Winning (6 page)

5. LEADERSHIP

It’s Not Just About You

6. HIRING

What Winners Are Made Of

7. PEOPLE MANAGEMENT

You’ve Got the Right Players. Now What?

8. PARTING WAYS

Letting Go Is Hard to Do

9. CHANGE

Mountains Do Move

10. CRISIS MANAGEMENT

From Oh-God-No to Yes-We’re-Fine

O
NE DAY
, you become a leader.

On Monday, you’re doing what comes naturally, enjoying your job, running a project, talking and laughing with colleagues about life and work, and gossiping about how stupid management can be. Then on Tuesday, you
are
management. You’re a boss.

Suddenly, everything feels different—because it is different. Leadership requires distinct behaviors and attitudes, and for many people, they debut with the job.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself.

When you become a leader, success is all about growing others.

Without question, there are lots of ways to be a leader. You need to look only as far as the freewheeling, straight-talking Herb Kelleher, who ran Southwest Airlines for thirty years, and Microsoft’s quiet innovator, Bill Gates, to know that leaders come in all varieties. In politics, take Churchill and Gandhi. In football, take Lombardi and Belichick.

Each of these leaders would give you a different list of leadership “rules.”

If asked, I would give you eight. They didn’t feel like rules when I was using them. They just felt like the right way to lead.

This is not the last you will hear of leadership in this book. Virtually every chapter touches on the subject, from crisis management to strategy to work-life balance.

But I’m starting with a separate chapter on leadership because it is always on people’s minds. Over the past three years, during my talks with students, managers, and entrepreneurs, leadership questions invariably were asked. “What does a leader really do?” for instance, and “I was just promoted and I’ve never run anything before. How can I be a good leader?” Micromanagement often comes up as an area of concern, as in, “My boss feels as if he has to control everything—is that leadership or babysitting?” Similarly, charisma gets a lot of queries; people ask, “Can you be introverted, quiet, or just plain shy and still get results out of your people?” Once, in Chicago, an audience member said, “I have at least two direct reports who are smarter than I am. How can I possibly appraise them?”

These kinds of questions have pushed me to make sense of my own leadership experiences over forty years. Across the decades, circumstances varied widely. I ran teams with three people and divisions with thirty thousand. I managed businesses that were dying and ones that were bursting with growth. There were acquisitions, divestitures, organizational crises, moments of unexpected luck, good economies and bad.

And yet, some ways of leading always seemed to work. They became my “rules.”

WHAT LEADERS DO

 

1. 1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
   
 

2. 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
   
 

3. 3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism.
   
 

4. 4. Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.
   
 

5. 5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls.
   
 

6. 6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action.
   
 

7. 7. Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting the example.
   
 

8. 8. Leaders celebrate.
   
 

 

THE DAILY BALANCING ACT

Before we look at each rule, a word on paradoxes. Leadership is loaded with them.

The granddaddy of them all is the short-long paradox, as in the question I often get: “How can I manage quarterly results and still do what’s right for my business five years out?”

My answer is, “Welcome to the job!”

Look, anyone can manage for the short term—just keep squeezing the lemon. And anyone can manage for the long—just keep dreaming. You were made a leader because someone believed you could squeeze and dream at the same time. They saw in you a person with enough insight, experience, and rigor to balance the conflicting demands of short-and long-term results.

Performing balancing acts every day
is
leadership.

Take rule 3 and rule 6. One says you should show positive energy and optimism, showering your people with a can-do attitude. The other says you should constantly question your people and take nothing they say for granted.

Or take rule 5 and rule 7. One says you need to act like a boss, asserting authority. The other says you need to admit mistakes and embrace people who take risks, especially when they fail.

Of course, life would be easier if leadership was just a list of simple rules, but paradoxes are inherent to the trade.

That’s part of the fun of leading, though—each day is a challenge. It is a brand-new chance to get better at a job that, when all is said and done, you can never be perfect at.

You can only give it everything you’ve got.

Here’s how.

After the Boston Red Sox finally broke an eighty-six–year drought and won the World Series, you couldn’t turn on the TV or open a paper without hearing speculation as to why 2004 was “the year.” There were theories about everything, from centerfielder Johnny Damon’s hairstyle to the lunar eclipse!

Most people agreed, however, that the reason wasn’t mysterious at all. The Red Sox had the best players. The pitching staff was the league’s best, the fielders were good enough, and the hitters…well, they were sensational. And they were all bound together by a winning spirit so palpable you could feel it in the air.

There are lucky breaks and bad calls in any season, but the team with the best players usually does win. And that is why, very simply, you need to invest the vast majority of your time and energy as a leader in three activities.

 

• You have to
  evaluate
  —making sure the right people are in the right jobs, supporting and advancing those who are, and moving out those who are not.
  
 

• You have to
  coach
  —guiding, critiquing, and helping people to improve their performance in every way.
  
 

• And finally, you have to
  build self-confidence
  —pouring out encouragement, caring, and recognition. Self-confidence energizes, and it gives your people the courage to stretch, take risks, and achieve beyond their dreams. It is the fuel of winning teams.
  
 

 

Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a year in performance reviews. That’s not even close.
*

People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.

Take budget reviews. They are a perfect occasion to focus on people. That’s right, people. Yes, you need to talk about the business and its results, but in a budget review you can really see team dynamics in action. If everyone around the table sits silent and frozen while the team leader pontificates, you’ve got some serious coaching to do. If everyone’s involved in the presentation and the whole team is alive, you’ve got a great opportunity to give immediate feedback that you like what you see. If the team has a real star or a dud in its midst, share your impressions with its leader as soon as you can.

There is no event in your day that cannot be used for people development.

Customer visits are a chance to evaluate your sales force. Plant tours are an opportunity to meet promising new line managers and see if they have the ability to run something bigger. A coffee break at a meeting is an opening to coach a team member who is about to give his first major presentation.

And remember in all these encounters, evaluating and coaching are great, but building self-confidence is, in the end, probably the most important thing you can do. Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.

Besides its huge impact on upgrading the team, the best thing about using every encounter for people development is how much fun it is. Instead of mind-numbing meetings about numbers and plant tours showing off new machines, every day is about growing people. In fact, think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other. Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time, you just nurture and tend.

Then watch everything bloom.

It goes without saying that leaders have to set the team’s vision and most do. But there’s so much more to the “vision thing” than that. As a leader, you have to make the vision come alive.

How do you achieve that? First of all, no jargon. Goals cannot sound noble but vague. Targets cannot be so blurry they can’t be hit. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him, “Where are we going?” he could still answer in a half-asleep stupor, “We’re going to keep improving our service to individual contractors and expand our market by aggressively reaching out to small wholesalers.”

I had just that kind of experience last year when I was out hawking an investment fund for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, where I consult. At one dinner session in Chicago, the room was filled with about a dozen investors, all focused on our investment criteria and projections for returns.
*

Steve Klimkowski, the chief investment officer of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, was one of them. But in the midst of all the financial chatter, he was just as interested in talking about his hospital’s mission to deliver “excellent patient care—from the patient’s perspective.” He had examples of how employees at every level—including him, the investment guy—had transformed their work to fulfill the vision. He had been coached, for example, never to give outpatients directions to a location in the hospital, but to walk them there. At his performance review, Steve had been asked to list several ways in which he personally had improved the patient’s experience at Northwestern Memorial. In fact, Steve’s understanding of his role in achieving the mission, and his passion for it, were so real that after talking to him for fifteen minutes, you could wake me in the middle of the night and I could tell you about it!

Clearly, Northwestern Memorial’s leaders had communicated the hospital’s vision with amazing clarity and consistency. And that’s the point. You have to talk about vision constantly—basically, to the point of gagging. There were times I talked about the company’s direction so many times in one day that I was completely sick of hearing it myself. But I realized the message was always new to someone. And so, you keep on repeating it.

And you talk to
everyone.

One of the most common problems in organizations is that leaders communicate the vision to their closest colleagues and its implications never filter down to people in frontline positions. Think about all the times you have bumped into a rude or harried clerk at a high-service department store, or been put on hold by a call center operator at a company that promises speed and convenience.

Somehow, they haven’t heard the mission, maybe because it wasn’t shouted in their direction, loud enough or often enough.

Or maybe their rewards weren’t aligned.

And that’s the final piece of this particular leadership rule. If you want people to live and breathe the vision, “show them the money” when they do, be it with salary, bonus, or significant recognition of some sort. To quote a friend of mine, Chuck Ames, the former chairman and CEO of Reliance Electric, “Show me a company’s various compensation plans, and I’ll show you how its people behave.”

Vision is an essential element of the leader’s job. But no vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards. Only then will it leap off the page—and come to life.

You know that old saying “The fish rots from the head.” It’s mainly used to refer to how politics and corruption filter down into an organization, but it could just as easily be used to describe the effect of a bad attitude at the top of any team, large or small. Eventually, everyone’s infected.

The leader’s mood is, for lack of a better word, catching. You’ve seen the dynamic a hundred times. An upbeat manager who goes through the day with a positive outlook somehow ends up running a team or organization filled with…well, upbeat people with positive outlooks. A pessimistic sourpuss somehow ends up with an unhappy tribe all his own.

Unhappy tribes have a tough time winning.

Of course, sometimes there are good reasons to be down. The economy is bad, competition is brutal—whatever. Work can be hard.

But your job as leader is to fight the gravitational pull of negativism. That doesn’t mean you sugarcoat the challenges your team faces. It does mean you display an energizing, can-do attitude about overcoming them. It means you get out of your office and into everyone’s skin, really caring about what they’re doing and how they’re faring as you take the hill
together.