by Jack Welch
And by the way, it does nothing for your career or your political standing in an organization to launch into your new job with a period of turmoil. Much better to be known as a keeper of the peace who leaps into action only when the troops are prepared to fight for a mission they believe in.
And so, campaign you must.
But here’s the rub: you have to do that without compromising your new authority. That’s right: you have to run for office while holding office—and doing all the things an officeholder must do!
And there’s your quandary—the hard part, as we said—the need for you to campaign and command simultaneously. That’s what the transition from peer to manager is all about.
Getting it right is all about timing.
Your kinder, gentler election drive cannot last forever. In fact, give it three months—six at most. By that time, if you haven’t won the vote of a former peer or two or three, you won’t ever. In fact, after a certain point, the softer you are, the less effective you will become as you fight battles that do nothing but wear you down. So, save your energy and attention for bigger things, and begin the process of moving steadfast resisters out—and bringing in people who readily accept the changes that you and your new core of supporters see as necessary.
The fact is, running for office goes with the territory of being promoted, and all effective managers go through it—often, several times in their careers. Fortunately, the transition period does not last forever, and if you handle it right—with a campaign and not chaos—you’ll be in a great position to do what’s best for the organization and yourself.
Lead from strength.
WINNING THE WHINING GAME
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I run a fourteen-person business, and we look after our people very well—parties for birthdays, babies, and marriages, and a real interest in each individual, both personally and professionally. Still, people complain incessantly. There’s too much politics, not enough appreciation, and so on. I am about to tear my hair out because nothing seems to make them happy.
—CAPE TOWN, SOUTH AFRICA
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Stop trying. With the best of intentions, you have created a classic entitlement culture, in which your people have the deal exactly backward. They think you work for them.
This phenomenon is not uncommon, although it tends to be more prevalent in small organizations, where employees can more easily develop casual, familial relationships with their bosses, and bosses more often blur professional lines themselves.
In the end, such cozy familiarity can backfire, as is happening with you and your moaning, groaning employees.
It’s irrelevant, however, how you got yourself into your predicament. It only matters now that you get out quickly, and the first person you need to get straight with is yourself. You are running a company, not a social club or a counseling service. Your number one priority is to win in the marketplace so that you can continue to grow and provide opportunities for your people. Of course, you want your employees to be happy. But their happiness needs to come from the company’s success, not from their every need being met. When the company does well because of their performance, they will thrive, personally and professionally. Not the other way around.
Consider this way of thinking your new creed.
Next, gather your people together, and let them know about your conversion experience, and your plan to convert them too. Together, you and your staff will need to create a list of behaviors that will result in the company’s winning. These behaviors will become your new company values—guidelines, if you will, to live by. For instance, one value could be: we will respond with a sense of urgency to customer requests. Or, we will only ship products with zero defects. The point of this process is very simple: to help your people understand that work is about…well, it’s about work.
Without doubt, you will hear yelps of pain as you dismantle your entitlement culture. Indeed, some employees that you like and value may leave in protest. Take the hit and wish them well.
They will soon find out the grass is not greener on the other side, and you will discover how much better your company operates when your main concern is not whining—but winning.
NEW JOB—OLD TEAM?
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I have just been hired in a leadership position at a new company. I am tempted to bring along some people from my old organization; we work together well, and they have the skills. Your thoughts?
—BANGALORE, INDIA
* * *
A tempting idea but a tricky one. The answer is, in a phrase, it depends.
If you’re running a company that requires a rapid turnaround in a changing environment, and you are saddled with an embedded culture of employees in a state of denial, you’d be smart to bring along capable former colleagues you’d trust in a foxhole. Together, you’ll get the work done faster and more smoothly, and with the camaraderie born of your shared experiences in the past, it will be a lot more fun too.
But if you’ve been hired to lead a relatively good business that mainly needs a dose of reenergizing, hiring several members of your old team can create a lot of mayhem for very little gain. Nothing is more demotivating to a functioning organization than a little imported cabal that regularly invokes, “This is how we did it at our old company.” In the worst-case scenario, this dynamic gives rise to a two-class society: the boss’s favored insiders and the alienated has-beens.
Bottom line: survey the terrain. Bring in your old team only if you need fast change and resisters won’t budge. If you’re not in a crisis situation, search out the best among the team you’ve inherited, and give them a new sense of purpose. You may miss your former colleagues, but you sure won’t miss the havoc they would cause.
THE SMARTER THEY ARE…
* * *
I am looking for advice about a situation you’ve probably had to deal with: a superior employee. You can’t fire yourself, so what’s the solution? Do you keep a lid on the employee’s performance? Or hope the organization doesn’t figure out your underling is better than you are?
—ORANGE, CALIFORNIA
* * *
Or how about this: you celebrate.
Look, the best thing that can happen to you as a boss—and you’re right, it has happened to both of us—is hiring a person who is smarter, more creative, or in some way more talented than you are. It’s like winning the lottery. Suddenly, you’ve got a team member whose talent will very likely improve everyone’s performance and reputation.
Including yours.
Yes, it’s human nature to feel as you do—fearful that a “superior” employee could make you look, well, inferior, and perhaps slow down your career progress. But in reality, the exact opposite usually occurs.
The reason is that leaders are generally not judged on their personal output. What would be the point of evaluating them like individual contributors? Rather, most leaders are judged on how well they’ve hired, coached, and motivated their people, individually and collectively—all of which shows up in the results. That’s why when you sign up top performers and release their energy, you don’t look bad. You look like the goose that laid the golden egg.
So, keep laying them. It is a rare company that doesn’t love a boss who finds great people and creates an environment where they flourish, and you don’t have to be the smartest person in the room to do that. Indeed, when you consistently demonstrate that leadership skill, and come to be known as the person in your company who can land and build the best, watch your career take off.
Now, we’re not saying that managing “superior” employees on your team is necessarily easy. Your question, in fact, reminds us of one we received in Chicago several years ago from an audience member who said two of his seven direct reports were smarter than he was, and asked, “How can I possibly appraise them?”
“What the heck happened to the other five?” was our attempt at a lighthearted response. But we took his point. How in the world do you evaluate people who yo
u feel are more talented than you?
You don’t. That is, you don’t evaluate them on their intelligence or particular skill set. Of course, you talk about what they are doing well, but as important, you focus on areas in which they can improve. It is no secret that some very smart people have trouble, for instance, relating to colleagues or being open to other people’s ideas. Indeed, some struggle with becoming leaders themselves. And that is where your experience and self-confidence come into play and your coaching can really help.
In that way, then, managing superior employees is just like managing regular types. You have everything to gain from celebrating their growth—and nothing at all to fear.
MANAGEMENT PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICES
On Running a Business to Win
Being a boss is one thing, and managing your career another. But business cannot move forward without certain principles and practices in place.
Right—but which ones? That’s the general question that the answers in this chapter grapple with. Grapple, because certain principles, such as candor and differentiation, and certain practices, such as strategy, budgeting, and HR, are controversial, to say the least. Take candor. We haven’t visited a country (including the United States) where people haven’t challenged its “appropriateness,” not to mention its practicality. But every aspect of management, as the following pages show, can be open to debate. And they should be; that’s how companies get better.
GETTING THE BEST PEOPLE
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In your experience, what are the three most critical factors to put in place to turn a company into a “preferred employer” on a sustained basis? And what’s a realistic time frame for getting there?
—CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
* * *
You ask for three factors—but you really need twice that many “gold stars” to earn the grand prize of being a preferred employer. And it is a grand prize, because when you build a company where people really want to work, you’ve got your hands on one of the most powerful competitive advantages in the game, the ability to hire and field the best team.
But before we give you our six ways to arrive at that fortunate place, a reply to your question about how long the preferred employer process takes.
The answer is easily years, and it can be decades or more. That’s just the way it is with corporate reputations—they’re built annual report by annual report, career story by career story, crisis by crisis (because every company has one or two of them), and recovery by recovery. It probably took IBM about thirty years to earn its gold-standard reputation in the ’70s, less than a decade to lose it when the company stumbled, and then about a decade more to rebuild it to where it is today.
In today’s media-saturated world, however, there is a major exception to the generally slow pace of reputation building. Companies can become preferred employers virtually overnight thanks to a “buzz factor,” which is as potent as it is fast acting. In a technology-based company, buzz usually comes with an exciting breakthrough or otherwise paradigm-altering new product or service. Google, eBay, and Apple are perfect examples. Buzz, however, can also come from having a glamorous or prestigious brand, like Chanel or Ferrari.
But the buzz factor is as rare as it is precarious. Apple had it with the Mac, lost it when other PC manufacturers leapfrogged them, then recaptured it (plus some) with the iPod. This entirely common story explains why most companies have to become a preferred employer the old-fashioned way, grinding it out over time.
Here’s a checklist to assess your company’s progress.
First, preferred employers demonstrate a real commitment to continuous learning. No lip service. These companies invest in the development of their people with classes, training programs, and off-site experiences, all sending the message that the organization is eager to facilitate a steady path to personal growth.
Second, preferred employers are meritocracies. Pay and promotions are tightly linked to performance, and rigorous appraisal systems consistently let people know where they stand. As at every company, whom you know and where you went to school might help get you in the door at a meritocracy. But after that, it’s all about results. Now, why does all this make a company a preferred employer? Very simply, because people with brains, self-confidence, and competitive spirit are always attracted to such environments.
Third, preferred employers not only allow people to take risks, they celebrate those who do, and don’t shoot those who fail trying. As with meritocracies, a culture of risk taking attracts exactly the kind of creative and bold individuals that companies want and need in a global marketplace where innovation is the single best defense against unrelenting cost competition.
Next, preferred employers understand that what is good for society is also good for business. Gender, race, and nationality are never limitations; everyone’s ideas matter. Preferred employers are diverse and global in their outlook and environmentally sensitive in their practices. They offer flexibility in work schedules to those who earn it with performance. In a word, preferred companies are enlightened.
Fifth, preferred employers keep their hiring standards tight. They make candidates work hard, requiring an arduous interview process and strict criteria around intelligence and previous experience. Admittedly, this factor is somewhat of a catch-22, as it is difficult to be picky before you become an employer of choice! But it’s worth the effort, as talent has an uncanny way of attracting, well, talent.
Sixth and finally, preferred companies are profitable and growing. A rising stock price is a real hiring magnet. Beyond that, though, only thriving companies can promise you a future, with career mobility and the potential of increased financial reward. Indeed, one of the most intoxicating things a company can say to a potential employee is, “Join us for the ride of your life.”
As we said at the outset, the best thing about being a preferred employer is that it gets you good people—and that launches a virtuous cycle. The best team attracts the best team, and winning often leads to more winning.
That’s a ride that you and your employees will never want to get off.
THE FIGHT AGAINST PHONINESS
* * *
Even though my company is in a very competitive industry and we need to move fast and decisively, I’ve noticed that people rarely say what they mean to each other—particularly in meetings. There’s just so much beating around the bush and general phoniness. I’m just a middle manager. What can I do?
—PHOENIX, ARIZONA
* * *
What you describe is one of the most common and destructive problems in business, and in society, for that matter—the lack of candor. No matter where we travel, we hear about organizations that are slowed down and gummed up by the very human tendency to soften hard, urgent messages with false kindness or phony optimism. This tendency is particularly prevalent when it comes to communicating about poor performance. Very often, bosses don’t come right out and tell underperformers how badly they are doing until, in a burst of frustration, they fire them. That’s terribly unfair to the person at the receiving end and often very disruptive to the business itself.
But lack of candor doesn’t just pervade performance evaluations. It cripples lots of conversations, many about how and when and where to spend scarce company resources. Yes, these kinds of conversations can be sensitive, politically loaded, or complex, or all of the above. But they’ll simply be better if they’re candid.
So, what can you do? The only option we know of is having the guts to start using candor yourself, even if you have limited power in the organization. When people use double-talk, push back with questions that cut through the nonsense and probe for reality. Ask, “What are you really trying to tell us?” or say, “What I hear you saying is…” and deliver the straight message yourself for confirmation.
Introducing candor to an organization, of course, is not without risk. In fact, it can be a total shock to the system, and being the first one to use it can get you killed, that is
, marginalized or thrown out. But should you decide to get candid anyway, go slow and use humor when possible. In the best-case scenario, your candor will eventually be rewarded with candor in return—and sometimes the change is faster than you would imagine. As soon as many people experience candor, they can’t understand how they ever did business without it.
THE LIMITS OF CANDOR—OR NOT
* * *
I’m a recent MBA who was just made a manager. I believe in using candor, but I’m afraid to, since most of my direct reports are twice my age.
—HUNTSVILLE, ALABAMA
* * *
You may feel squeamish using candor with people who look like your parents, but rest assured that “old people” hate jargon, ambiguity, and double-talk just as much as you do. In fact, having suffered through it at work for decades, they will most likely applaud your efforts to be straight, especially after the shock wears off.
Shock—because without doubt, there will be a rough period of adjustment once you start talking directly and honestly about performance and results. Most people—no matter what their age—just aren’t accustomed to it.
Use it anyway. In the end, candor always works, and it always makes work better. Once you dispense with mixed messages and phony performance reviews, a team never fails to become faster, more creative, and more energetic.
