Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (18 page)

Once you have the right team in place, you have to know how to motivate them. The more you can get inside the heads of your team members, the better able you’ll be to influence the team in a positive way. Below are three steps for understanding what will motivate your team members.

1. Ask questions that promote insight: If you want to find out what your team members are thinking, the best way to begin is by asking questions. My favorite things to ask are: (1) What’s working? (2) What’s not? (3) What would you do if you were me? In my case, these questions have led to a lot of feedback about our need to do more to improve restaurant operations. As a result, I recently put together a team to study companies that are known to be great operators. We’ve taken what we learned and are now launching a World Class Operations initiative around the globe. A number of people have also told me that they’d like to know more about what our brands are doing in other countries, so I started a blog in which I share in real time what I experience during my visits around the world, including pictures of the restaurants, people, and unique features of each location. Moreover, when I respond to feedback by
   doing things differently, I always point out that “you asked for it, you got it” to show I value people’s input.
   
2. Listen for understanding: The most powerful way to motivate people is to really listen to them with your full attention and an open mind. When I’m about to ask someone what she thinks about something, I always try to remind myself to suspend judgment until I’ve heard her out. The worst thing you can do is squash a person’s idea before you’ve thought it through. I think this gets harder the more experience you have. The more we know, the more we have a tendency to react by saying things like “We’ve tried that already” or “That’s been done before.” But
   saying things like that are a sure way to kill someone’s desire to speak openly to you about her ideas or opinions. Building a reputation for being the kind of person who truly listens before making decisions is fundamental to having a legion of followers.
   
3. Take note of differences in style: You can diagnose this yourself, or you can use readily available “style preference” inventory tools, such as Meyers Briggs, DISC (directive, influencing, supporting, contemplative), ProScan PDP Behavior Assessment, or LSI (lifestyles inventory), to help you better understand the individuals on your team. If you doubt the merit of tools like these, consider this story told to me by Jennifer Munro, president of EagleVision Performance Solutions. She used the PDP ProScan Program to help a CEO find a replacement for his company’s president. After assessing his staff, Munro told him that the only person who really met his criteria for the job was his current secretary. “He was not very pleased with that opinion at first,” Munro told me, “but then he started to pay attention to her work and gave her more and more challenges. She accomplished everything he gave her and
   enjoyed her expanding role.” The CEO continued to give her more responsibility and within four years she had moved up to vice president, then executive vice president, and then COO. Today she’s CEO of one of the most successful banking groups in her state. Sometimes these tools can help us see potential in people that we might otherwise miss.
   

How often have you heard someone articulate a goal or a vision in business but then not put resources to achieve it? What does that say to you? It signals that the goal was never really a top priority in the first place.

It’s dangerous when this happens, for two reasons: (1) A lack of resources put toward a goal gives people permission not to focus on it,
and (2) The next time you have a goal you want to accomplish, your people may wonder if you’re just crying wolf. You say this is important, but you said that the last time, when you didn’t back it up. If you don’t organize your resources around making something happen, how can you expect people to take you seriously? Conversely, if you put in place what is needed to accomplish your Big Goal, you get rid of all the excuses for why it can’t be done.

It’s simply a matter of putting your money (and your people) where your mouth is to show what’s important. Here are some examples of how you might need to organize your resources to achieve your Big Goal.

CREATE NEW ROLES
: At Pizza Hut, our Yum! Restaurants International CEO, Graham Allan, wanted to build our business in casual dining and specialty beverages, like smoothies, coffees, and teas, but we didn’t have enough knowledge in these areas. To fix that, Graham recruited people from outside the organization who had such expertise, including someone who had helped develop a very successful beverage program for one of our competitors.

DEFINE ROLES MORE CLEARLY
: Not long ago, we decided at Yum! that we needed to decentralize some of our functions, giving responsibility for them to the brands themselves instead of handling them at the corporate office. But we didn’t want this restructuring to demotivate or confuse anyone, so our chief people officer, Anne Byerlein, came up with what we call our Six Pillars of Yum! These spell out the main responsibilities of our corporate office as clearly as possible, grouping them under six headings: corporate strategy, public company responsibilities, performance management, know-how building for systemwide innovation, talent development, and culture design and evolution.

CENTRALIZE RESOURCES
: Over the past several years, Yum! has been developing a new Chinese fast-food concept in China called East Dawning. One of the problems that kept coming up, however, was that there was too much variation in products from restaurant to restaurant
and too much time spent on in-store preparation. So we invested in a central kitchen to prepare the food, which would then just require finishing off in the restaurants. This led to more efficiency and better quality control.

One of the most important things you do in any big company is, you need to be a catalyst on resources. I mean, we made the decision to just add one thousand more sales reps in China. And if I had waited for everybody to do bottoms-up budgeting, it would take us five years to do that. … We needed to move faster, and I needed to use my checkbook and my clout to make it happen faster. So I do think the role of any good leader is to be disruptive to your own organization when you need to be.

—
JEFF IMMELT, CHAIRMAN & CEO, GE

MAKE THE FINANCIAL INVESTMENT
: Over the past few years, JPMorgan Chase has spent hundreds of millions of dollars on IT systems, which have allowed it to better communicate with its customers. The customer data gathered as a result has become a huge competitive advantage. On a smaller scale, at KFC in the United States, we wanted to push for better operations, so we spent money on additional staff to audit our restaurants more frequently. Not only did this practice give restaurant managers more feedback on how they were doing compared with others and how they could improve, it also showed them how much of a priority this was for our organization, thus encouraging them to increase their own efforts as well.

I was once in Las Vegas at a franchisee conference when this tremendous lightening storm hit. All the electricity went out in the entire hotel
for a few moments until the backup generator kicked on automatically. But the backup generator wasn’t enough to power the entire hotel. Can you guess where they directed that resource? To the slot machines. Everywhere else in the hotel was dark, but those slot machines kept right on ringing. That shows you in an instant what mattered most to that business. In the absence even of electricity, they kept the core of their business running by putting process and discipline around what really mattered.

A good leader understands what the core of the business is all about and puts the right processes in place to ensure that that core runs smoothly. Here are some examples of how other companies are doing this.

SINGAPORE AIRLINES
: Their flight attendants are the single most important thing to their business, because they are the ones who have the most contact with their customers. So the company has identified exactly which qualities they want to see in their flight attendants and has developed intricate hiring processes to make sure they get the right people.

TARGET
: Most marketing departments focus almost exclusively on reaching the customer, but Target’s marketers spend 65 percent of their time communicating to their own employees about what the Target brand stands for. Why? As Michael Francis, their chief marketing officer, told us: “Ultimately what that has done is that it has created 315,000 brand ambassadors who really understand, not only what we’re trying to accomplish from an enterprisewide standpoint, but how to take that and apply it to their own store.”

PROCTER & GAMBLE
: P&G had some growth problems in the past, but its leaders have recently managed to turn their business around. I talked to A. G. Lafley, who is a phenomenal leader, and asked him how they were able to do this. He said it was because the company had developed an entire religion around the power of innovation and they had
completely restructured to make that the focus. For example, they developed an open architecture where employees can share ideas anytime and anywhere. They also put in place a corporate innovation fund, so that when they wanted to pursue a new idea, they could do it right away, without having to go through the typical, drawn-out processes for fund approval.

There’s no point talking about inclusion if we don’t train people to be inclusive. So we put in inclusion level-one, level-two, level-three training, and we made it mandatory. We didn’t make it an option. Our experience was, people who are already diversity conscious are the people who take this training. People who reject diversity never take the training, so we made it mandatory. Everybody took the training. … So we put the money behind that, and I’ll be honest with you, spending all that money up front paid off in spades because what it started was a movement.

—
INDRA NOOYI, CEO OF PEPSICO

YUM! BRANDS CHINA
: In our organization, we’ve set a goal to make the restaurant general manager the number-one leader in our company. The reason is that RGMs build the teams that satisfy our customers. Sam Su, who runs our China division, has really put the processes in place to make this concept come alive. He said to me: “What does it really mean for the RGM to be number one? That doesn’t mean that the person is number one, it means the job is of number-one importance. We know that we need to support that, so we structured everything around it. We were very specific about the area coach (the first line supervisor, who manages five to eight restaurants), how he spends time in the restaurant, and the next step up, which we call the district manager, what his job is, how he supports the restaurants. We have quarterly or semiannual RGM forums now. In those meetings, RGMs are the kings. And the
function areas involved are there to provide answers, and they
better have good answers, because otherwise there will be consequences. So we have all kinds of things specifically to support [the concept that RGMs are our number-one leaders] and to make it happen.”

This use of the phrase comes from Jim Collins, who for his book
Built to Last
did extensive research into those companies that are successful, not just for a period of time, but year after year after year
.
One of the things he shared with us was that leaders in these enduringly great companies passed the “hit by a bus” standard: If you were to be hit by a bus tomorrow, would your team or organization be able to go on without you? Would they be able to continue to improve beyond where they are today?

If your answer is yes, then you are what he calls a clock builder instead of a time teller. A time teller has to be present to let everyone know what time it is, whereas the clock builder builds a clock, institutionalizing process and discipline around what really matters, so that people can use it to tell time themselves. This is an important distinction, because it’s key to making your business stable over the long term. The time teller has everyone looking up to him for the answers, but what happens when he’s not around or when he makes the wrong call? In my opinion, Hank Greenberg, the former CEO of AIG, is a good example of a time teller. The company ultimately collapsed after he left because he hadn’t set the business up to continue in his absence. This wouldn’t have happened to a clock builder.

These are the kinds of questions you should be asking yourself at this point. By now you’ve communicated your vision to your people and decided upon a strategy. In this chapter, you will have thought through how to allocate resources and put the necessary organization and processes around them to make them work. As a final step, ask yourself, Will that structure work in my absence? If you have to be there to keep things going, then they’re not working well enough.

Self-reflection