Winning (8 page)

What a lost opportunity. Celebrating makes people feel like winners and creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy. Imagine a team winning the World Series without champagne spraying everywhere. You just can’t! And yet companies win all the time and let it go without so much as a high five.

Work is too much a part of life not to recognize moments of achievement. Grab as many as you can. Make a big deal out of them. If you don’t, no one will.

There is no easy formula for being a leader. If only!

Leadership is challenging—all those balancing acts, all the responsibility, all that pressure.

And yet, good leadership happens—and it comes in all kinds of packages. There are quiet leaders and bombastic ones. There are analytical leaders and more impulsive ones. Some are tough as nails with their teams, others more nurturing. On the surface, you would be hard-pressed to say what qualities these leaders share.

Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.

I am often asked if leaders are born or made. The answer, of course, is both. Some characteristics, like IQ and energy, seem to come with the package. On the other hand, you learn some leadership skills, like self-confidence, at your mother’s knee, and at school, in academics and sports. And you learn others at work through iterative experience—trying something, getting it wrong and learning from it, or getting it right and gaining the self-confidence to do it again, only better.

For most of us, leadership happens one day when you become a boss and the rules change.

Before, your job was about yourself.

Now, it’s about them.

S
OMETIMES WHEN I APPEAR
before business audiences, I get a question that totally stumps me, as in: I have no clue about the right answer. A couple of years ago at a convention of insurance executives in San Diego, for instance, a woman stood up and said, “What is the one thing you should ask in an interview to help you decide whom to hire?”

I shook my head. “The
one
thing?” I said. “I can’t come up with
one.
What do you think?”

“That’s why I’m asking you!” she replied.

The audience roared, certainly because I was so floored, but also because they could probably relate.

Hiring good people is hard.

Hiring great people is brutally hard.

And yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field. All the clever strategies and advanced technologies in the world are nowhere near as effective without great people to put them to work.

Because hiring right is so important—and so challenging—there is a lot of territory to cover in this chapter.

 

• First, we’ll take a short look at three acid tests you need to conduct before you even think about hiring someone.
  
 

• Next we’ll lay out the 4-E (and 1-P) framework for hiring that I have used for many years. It’s named after the four characteristics it contains, which all begin with
  E,
  a nice coincidence. There’s a P (for passion) in there too.
  
 

• After that, we’ll explore the four special characteristics you look for when hiring leaders
  .
  The previous chapter was about what you do when you are a leader—the rules of leadership, as it were. This section is about how to hire leaders in the first place.
  
 

• Finally, I’ll answer six FAQs (frequently asked questions) about hiring that I get during my travels—plus that “impossible” one from that insurance executive in San Diego. After all, I’ve had a couple of years to think it over!
  
 

 

THE ACID TESTS

Before you even think about assessing people for a job, they have to pass through three screens. Remember, these tests should come at the outset of the hiring process, not right before you’re about to sign on the dotted line.

The first test is for
integrity.
Integrity is something of a fuzzy word, so let me tell you my definition. People with integrity tell the truth, and they keep their word. They take responsibility for past actions, admit mistakes, and fix them. They know the laws of their country, industry, and company—both in letter and spirit—and abide by them. They play to win the right way, by the rules.
*

How can you test for integrity? If a candidate comes from inside your company, that’s pretty easy. You’ve seen him or her in action or know someone who has. From the outside, you need to rely on reputation and reference checks. But those aren’t foolproof. You also have to rely on your gut. Does the person seem real? Does she openly admit mistakes? Does he talk about his life with equal measures of candor and discretion?

Over time, many of us develop an instinct for integrity. Just don’t be afraid to use it.

The second test is for
intelligence.
That doesn’t mean a person must have read Shakespeare or can solve complex physics problems. It does mean the candidate has a strong dose of intellectual curiosity, with a breadth of knowledge to work with or lead other smart people in today’s complex world.

Sometimes people confuse education with intelligence. I certainly did that at the start of my career. But with experience, I learned that smart people come from every kind of school. I’ve known many extremely bright people from places like Harvard and Yale. But some of the best executives I’ve worked with have attended places like Bryant University in Providence, Rhode Island, and the University of Dubuque, in Iowa.

GE was lucky to have all these people on its team.

My point is that a candidate’s education is only a piece of the picture, especially when it comes to intelligence.

The third ticket to the game is
maturity.
You can, by the way, be mature at any age, and immature too. Regardless, there are certain traits that seem to indicate a person has grown up: the individual can withstand the heat, handle stress and setbacks, and, alternatively, when those wonderful moments arise, enjoy success with equal parts of joy and humility. Mature people respect the emotions of others. They feel confident but are not arrogant.

In fact, mature people usually have a sense of humor, especially about themselves!

As with integrity, there is no real test for maturity. Again, you have to rely on reference checks, reputation, and most important, gut.

THE 4-E (AND 1-P) FRAMEWORK

The 4-E framework took years for me to solidify. No doubt other people have other frameworks that work very well in building winning teams. But I’ve found this one was consistently effective, year after year, across businesses and borders.

The first E is positive energy.
We just talked about this characteristic in the chapter on leadership. It means the ability to go go go—to thrive on action and relish change. People with positive energy are generally extroverted and optimistic. They make conversation and friends easily. They start the day with enthusiasm and usually end it that way too, rarely seeming to tire in the middle. They don’t complain about working hard; they love to work.

They also love to play.

People with positive energy just love life.

The second E is the ability to energize others.
Positive energy is the ability to get other people revved up. People who energize can inspire their team to take on the impossible—and enjoy the hell out of doing it. In fact, people would arm wrestle for the chance to work with them.
*

Now, energizing others is not just about giving Pattonesque speeches. It takes a deep knowledge of your business and strong persuasion skills to make a case that will galvanize others.

A great example of an energizer is Charlene Begley, who started with GE as a financial management trainee in 1988. After several years in various jobs, Charlene was selected to run GE’s Six Sigma program in the transportation business. That’s where her leadership really began to shine. Galvanized by her intensity, her team really got its Six Sigma program on the corporate radar screen.

It’s hard to unpick Charlene’s ability to energize because it’s a brew of skills all mixed together. She is a great communicator, who can clearly define objectives. She’s dead serious about work, but she doesn’t take herself too seriously. In fact, she has a good sense of humor and shares credit readily. Her attitude is always upbeat: no matter how hard the job, it can get done.

Charlene’s ability to energize that Six Sigma team was one of the key characteristics that got her out of the pile and set her on GE’s fast track. After Six Sigma and a couple of other leadership roles, she was made head of GE’s corporate audit staff and eventually became CEO of GE Fanuc Automation. Today, at thirty-eight, Charlene is CEO and president of GE’s $3 billion rail business.

The third E is edge, the courage to make tough yes-or-no decisions.
Look, the world is filled with gray. Anyone can look at an issue from every different angle. Some smart people can—and will—analyze those angles indefinitely. But effective people know when to stop assessing and make a tough call, even without total information.
*

Little is worse than a manager at any level who can’t cut bait, the type that always says, “Bring it back in a month and we’ll take a good, hard look at it again,” or that awful type that says yes to you, but then someone else comes into the room and changes his mind. We called these wishy-washy types last-one-out-the-door bosses.

Some of the smartest people that I’ve hired over the years—many of them from consulting—had real difficulty with edge, especially when they were put into operations. In every situation, they always saw too many options, which inhibited them from taking action. That indecisiveness kept their organizations in limbo. In the end, for several of them, that was a fatal flaw.

Which leads us to the fourth E—execute—the ability to get the job done.
Maybe this fourth E seems obvious, but for a few years, there were just the first three Es. Thinking these traits were more than sufficient, we evaluated hundreds of people and labeled a slew of them “high-potentials,” and moved many of them into managerial roles.

In that period, I traveled to personnel review sessions in the field with GE’s head of HR, Bill Conaty. At the review sessions, we would refer to a single page that had each manager’s photo on it, along with his or her boss’s performance review and three circles, one for each E we were using at the time. Each one of these Es would be colored in to represent how well the individual was doing. For instance, a person could have half a circle of energy, a full circle of energize, and a quarter circle of edge.
*

Then one Friday night after a weeklong trip to our midwestern businesses, Bill and I were flying back to headquarters, looking over page after page of high-potentials with three solidly colored-in circles. Bill turned to me. “You know, Jack, we’re missing something,” he said. “We have all these great people, but some of their results stink.”

What was missing was execution.

It turns out you can have positive energy, energize everyone around you, make hard calls, and still not get over the finish line. Being able to execute is a special and distinct skill. It means a person knows how to put decisions into action and push them forward to completion, through resistance, chaos, or unexpected obstacles. People who can execute know that winning is about results.

If a candidate has the four Es, then you look for that final P—passion.
By passion, I mean a heartfelt, deep, and authentic excitement about work. People with passion care—really care in their bones—about colleagues, employees, and friends winning. They love to learn and grow, and they get a huge kick when the people around them do the same.

The funny thing about people with passion, though, is that they usually aren’t excited just about work. They tend to be passionate about everything. They’re sports trivia nuts or they’re fanatical supporters of their alma maters or they’re political junkies.

Whatever—they just have juice for life in their veins.

HIRING FOR THE TOP

The three preliminary acid tests and the 4-E (and 1-P) framework apply to any hiring decision, no matter what level in the organization. But sometimes, you need to hire a senior-level leader—someone who is going to run a major division or an entire company. In that case, there are four more highly developed characteristics that really matter.

The first characteristic is authenticity.
Why? It’s simple. A person cannot make hard decisions, hold unpopular positions, or stand tall for what he believes unless he knows who he is and feels comfortable with that. I am talking about self-confidence and conviction. These traits make a leader bold and decisive, which is absolutely critical in times when you must act quickly.

Just as important, authenticity makes leaders likable, for lack of a better word. Their “realness” comes across in the way they communicate and reach people on an emotional level. Their words move them: their message touches something inside.

When I was at GE, we would occasionally encounter a very successful executive who just could not be promoted to the next level. In the early days, we would struggle with our reasoning. These executives demonstrated the right values and made the numbers, but usually their people did not connect with them. What was wrong? Finally, we figured out that these executives always had a certain phoniness to them. They pretended to be something they were not—more in control, more upbeat, more savvy than they really were. They didn’t sweat. They didn’t cry. They squirmed in their own skin, playing a role of their own inventing.

Leaders can’t have an iota of fakeness. They have to know themselves—so that they can be straight with the world, energize followers, and lead with the authority born of authenticity.

The second characteristic is the ability to see around corners.
Every leader has to have a vision and the ability to predict the future, but good leaders must have a special capacity to anticipate the radically unexpected. In business, the best leaders in brutally competitive environments have a sixth sense for market changes, as well as moves by existing competitors and new entrants.
*

The former vice-chairman of GE, Paolo Fresco, is a gifted chess player. He carried that skill into every global business deal he made over the course of thirty years. Somehow, because of his intuition and savvy, he could put himself in the chair of the person across the table, allowing him to predict every move in a negotiation. To our amazement, Paolo always saw what was coming next. No one ever came close to getting the better of him—because he knew what his “adversary” was thinking before the adversary himself knew.

The ability to see around corners is the ability to imagine the unimaginable.

The third characteristic is a strong penchant to surround themselves with people better and smarter than they are.
Every time we had a crisisat GE, I would quickly assemble a group of the smartest, gutsiest people I could find at any level from within the company and sometimes from without, and lean on them heavily for their knowledge and advice. I would make sure everyone in the room came at the problem from a different angle, and then I would have us all wallow in the information as we worked to solve the crisis.