your plan.
   
3. Culture: You have to create an environment that reinforces the strategy and structure by engaging your people and encouraging the behaviors you want.
   

This is not a book on how to develop a business strategy, but there are numerous books that can help you determine what actions you need to take to meet your specific business goals. Instead, this section will cover how to take people with you through each aspect of your plan.
The first three chapters in this section have to do with the first part—the Strategy—and in these I’ll talk about how to make sure you have one that your people can rally around.
Chapter 9
covers the second part, the Structure your people need to support your strategy. Finally,
chapter 10
deals with the Culture aspect of your plan.

At Yum! we have used this model for every type of change effort, big or small, since our spin-off from PepsiCo. It’s a deceptively simple formula, however. You must never forget how interconnected these pieces are. Miss a step or do them in the wrong order, and you won’t have a complete plan. As Matt Killen, the twenty-six-year-old wunderkind golf coach for the likes of Kenny Perry, Chad Campbell, and J. B. Holmes, told me: “It’s not good to Band-Aid things, because they continue to bleed. If you have a problem, you need to fix it right. If you try to shortcut it, it looks like a shortcut.” Remember, there is always a temptation, especially when you see improvement in results, to skip steps in your plan. Don’t get ahead of yourself. If your plan is a good one, one that’s right for the long term, work through every step. If you skip, you’ll pay.

This became very clear to me when I was at the Pepsi-Cola Company during a time when the business was in need of transformation. Historically, Pepsi had made its money by selling concentrate, the base components for Pepsi, Mountain Dew, and its other brands. The company sold concentrate to independent franchisees, who would invest in plants and warehouses, manufacture the products, and then make money by selling the finished brands to customers, the businesses that stocked Pepsi products in the grocery stores and convenience stores of the world. But in the late 1980s, that began to change. Major national accounts like Walmart and Costco were becoming more and more powerful, and they wanted to deal with one point of contact versus countless local franchise bottlers. Given the size and growing importance of this emerging customer base, PepsiCo made the decision to consolidate its bottling network. Pepsi started to buy up a number of
bottling operations until we owned about 65 percent of the system. For the first time, we had to figure out how to bottle our products and
deal with customers ourselves on a very broad scale. It quickly became very apparent that we just weren’t very good at all this. We had invested a ton of money but were getting returns that were clearly not up to snuff.

Pepsi president Craig Weatherup rightly realized that this meant a sea change in the organization. Pepsi was going to have to learn to become more customer focused and make money at the same time. With the help of consultants, we came up with this notion of becoming a Right Side Up company, a concept that was illustrated using an inverted pyramid. The idea was that the front line was now at the top of that pyramid because they were the ones who had contact with the customers. Management was at the bottom of the pyramid because they were there to serve and support those on the front line.

Weatherup is an incredibly smart guy and he was passionately behind this. We had meetings all around the country at bottling plants where we presented this new concept: the Right Side Up culture that would define PepsiCo going forward. The problem wasn’t that it was a bad concept; it was simply an incomplete one. The bottlers were all for it, but they had practical concerns: We want to put the customers first and make them happy, too, but what does that mean? What do customers want from us exactly? And how do we give it to them?

The bottlers were right. In our efforts to redefine the company, management had skipped over two crucial steps, Strategy and Structure, and concentrated primarily on Culture. Because of that, we had to go home and start over from the beginning.

We didn’t throw out the idea of a Right Side Up company. Instead, we got more definition about what that meant. We moved from a carbonated soft drink company to a “total beverage company” (Strategy), which meant offering more product variety to our customers, such as bottled water and iced teas, in addition to soft drinks. Doing this, however, required that we revamp some of our processes so that, for example, our delivery trucks carried more than just our carbonated soft drinks, adding products like Aquafina, Lipton teas, and Ocean Spray juices (Structure). It was only after we got the strategy and structure
right that the customer-focused culture really came to life. The result was substantially better performance.