Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (25 page)

People need a sense of progress to keep them going. It’s what keeps them on the right track and keeps them motivated. Jamie started his fitness program because, once upon a time, he was overweight himself, and without measurement, he says, he would have quit his personal journey. When he started out he was 300 pounds, and it was hard to tell that he was getting anywhere for all his efforts. “You don’t see a lot of physical changes when you lose those first five pounds, when you go from 300 to 295 pounds,” he explained. “Thankfully I had the data to prove I was making progress.”

As the leader, you have to be careful that you don’t allow people to confuse progress with success. Losing those first five pounds is important, but tracking and recognizing that result is only truly useful if it leads you to lose the next five and then the next five after that.

We learned that in our organization recently with our CHAMPS scores. I’ve mentioned before that, in some of our restaurants, we haven’t done as good a job as we could have at satisfying customers. That’s why I upgraded our culture principle of “customer focus” to “customer mania,” to underscore its importance. But it’s not enough to just talk about the idea. People really follow through on customer mania when we do a good job of measuring their performance in this area. That’s why, in the late 1990s, we invented our CHAMPS scorecard. CHAMPS stands for Cleanliness, Hospitality, Accuracy, Maintenance, Product Quality, and Speed of Service, and each one of our restaurants gets rated in these six categories on a regular basis.

Unfortunately, that scorecard alone wasn’t driving the kind of breakthrough results we were going for. Scott Bergren, who runs Pizza Hut, put it this way: “A funny thing happened over time with CHAMPS. We started to celebrate small movements in the scores, which aren’t significant enough for our customers to really notice.” This came to light when Pat Murtha, Pizza Hut’s COO, traveled to a number of our U.S. restaurants to give a presentation on the importance of dramatically improving performance. He reported back: “Our managers just are
not
making the leap from the measurement to the result! They don’t get that improving from 66 percent customer satisfaction to 68 percent is just not the breakthrough performance we need for our customers. I feel like I have to somehow recast our efforts so that we can really make a difference.”

So that’s what Murtha did. He decided to give some context to the measurements by dividing Pizza Hut restaurants into three categories according to their customer satisfaction scores. The top 15 percent were set apart as Brand Builders, the bottom 10 percent were Brand Destroyers, and the majority in the middle became members of what he termed the So-So Zone.

I can remember being an hourly employee and [the company] was trying to have this big focus on quality. We were only allowed ten-minute breaks two times in the evening and I said, “I’m going to check out this quality board to try to understand it because quality must be a big deal.” So I’m looking at the Customer Squawks Board, as they called it, and I spent two separate breaks looking at this thing and trying to understand it. I could never figure it out. Nobody ever explained it to us. Somebody probably thought it was a great idea but no one ever bothered to ask, Does this work for you? Do you have any clue what it’s saying?

—
DAVID COTE, CEO OF HONEYWELL INTERNATIONAL

The effect was immediate. No one wanted to be a Brand Destroyer, so those at the bottom of the heap began to take action to fix what was wrong. The restaurants at the top were rightfully proud of their designation and therefore motivated to work hard to keep their position. But the most progress came from those restaurants in the middle. Being average had felt OK for many of them up to this point, but somehow being called so-so felt like an insult. The average performers started doing what was necessary to improve, all because of how Murtha had reframed their results. As Scott explains, “You really have to inspect whether the measurements are clear, whether you’ve focused on the few things that really matter for great performance, and finally, whether the metric itself inspires much
greater
performance.”

As the leader, it’s up to you to determine what success looks like, and you have to make sure you’ve got the bar in the right place. Back in
chapter 1
, when you were first setting the Big Goal you wanted to accomplish, I asked you to consider whether you were thinking big
enough. The same principle applies here. When making sense of your measurements and talking to your people about them, are you signaling that you are happy with simple incremental progress? Or are you using your scorecard to encourage your team to go for breakthrough?

I serve on the board of JPMorgan Chase with Lee Raymond, the former chairman and CEO of Exxon, who is one of the most insightful leaders I’ve ever worked with. When I asked him his thoughts on this very subject, he cautioned me: “Measurement for measurement sake is not what it’s all about. You have to think about what you want to achieve when you establish measures.” As an example, he told me about the loads of data they used to gather on safety at their refineries. Each refinery would use that data to predict how many accidents they would have each year and then they would focus on trying to beat that number.

That was the method for improving their safety record for years until something extraordinary happened: One of Exxon’s refineries unexpectedly reported zero accidents for the year. It changed everything. “This demonstrated that it could be done,” Lee told me. “Traditional wisdom had been that this feat was impossible. But with that one refinery leading the way, now over seventy percent of our refineries have zero accidents.”

This reminded me a story John O’Keeffe told us about Roger Bannister, the first person ever recorded to run a mile in less than four minutes. Up until that point in 1954, most people believed the human body just wasn’t built to go that fast, but Bannister proved them wrong. And once Bannister did it, others followed quickly on his heels. Just forty-six days later, John Landy broke Bannister’s record. And by the end of 1957, just a little more than three and a half years after Bannister had accomplished the “impossible,” fifteen more runners had done the same. It’s not that surprising, really. Others will have an easier time once someone else has shown them what’s possible. These stories for me are a reminder that you shouldn’t lower your standards just because something hasn’t been done before. Just imagine if no one ever tried for zero accidents or to beat the four-minute
mile. Measurements are important, but it’s also important that you don’t let numbers alone determine what is possible.

Once you know your measurements, you shouldn’t keep them to yourself; go public with the results. Remember that “the more they know, the more they care,” so make sure everyone you’re working with has a clear understanding of what the benchmarks are and how well they’re doing according to those standards.

I would argue that measurement gets distorted when there are too many. I tried to get the right set of metrics and as few as I could make them. And I don’t mean to say that means there were two. But you ought to narrow it down to what those few metrics are, four or five metrics for example, that really matter, and then measure against those four or five metrics. I think people say, “Well, I don’t know, so I’ll add another one.” You can’t measure performance as accurately, and you confuse people by having them report on some stuff that may or may not be central.

—
LARRY BOSSIDY, AUTHOR OF
EXECUTION
AND FORMER VICE CHAIRMAN OF GE AND CEO OF ALLIED SIGNAL

Measurements can be a powerful coaching tool if used the right way. Numbers are hard to argue with, so they can help people stay focused on areas in which they need to improve, rather than feeling that they are being criticized unfairly. The following are things you should do to get the most out of this essential coaching tool.

FOCUS ON THE VITAL
: Measurements are no good if they’re confusing or if there are so many of them that people spend more time sorting through them all than using them as guideposts to improving performance. A few years back, we decided to make our barometer for customer mania even simpler at Taco Bell. We’d learned that several first-class, customer-driven organizations had found a simple but effective measure to predict both customer loyalty and sales growth, which was the Recommend a Friend measure—if a customer is willing to put his own
reputation on the line to recommend a product or service, that person was emotionally committed to it. So we decided to measure how often customers recommended Taco Bell to their friends and to make that measure a priority. We still collect data on each element of CHAMPS and turn it over to our restaurant general managers to help them pinpoint where
they need to improve, but the Recommend a Friend measure is now the only measure we use to determine bonuses, which surely signals to our RGMs just how important we think it is. The new single-measure standard has some real advantages, as Tom Wagner, who started the program, points out: “It’s simple, easy to understand, and easy to implement.” And it has led to improved results.

CLEARLY DIFFERENTIATE TOP PERFORMERS
: Don’t cheapen recognition by doling it out simply because someone is meeting basic expectations. Doing so would be offensive to all those who bust their humps and overdeliver. When Larry Bossidy talked to our leadership team
,
he emphasized the importance of “rewarding the doers,” which means rewarding those who have achieved tangible, measurable results. Who you choose to recognize has a real effect; it differentiates people, motivates them, and shows those who didn’t get recognized what it takes to get ahead.

We were focusing on the wrong thing. Instead of measuring the qualitative aspect of the experience, we were measuring transactions per hour, sales per hour, and those measurements started driving decisions. I think it put us in a situation where we were no longer delivering the qualitative romance and theater of what built the brand. And business suffered as a result.

—
HOWARD SCHULTZ, CEO OF STARBUCKS

When my team and I visited Enterprise Holdings, the number-one rental car company in the world, I learned from their CEO, Andy Taylor, how they use customer satisfaction measurements to really differentiate and encourage top performers. At each one of their branches, they ask
customers to rate the service they received on a scale of one to five, with “completely satisfied” being at the top. I was amazed to learn that 82 percent of their customers give them a top-of-scale rating, which is quite an achievement. And to support their goal of keeping very high standards in this area, it is company policy that no branch manager gets promoted unless the customer satisfaction score of his or her team is
better than
that system average. As Andy explained to me, “When you think about it, we’re not in the car rental business at all. We’re in the customer satisfaction
business.”

When you’re in a group meeting and you have a problem with an individual who you think is either being unreasonable or not open-minded, it’s important, right after that meeting ends, one on one, to sort it out. I think that’s a big help. In a public meeting, you’re celebrating success and all that sort of thing, but before it’s too late and before that person forgets that behavior and that example, you’ve got to bring it to their notice. Sometimes people say something which they didn’t realize was hurtful or inappropriate, and if you address them fairly soon, if it’s live with an example and it’s one on one, they really appreciate it.

—
MICKY PANT, PRESIDENT OF GLOBAL BRANDING, YUM! BRANDS

TAKE ACTION WHEN IT’S NOT WORKING
: Measurement allows you to see when things aren’t working, which tells you when you need to make changes. I love the positive atmosphere we’ve created in our company as a result of our culture, but the other side of that is that I do end up having a lot of difficult conversations with people when things aren’t working as they should. And I’ve had the painful obligation of firing a lot of people over the course of my career. We love to have fun at work, but it’s also a place where you execute or else. You’ve got to embody both sides to be successful: Lead the celebration when things are going well
and
confront the truth when they aren’t.

If you’re doing a good job of measuring your progress and the benchmarks of success are clear, then everyone knows when progress is made, and that gives you the opportunity to celebrate your accomplishments along the way. And celebrations are essential. They are shared experiences that keep people motivated and invested in achieving the ultimate goal.