Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (22 page)

In order to be a great leader, one who takes people with him, you really need to be a great communicator. That starts with an ability to gain people’s attention. Be bold and be clear. When I decided that I wanted to make recognition a big part of our company culture, I didn’t give away plaques. Why not? Because a floppy chicken is much more unexpected. It’s also fun. I got proof recently that my floppy chickens did more than just get people’s attention in the moment, that they had a lasting impact. I was presenting my Taking People with You program when a participant, Steve Robles, stood up and said, “I’m floppy chicken number 147”—because I signed and numbered every chicken I gave out—“I was working in Los Angeles, in the inner city, when you came to my restaurant and gave me your floppy chicken award. I went home that night and told my wife, ‘Hey, David patted me on the back
and said I was great. He gave me an award and a handwritten note.’ It was magical, and the experience always stuck with me.”

That was more than a decade ago, but Robles still sounded emotional as he described the experience and how he went on to get his
MBA and open several of his own restaurants, where he has established a recognition culture of his own. Do you think the event would have been as memorable for him if I had walked into his inner-city restaurant all those years ago wearing a fancy business suit and formally handed him a plaque? Probably not. Nor would it have made as much of an impact if he had stood up during the program and said, “I got a recognition award from you years ago.” But “I’m floppy chicken number 147,” that broke through the clutter. The whole room broke into spontaneous applause when he finished telling his story.

At Yum! we’re dedicated to attracting top talents as soon as they graduate from college. But then, so are a lot of companies; we’ve had to find ways to break through the clutter there, too. Among our primary targets, we’ve identified young talent coming out of Northwestern’s Integrated Marketing Communications Masters Program, and we’ve learned that one of their biggest worries is that they’ll get lost in a big company like ours and won’t be able to grow as quickly as they could elsewhere. Our strategy, as a result, has been to demonstrate that we want them to grow with us and that our top leaders are personally committed to that concept. We bring potential hires to Louisville every year, often by group in a company plane to show them that we believe they are the key to our future. We conduct interviews with them during the same day with all our division presidents, chief marketing
officers, and me. We wrap it up with a special dinner that these same leaders attend, where I make a point of talking one-on-one with each person we know we want. We then make an offer within a week to show them that we are
not
a big company mired in bureaucracy (another perception a lot of people have), but that we can act quickly. We’ve heard over and over again that few places go to such trouble for kids just out of college. As a result, we have a tremendous success rate for recruiting Northwestern’s best and brightest.

Going public with what you want to accomplish is a great way to give yourself that extra motivation to see it through. Why? Because if you don’t succeed, everyone will know it. You’ll lose credibility and risk seeming ineffectual. To be a good leader, you have to put pressure on yourself, so if it’s important to you to get something done, take a public stand on it. Going public will also give your people purpose. It will show them what you really care about.

President Kennedy went public with a bold challenge before a joint session of Congress in 1961: “I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to earth.” We all know that it ended up happening, but do you know when? In July of 1969, just a
few months shy of the deadline Kennedy had challenged NASA to meet. That shows you the power of going public with bold and specific goals. It all played out just the way the president proposed, down to the timeline.

The business had just gone through a really significant period of growth. It had doubled in size the previous eighteen months. Unfortunately, it was losing a lot of money because we didn’t have the processes in place to manage that sort of program. I realized after six months that while people’s minds were fully committed to the strategy, in their hearts they weren’t necessarily there because I hadn’t given them the resources and means to do what we needed them to do. So I decided to make a big step in the form of a public commitment about how we were going to grow the business and make the changes we needed to make. And that chance was called People First, inspired by our credo, which is people capability first, satisfy customers, sales and profits will follow. I decided I needed to go public on that, first of all so that I’d have no way of turning back, secondly so that people would trust me and they would come along with me.

—
IVAN SCHOFIELD, GM FRANCE, YUM! RESTAURANTS INTERNATIONAL

Not all of us have Congress or the news media to go public to, but the same tactic works in business too. Going public to your team is just the first step. To really go public, you have to tell everyone who will listen, your boss, your whole company, your whole community if it’s appropriate. Going public to your team will make it more likely that
you
will give it your best effort, but going public
with
your team in front of the whole division, company, or community will hold the feet of the whole group to the fire.

When we first started our company, I sent out a personal letter to all employees to be delivered at the beginning of the new year. The fact that I handwrote it and sent it to their homes during a holiday break was an effort to break through the clutter, but it was
also my way of going public with what I envisioned for our company’s future, not just to employees, but to their entire families. If something is delivered to your home, your wife or husband is probably going to ask what it is. Your kids may even be curious. And they might even ask, a few months down the road, how much progress has been made toward realizing those goals.

This tactic works with personal goals too. Someone in our organization decided she wanted to run a marathon, so the first thing she did was start telling people about it. Then people started asking her how her training was going, which pushed her to train harder so she’d have something good to tell them the next time they asked. And when she finally got to the day of the marathon, she had a bunch of people rooting for her. Putting your goals out there will affect the way you think about them. There will be more urgency, and they will be more top-of-mind, which means you’ll more actively seek out solutions.

When you’re going public with your goals, don’t just tell people what you want to happen—show them. Once you’ve gotten people’s attention, follow up by demonstrating the change you want. Howard Draft’s “6.5 seconds” study makes for a great emotional word picture, but what’s even better is that he had that number printed all over the walls of his headquarters. I talked about how emotional word pictures can help you communicate a vision in
chapter 7
, but they can also help you continue to market it.

I do something similar to reinforce our company’s promise to put people capability first by lining my office walls with pictures. Pretty much every time I recognize someone, a picture is taken, so I have them framed and put up. When my walls started to fill up, I just kept going, expanding onto the ceiling against the wishes of our loss prevention folks who were afraid things would fall on my head or, worse, someone else’s. (You’ll be happy to know, we secured the frames tightly, and so far so good.) The extra effort has definitely had the desired effect. Without a doubt, I have to have one of the most fun offices in the corporate world, and it was actually featured in the
Wall Street Journal.
It screams “people first” and recognition. When family members come to visit our offices, they always walk away amazed and impressed by the fact that “he even has pictures on the
ceiling.”

Alan Mulally told me recently how he knew he had to shock the system when he became CEO of the Ford Motor Company in 2006. The company was losing billions of dollars, and many outsiders were wondering whether it could potentially go under. One of the company’s biggest problems was that, once upon a time, Ford had stood for quality cars, but that wasn’t true anymore, and Mulally didn’t think his people were facing up to that fact. So one of his very first decisions was to take his executive team to the headquarters of
Consumer Reports,
which had recently rated a number of Ford models pretty low on quality. As the director of
Consumer Reports
started going through all the data, and Alan says there was a ton of it, his executives started interrupting to explain their findings away. Alan stopped them. “Let’s write down everything everybody says,” he told them, “because
we’re going to seek to understand before we seek to be understood.” After that all the executives just sat and listened to the
shocking assessment
Consumer Reports
gave them of their product quality. It wasn’t much fun for anyone, but Alan believed it was necessary to shock his people into consciousness and prove to them beyond a shadow of a doubt that they needed to make some changes. And they did. In 2010,
Consumer Reports
rated several Ford models at the top of their list.

To give you just one more example, when Howard Schultz returned to his role as CEO of Starbucks after a hiatus of eight years, he decided that the company needed to get back to the basics of making great coffee and providing a great place to drink it. In his absence, he believed the quality of their coffee had suffered, so, as he told me, “To really demonstrate our comprehensive commitment to quality, we closed every single store and we retrained 110,000 people in one day.” The move cost the company millions of dollars in lost sales but there was no mistaking Schultz’s intentions. He wanted his people focused on making quality coffee, and he meant it.

You do have to be careful when you go public. You should work through the idea first and make sure you really believe it’s possible to achieve before you start making promises. A bold announcement without a plan to get it done doesn’t have a snowball’s chance of succeeding.

One of the things I’ve learned is that one of the hardest things to do is to try to pretend that you did something right when in your heart you know you did something wrong. It’s very disarming when you ask somebody what happened and they say, “I made a mistake.” The conversation is over then, and you move on to, “What are we going to do next time?”

—
STEVE BURKE, CEO OF NBCUNIVERSAL

Sometimes, even with a good idea and a good plan, things just don’t pan out the way you wanted them to. That’s what happened to me
with multibranding. It had been announced as a major strategy for our company. We talked about it in the media, we talked about it to investors, we talked about it to our board of directors, and we talked about it internally to our employees and franchisees. So when it didn’t work, I couldn’t just pretend it never happened. I had to say something.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.

—
TEDDY ROOSEVELT