by Jack Welch
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.
* * *
RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
* * *
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.
* * *
RULE 3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism.
* * *
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.
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.
* * *
RULE 4. Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency, and credit.
* * *
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.*
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.*
* * *
RULE 5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls.
* * *
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.*
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.
* * *
RULE 6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action.
* * *
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.*
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.
* * *
RULE 7. Leaders inspire risk taking and learning by setting the example.
* * *
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 everywh
ere. Smoke blanketed the area. Thank God no one was hurt.*
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.”
