Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (14 page)
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Authors: David Novak
GOLDMAN SACHS’S TEN CHARACTERISTICS OF A HIGH-PERFORMING COMPANYTELLING ISN’T SELLING
- High-quality product or service and sustainable competitive advantage.
- Superior management with a demonstrated desire to act in shareholders’ interests.
- Compound earnings growth rate of 10–12 percent over the last ten years.
- Consistency/predictability/quality of reported earnings.
- Projected growth in earning power of at least 10 percent over three years.
- A strong balance sheet.
- High profitability.
- Generation of free cash flow.
- International competitiveness.
- Reasonable purchase price.
Telling someone to go do something is not the best way to get them to do it. People, I don’t care who they are, like to discover their own solutions to problems. Think about how you feel: Don’t you feel the biggest sense of ownership over ideas, actions, or conclusions you’ve come to on your own, as opposed to something you’ve been told you have to do? The fact is, “I said it, so do it” or “I did it, so you do it” just doesn’t cut it for motivating and inspiring the people you need to take with you.
You have to believe that you will come up with the best solutions by involving others. That means that it’s your job to define reality in an emotional way that creates a clear case for change and hope for the future, but then realize that people are best won over when they draw their own conclusions. Share all four categories of reality with your team and then ask them what they would do about it.
This takes confidence, and it’s a real break from authoritarian leadership styles of the past, whereby the leader told you what to do and you went out and did it. That style doesn’t work so well in today’s business world. You can’t just tell people to drink the water. It’s best when they decide for themselves that they
want
to drink the water.
Earlier in this chapter, I included a quote from Scott Bergren, CEO of Pizza Hut, who used customer reality to convince the franchisees in his system that they needed to make some changes in their pricing. That was a pretty big shift in thinking for franchisees. But when customers were asked why they weren’t satisfied with Pizza Hut, 51 percent cited price/value. They also listed numerous places where they believed they got better value for their money, including McDonald’s and Subway, branded frozen pizzas found in grocery stories, and local pizza places. But Scott didn’t tell his franchisees what to do about this problem. He presented the facts, made a compelling case for change, and then asked, What are we going to do about our pricing problem?
No situation in business, when you really think about it, is hopeless. If you’re breathing and you can get up in the morning, you’ve got a chance.
—
DAVE DORMAN, CHAIRMAN OF MOTOROLA
About 80 percent of Pizza Hut franchisees adjusted their pricing without anyone telling them what to do. One of those franchisees even came up with our most popular new promotion, $10 Pizza Any Way You Want It, which allows customers to get a large pizza with their choice of crust and as many toppings as they want (including our specialty options) for one low price.
Part of defining reality for people is identifying the work your team still needs to do to get where you want to go. This is where you, as leader, help make sense of the reality of your current situation by framing it in terms of these questions: What’s next? Where do we go from here? What’s our unfinished business?
If you don’t keep asking yourself and your team these questions, you could be headed for some big surprises. Motorola was among the world leaders when mobile telephones got started, with the highest selling mobile product in history, the Razr, but then pretty much blew it. Dave Dorman, who is now the chairman of Motorola, explained it to me this way: “They sold a couple hundred million of the Razr. That’s probably about ten times as many iPods as have been sold. It was a $15 billion a year product … one product. That success created, I think, a lot of hubris. But it’s a very short-cycle business. It changes literally almost like fashion. In a six-month period, they went from selling thirty million a quarter to two million a quarter, and there was not a new product behind it. So Motorola hit the wall.” Sales of the Razr started to decline rapidly, and the company’s revenues went from
about $30 billion to $8 billion annually within a span of just eighteen months. Motorola lost its place at the top and would spend years trying to get back in the game.
In tennis, the person who wins the first set will often lose the second, even if she won the first by a large margin. Why? Because the loser now knows her opponent’s game and may become that much more motivated now that she’s playing from behind. Or perhaps the winner becomes complacent about her performance now that she has a win under her belt. But in reality, the strategy and level of play that won her the first set no longer applies because the game has changed. In tennis, just as in business or in life, the game is always changing.
You’ve probably heard the famous quote “Insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results.” But because the game is always changing, it also doesn’t make sense to do the same thing over and over and expect the
same
results.This tool is useful for defining your unfinished business and refocusing on your goals. What’s coming next? What are the possibilities? If business has been good and you’ve been winning, then you’ll need to play even harder from now on to make sure you keep it that way. And if things haven’t been going so well, then declaring a “second set” is an opportunity to do better. At root here is the idea that we can always start over. No matter where we’ve been, we can enter a second set, where things will be different.
Second Set Tactics
This tool allows you to draw a line in the sand and demand new, different, extraordinary performance, even when you are doing very well.
Importantly, it still allows you to congratulate your people on the successes they had in the first set. This is unusually helpful, because “we must do better” techniques tend to focus more on how bad people are.
Start identifying what will be tougher in the second set. Once you do this, you can stop tolerating the nonperformers from the first set. Often when a company is winning the first set, no one pays serious attention to the parts of the company or the people who aren’t performing as well as they should—you’re winning, so there’s no need to address them. But by declaring a second set, you establish a new situation, with new challenges, and that allows you to deal with the underperforming parts of your team or organization.
© John O’Keeffe, BusinessBeyondtheBox.com
Self-reflection
| Assess yourself on the following items related to chapter 6 , “Tell It Like It Is”: | Personal Opportunity | Personal Strength |
| 1. I create the type of environment where people are not afraid to speak up or contradict my point of view. | ||
| 2. I have a systematic way of seeking the truth from my customers, my competitors, and my team. | ||
| 3. I regularly ask my team what we are doing right and what we are doing wrong in the business. | ||
| 4. I insist on rigorous discussion and productive conflict on critical priorities. | ||
| 5. When defining reality in tough situations, I always create hope for the future. |
Exercises
- If some hotshot replaced you tomorrow, where would he or she say you missed the boat in telling it like it really is? Customers? Team? Financial? Competition?
- What’s keeping you from defining reality in that area?
Strategy: Create a Vision and Personalize it
Once you’ve defined reality for the people you lead, the next step is to develop a shared vision for where you want to go next. After a meeting with his team during which he had laid out an inspiring view of their future, a KFC franchisee from Tennessee, Charlie Middleton, said to me in his deep baritone, Deputy Dog–like voice, “A road to nowhere is hard to build.” What he meant was that it’s a lot easier to get somewhere if you know where you’re headed. I couldn’t agree more. When constructing a plan to achieve your goal, it’s essential that you have a clear idea of the end point first, before you start drawing a road map for how to get there.
What do I mean by a vision? It’s your idea of what the future will look like when you achieve your Big Goal, what the benefits are, what the outcome or results will be. If you can create a vision for what you want to get done and make it feel relevant to the people you lead, then you’re going to be well on your way.
When creating a vision, think about your target audience, the people you have to take with you. You have to create a vision that the people you lead can look at and say:
- I understand it.
- I know that my customers, or the people we need to win over, will like it.
- I can get excited about it.
- I can make it happen.
For example, in 1998, after our spinoff from PepsiCo, I wanted to talk about my vision for where I saw us headed as a new company. When I thought about it (with the help and input of my team, of course), the success of our restaurant brands boiled down to one thing: making people happy. Good food makes people happy. If we can give them a great customer experience on top of that, they’ll be even happier. If we give them value for their money, so they can keep a bit more in their pockets, well, that makes people happy too. So the vision we came up with was to “Put a YUM on people’s faces around the world.”
The vision I set forth satisfied each of the four points above, and all of us, from our restaurant workers to our lawyers, could get behind the idea. I handwrote a letter and sent it with this vision statement (or as I called it back then, our passion statement) to all our restaurant general managers and above-store leaders around the world to get their attention and give it a personal touch. (By the way, if you’re wondering why the letterhead says Tricon, it’s because that was our original name after the spinoff, one which I happily changed to the more memorable Yum! Brands when I became CEO.)
As John O’Keeffe, who created the Future Back tool that follows, said, “Make sure it’s a concept of the future that drives what you do in the present.”
Future ⇒ Present
Imagine a step-change possibility for the future first, then take massive action in the present to achieve it.
The idea here is to avoid falling into the habit of thinking and discussing the past first, then the present, and then the future. It’s a myth that you have to get right about the past before you can take action in the present in the hope of creating a better future. Focusing first on the past can lead to endless, useless argument while you sort out “the hairball of right history.”
Instead, use this tool to ensure that you start with a view of the future; then make sure your actions today are based on moving toward that future, rather than attempting to correct the past. When you find yourself or others talking about the past, change the conversation by saying, “Let’s move from the past to the future.”
Using This Tool When Establishing a Plan to Achieve Your Big Goal
- Visualize what the future will look like when you have achieved your goal.
- Then identify the actions you must take to reach that future vision.
- Decide what has to be accomplished each day/week to drive it to completion.
© John O’Keeffe, BusinessBeyondtheBox.com
It’s not just you who has to care about your vision for your business; it has to appeal to everyone involved in making it happen. In order to do all this, your vision has to inspire. Every employee, whether it’s someone working a shift for minimum wage or a high-level executive, wants to be a part of something bigger. People don’t want to go to work to just do their job. They are most motivated when they know that what they’re doing counts and they are helping the team drive toward a powerful vision of the future. It’s the leader’s job to give them that vision in a way that ignites their hearts and minds.
Your job as a leader is to give people something they can get excited about. Making money is not enough to inspire anyone over the long term. After all, just about any business could set a goal like “beat last year’s performance” or “grow profits by
x
percent.” But does that really get anyone fired up? What’s special about it?
