Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (17 page)

Alignment is a top-down commitment. It starts with you and your team. But then look back at your People Map. Are there secondary audiences? Third-tier audiences? Are there people whose support will be crucial, or simply helpful, even if those people aren’t ones you work with on a daily basis?

To do this, you have to communicate broadly and never stop. Remember the lesson of Sam Walton from
chapter 3
: “The more they know, the more they care.” When I visited Walmart, I learned that Walton had a knack for making a big company feel small because of the way he communicated directly with as many people in his organization as possible, by paying frequent visits to stores when he could, and then devising their closed-circuit television system for when he couldn’t. One day he used that Walmart TV system to ask his store workers to be
more attentive to the customer by greeting anyone who came within ten feet of them. He even asked them to swear they would do it by saying, “So help me, Sam.” That phrase became a refrain within the company, a way employees could voice their alignment or dedication to anything that was proposed to them.

As a more recent example, the CEO of AT&T, Randall Stephenson, showed how Walton’s maxim, “The more they know, the more they care,” really works when he set out to convince his entire organization of the merits of his new vision—“Mobilize everything.” As I mentioned in the last chapter, at the time, AT&T was full of people who thought of themselves as being in the wireline business, so Randall used what they called T University (because T is AT&T’s ticker symbol on the New York Stock Exchange) to share all the facts that grounded the new wireless strategy and educate everyone on the technology and its potential. Randall considered this education so important that he had his top seven hundred people take part for a full week. As Randall told me, “We have a lot of smart people, and once they saw the same things that helped me draw my conclusion, they came to the same conclusion
just as quickly as I had. It really got the top management of our company on the same page and ignited the shift in mind-set we needed to complete.”

The flip side is that when we forget to think of
all
the people who will be affected by our initiative, we run the risk of unforeseen problems. Scott Bergren will be the first to admit that he created quite a snafu when, as chief marketing officer, he decided that the KFC Colonel was looking a little outdated and could use a face-lift.

Bergren got started right away on creating and testing a new image for the Colonel that made him a little younger, a little buffer, and a little bit cooler. “Over the course of a pretty short period of time,” Bergren told me, “we created a very modern, great-looking new image. Customers told us hands down that this thing was perfect.” The project got so far along that they were beginning to roll out the new Colonel in the United States when Bergren realized he had forgotten something: KFC wasn’t just a U.S. business. He hadn’t even mentioned the idea to the heads of KFC’s international business units, who all had the old
logo up in their stores. “You can’t imagine what a mess I created,” Bergren admitted. He had to go back to the beginning and present his idea, along with all the research he had to back it up, to those people whom he’d left out. It
all worked out in the end, and now the new image is present in restaurants all around the world, but not without a lot of apologies and backtracking on Bergren’s part, which not only lost him time but also threatened to damage his credibility with those people. “It would have been so much easier if, at the beginning, I had gotten alignment that the logo was outdated, instead of trying to explain afterward what I had done,” Bergren said. “It was much more difficult that way. I just completely missed a step.”

Over the past twenty years, I’ve had the benefit of learning from a number of top-ranked change consultants. What they all have to say about alignment basically boils down to this: You have to make sure people understand three things.

1. What do you want them to do?
   
2. What’s in it for them?
   
3. Are you going to do it too?
   

There’s an old Native American proverb: “Tell me, and I’ll forget. Show me, and I may not remember. Involve me, and I’ll understand.”

—
TOM NELSON, PRESIDENT AND CEO OF NATIONAL GYPSUM

It’s common sense, really, but as I said earlier (and I think it bears repeating), the problem with common sense is, it’s not all that common. People will get on board with your goal when they understand it, they know what they’ll get out of it, and when they know that you are as invested in it as they are. Only then will they truly feel accountable for doing their part to make it happen.

Self-reflection

Exercise

Seek out some leaders you admire and ask them the following questions:

•   What feeds resistance in others, and how do you turn a resistant person around?
  
•   What practices do you use to surface and manage misalignment on your team?
  

It’s one thing to say you want to do something; it’s another thing to get it done. Once you have your strategy for your Big Goal, you have to put structure in place to make it happen. That means having the resources, organization, and processes you need to execute your strategy. These things together provide a solid framework that drives accountability.

For example, a number of years ago, we wanted to expand our lunch business at Pizza Hut. Customers loved coming into our restaurants for dinner, but they didn’t see us as a viable lunch option for three basic reasons: our pizzas were too big, too expensive, and took too long to make. It was the opposite of the quick, easy, and affordable fare that most people were looking for when on their lunch hour from work.

To solve these perception problems, we put a dedicated team on a mission to develop the lunch daypart. The first thing the team decided was to launch a six-inch Personal Pan Pizza at a low price point. That solved two out of the three issues, but then we had to figure out how to ensure that our restaurants would be quick enough for the lunch crowd. So we put a process in place to make sure that customers could eat their lunch and still make it back to work on time. We offered a “five-minute guarantee” and put an hourglass on each table to mark the time. If the waitstaff didn’t get customers their pizzas before that hourglass ran out, they had to give them a coupon for their next pizza free. Not only did this process entice customers, it also encouraged operational discipline at the back of the house, because it became very easy to measure whether
staff were living up to expectations: Just count
the number of coupons they had to give away. Our franchisees, even those who weren’t thrilled in the beginning at having to implement a new process in their restaurants, were won over by the results. The promotion was wildly popular with customers, and we doubled our lunch business.

The first thing to do in terms of resources is to put the right team in place, one with the skills, knowledge, and capabilities to accomplish your goal. This is a good time to return to your People Map from
chapter 1
and assess who you have working with you on this project. Do you have everyone you need to get big things done?

To do this, you’re also going to want to think back to what you learned about yourself in
chapter 2
. What are your strengths? What are your weaknesses? Where are your blind spots? Too often I see teams of people who are alike. It’s a natural inclination to surround ourselves with people who are similar to us, but that’s not the best way to get big things done. What you’re striving for here is a team of people with
complementary
strengths. As Sylvester Stallone said in his role as Rocky Balboa when asked why his relationship with his wife, Adrian, worked so well: “She’s got gaps. I got gaps. Together, we fill gaps.” Here are some ideas to keep in mind as you build a team to help you do big things:

MAKE A SUPER MILKSHAKE
: I call a team of people who fill in one another’s gaps a super milkshake. You get all these different people, put their personalities and talents in a blender, and what comes out is the smoothest, best tasting milkshake you’ve ever had. Jim Stengel told me how he did this when he was global marketing officer at P&G: “I know what I love to do and I know what my strengths are. I love to deal with consumers, I love to deal with people and concepts, I like to think big. What I don’t love are all the daily minute-by-minute details you have
to do to run a large company or function. So I put on my team people who were not like me, including a woman who was an MIT engineer and extremely detail oriented. I also brought in a woman from purchasing to help me revamp that system. I brought in a finance manager because I wanted more strategy there and more of
a financial mind-set. So I balanced my team with people who I thought were right for where we needed to go.”

There are really three things you need to think about when you make your super milkshake. As Jim summed it up when talking about the team he built, “(A) They had good chemistry together; (B) they represented the skills we needed to move forward; and (C) they complemented me really well.”

REMEMBER, EVERY JOB IS A CHERRY
: When I was head of marketing at Pizza Hut, I built one of the most successful teams I’ve ever led, out in Wichita, Kansas. In fact, it was the success of that team that helped earn me a promotion to run marketing and sales at Pepsi a few years later. When I started the job at Pizza Hut, people told me I’d never be able to recruit top talent to a place like Wichita. They were wrong. I hired people who went on to have top jobs at companies like Subway, Capital One, McDonald’s, Wendy’s, and JC Penney. I was able to do this because of the environment I created. We all want to work in a place where we can grow and learn. If you can offer that to others, you can attract good people no matter where you are.

David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International, started his career working at his dad’s gas station. He told me, “I can remember him taking an absolute verbal beating from a customer, which was not my dad, and him just walking back to me and saying, ‘You know, sometimes in business and sometimes in life, you’ve got to put your pride in your back pocket.’ I can also remember him saying, ‘Look, Dave, I run a gas station. They can buy gas anywhere. I need to do a great job on customer service.’ It was my job to wash the windshields, and he made you feel really proud to do this great job of washing the windshield. It’s funny how a lot of those simple lessons get lost when you end up in a
big company.” It may have been a humble beginning, but that gas station is where Cote learned a lot of basic business lessons that have served him well to this day.

You have to think of every job you’re offering as a cherry and not settle for less than the best. In other words, every job is an opportunity for someone great to learn and thrive in that position. Too many leaders end up with just so-so talent on their teams because they don’t know how to inspire, how to create a growth environment, or how to invest in their people. But if you’re one of the leaders who does these things, then you can attract the very best people and expect greatness from them.

Your ability as a leader to attract, develop, and retain people is fundamental to your success. When you get your team right, you’re going to get results.