Winning (7 page)

Now, you might be thinking, “That kind of emotional bonding—it just ain’t me.”

And it isn’t for some people. I’ve seen a few capable managers run their businesses while keeping their people at arm’s length. These managers often demonstrated the right values, like candor and rigor, and they delivered good results.

But in never really getting inside their people, something was lost. Work stayed work.

The right attitude could have made it so much more.

Make that attitude yours.

For some people, becoming a leader can be a real power trip. They relish the feeling of control over both people and information.

And so they keep secrets, reveal little of their thinking about people and their performance, and hoard what they know about the business and its future.
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This kind of behavior certainly establishes the leader as boss, but it drains trust right out of a team.

What is trust? I could give you a dictionary definition, but you know it when you feel it. Trust happens when leaders are transparent, candid, and keep their word. It’s that simple.

Your people should always know where they stand in terms of their performance. They have to know how the business is doing. And sometimes the news is not good—such as imminent layoffs—and any normal person would rather avoid delivering it. But you have to fight the impulse to pad or diminish hard messages or you’ll pay with your team’s confidence and energy.

Leaders also establish trust by giving credit where credit is due. They never score off their own people by stealing an idea and claiming it as their own. They don’t kiss up and kick down because they are self-confident and mature enough to know that their team’s success will get them recognition, and sooner rather than later. In bad times, leaders take responsibility for what’s gone wrong. In good times, they generously pass around the praise.

When you become a leader, sometimes you really feel the pull to say, “Look at what
I’ve
done.” When your team excels, it’s only normal to want some credit yourself.

After all, you run the show. You hand out the paychecks, so people listen to your every word (or pretend to) and they laugh at all your jokes (or pretend to). In some companies, being boss means getting a special parking place or traveling first class. It could go to your head. You could really start to feel pretty big.

Don’t let it happen.

Remember, when you were made a leader you weren’t given a crown, you were given a responsibility to bring out the best in others. For that, your people need to trust you. And they will, as long as you demonstrate candor, give credit, and stay real.
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By nature, some people are consensus builders. Some people long to be loved by everyone.

Those behaviors can really get you in the soup if you are a leader, because no matter where you work or what you do, there are times you have to make hard decisions—let people go, cut funding to a project, or close a plant.

Obviously, tough calls spawn complaints and resistance. Your job is to listen and explain yourself clearly but move forward. Do not dwell or cajole.

You are not a leader to win a popularity contest—you are a leader to lead. Don’t run for office. You’re already elected.

Sometimes making a decision is hard not because it’s unpopular, but because it comes from your gut and defies a “technical” rationale.

Much has been written about the mystery of gut, but it’s really just pattern recognition, isn’t it? You’ve seen something so many times you
just know
what’s going on this time. The facts may be incomplete or the data limited, but the situation feels very, very familiar to you.
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Leaders are faced with gut calls all the time. You’re asked to invest in a new office building, for instance, but visiting the city, you see cranes in every direction. The deal’s numbers are absolutely perfect, you’re told, but you’ve been here before. You know that overcapacity is around the corner and the “perfect” investment is about to be worth sixty cents on the dollar. You’ve got no proof, but you’ve got a real uh-oh feeling in your stomach.

You have to kill the deal, even if that pisses people off.

Sometimes the hardest gut calls involve picking people. You meet a candidate who has all the right stuff. His résumé is perfect: prestigious schools and great experience. His interview is impressive: firm handshake, good eye contact, smart questions, and so on. But something nags at you. Maybe he’s moved around an awful lot—he’s just had too many jobs in too few years without a plausible enough explanation. Or his energy seems too frantic. Or one previous boss said nice things about him but didn’t sound as though he really meant them.

And you’re left with that uh-oh feeling in your stomach again.

Don’t hire the guy.

You’ve been made a leader because you’ve seen more and been right more times. Listen to your gut. It’s telling you something.

When you are an individual contributor, you try to have all the answers. That’s your job—to be an expert, the best at what you do, maybe even the smartest person in the room.

When you are a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room. Every conversation you have about a decision, a proposal, or a piece of market information has to be filled with you saying, “What if?” and “Why not?” and “How come?”

When I was first made a manager, in 1963, I was running a start-up with a product that went to market through a large pool sales force. I knew we weren’t getting enough attention from the people in the field. So every weekend I would take home carbon copies of the sales reports filed after every customer visit—piles of them. On Mondays, I would make a pest of myself with a round of phone calls, asking the salespeople or the plant manager to explain everything I didn’t understand. Why, for instance, were we giving truckload pricing to one customer for small lot sales? Why was another customer getting a product with black specks?

These questions got the sales team to give our product the attention it needed and increased my understanding of how it was sold.

Questioning, however, is never enough. You have to make sure your questions unleash debate and raise issues that get action.

Remember, just because you are a leader, saying something doesn’t mean it will happen.

That was the case back in the early ’90s when I was pretty much obsessed with the idea of an MRI machine with a larger opening. If you have ever had an MRI, you’ll know what I am talking about. You lie on your back and are slid inside a tunnel containing a spinning magnet.

At the time, the tunnel—or bore, as it was called—was very narrow, and patients were experiencing claustrophobia during the forty-minute MRI process. Word was that Hitachi was coming up with a machine with a much wider bore, but some members of our medical business dismissed the product. Hospitals, they said, would never accept the low-quality images such large-bore machines produced.
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Having experienced an MRI myself, I just wasn’t convinced. The machines did make you feel claustrophobic! Every chance I got, I asked the medical team to look at the situation again. Won’t hospitals compromise image quality for patient comfort, especially for simple procedures, like elbows and knees? Won’t the technology eventually improve?

In response, the medical team gave me the all-too-common business head fake. “We’ll look into it,” they kept assuring me. Of course they didn’t. I was a know-nothing, meddling pain in the neck, and they were just trying to mollify me.

A year later, Hitachi rolled out a large-bore machine and captured a significant piece of the market. We spent two years playing catch-up.

The last thing I want to sound like with this story is a hero.

Just the opposite.

I should have pushed a whole lot harder with my questioning. In fact, I should have insisted we put resources into developing our own large-bore machine. All we were left with at the end was me thinking, “I knew it,” and wanting to say, “I told you so.”

Both of those sentiments are worth nothing. You would assume that was obvious, but I’ve seen more leaders believe that second-guessing absolves them from responsibility when things go wrong. Years ago, I used to see a well-known CEO socially on a fairly regular basis. Whenever his company had been in the news for screwing up, he’d always say something like, “I knew they shouldn’t have done that.” For some reason that made him feel better, but what did it matter?

We’ve all been guilty at one point or another in our careers of boasting of perfect hindsight.

It’s a terrible sin.

If you don’t make sure your questions and concerns are acted upon,
it doesn’t count.

I realize most people don’t love the probing process. It’s annoying to believe in a product or come into a room with a beautiful presentation only to have it picked apart with questions from the boss.

But that’s the job. You want bigger and better solutions. Questions, healthy debate, decisions, and action will get everyone there.

Winning companies embrace risk taking and learning.

But in reality, these two concepts often get lip service—and little else. Too many managers urge their people to try new things and then whack them in the head when they fail. And too many live in not-invented-here worlds of their own making.

If you want your people to experiment and expand their minds, set the example yourself.

Consider risk taking. You can create a culture that welcomes risk taking by freely admitting your mistakes and talking about what you’ve learned from them.

I cannot count the number of times I’ve told people about my first big mistake—and it was huge—blowing up a pilot plant in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1963. I was across the street in my office when the explosion occurred, set off by a spark igniting a large tank of volatile solution. The noise was enormous, and then roof shingles and shards of glass flew everywhere. Smoke blanketed the area. Thank God no one was hurt.
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Despite the enormity of my mistake, my boss’s boss, a former MIT professor named Charlie Reed, didn’t beat me up. Instead, his sympathetic, scientific probing of the reasons for the incident taught me not only how to improve our manufacturing process, but more importantly, how to deal with people when they were down.

That wasn’t the only mistake in my career; I made plenty. I bought the investment bank Kidder Peabody—a cultural fit disaster—and made many wrong hires, to name just two more.

These experiences were nothing to feel great about, but I talked about them openly in order to show that it was OK to take swings and miss, as long as you learned from them.

You don’t need to be preachy or particularly somber about your errors. In fact, the more humorous and lighthearted you can be about them, the more people will get the message that mistakes aren’t fatal.

As for learning—again, live it yourself. Just because you’re the boss doesn’t mean you’re the source of all knowledge. Whenever I learned about a best practice that I liked at another company, I would come back to GE and make a scene. Maybe I often overstated the case, but I wanted people to know how enthusiastic I was about the new idea. And I was!

You can—and should—learn from one another too. Remember that executive in Chicago who asked me how he could appraise people who were smarter than he was? The answer I gave him was, “Learn from them. In the best-case scenario, all your people will be smarter than you. It doesn’t mean you can’t lead them.”

There is no edict in the world that will make people take risks or spend their time learning. In most cases, their risk-reward equation just isn’t obvious enough.

If you want to change that, set the example yourself. You’ll love the exciting culture you create and the results you get—and so will your team.

What is it about celebrating that makes managers so nervous? Maybe throwing a party doesn’t seem professional, or it makes managers worry that they won’t look serious to the powers that be, or that, if things get too happy at the office, people will stop working their tails off.

Whatever the reason, there is just not enough celebrating going on at work—anywhere. When I travel, I frequently ask audiences if they’ve done anything to recognize their team’s achievements—large or small—over the past year. I’m not talking about those stilted, company-orchestrated parties that everyone hates, in which the whole team is marched out to a local restaurant for an evening of forced merriment when they’d rather be home. I’m talking about sending a team to Disney World with their families, or giving each team member two tickets to a great show in New York, or handing each team member a new iPod or the like.

But to my question “Do you celebrate enough?” almost no one raises a hand.

It’s not as if GE was immune to this phenomenon. I harped on the importance of celebrating for twenty years. But during my last trip as CEO to our training center in Crotonville, I asked the hundred or so managers in the class, “Do you celebrate enough in your units?” Even knowing what I wanted them to say, less than half answered yes.
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