Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (26 page)

Years ago I was watching an AFC championship game between the Cleveland Browns and the Denver Broncos. It was an incredibly cold day made worse by wind and snow, a really difficult atmosphere in which to keep one’s spirits up. With just five minutes left on the clock and the Broncos behind by a touchdown, they got the ball on their own two-yard line. It looked as though they were sure to lose. But then the team, led by Hall of Fame quarterback John Elway, started moving the ball steadily across the field, play by play, first down after first down. They got nine first downs in all before finally scoring a touchdown with just thirty-seven seconds left in regulation play. It was an incredible ninety-eight-yard drive to tie the score, and Denver went on to win the game in overtime.

I never wanted to see a fellow score a basket that didn’t thank somebody. Now don’t run over and shake his hand or the other team will go down and score. But you give him a wink, a nod, a point or something. I had a player one time say, “Well, what if he’s not looking?” I said, “He’s looking. And if not, I will be.”

—
JOHN WOODEN, HALL OF FAME BASKETBALL COACH, UCLA

It was an amazing thing to watch, but what caught my attention the most was the way the whole team celebrated each and every one of those first downs. The guys on the sidelines were clapping and cheering the whole way down the field. Research has shown just how important this is too: A recent study of soccer players, for example, found that the team that celebrated goals with the most enthusiasm typically won the game.

It’s a great lesson for any leader: Don’t
wait for the win or until you cross the finish line. If you just drill people about performance without pausing to celebrate the small victories, you’ll wear people out. It’s your job as leader to determine where your own first downs will be. If your sales figures were down 4 percent last quarter and this quarter they are down just 3 percent, well, you’re not in the plus column yet, but it’s an achievement worth paying attention to. Realize and communicate that you’re not satisfied yet and you don’t want to stay where you are, but take some time to congratulate people for moving things forward. That’s progress, and progress is always worth celebrating. Now, I realize that some believe if you tell people “good job,” you take the pressure off and they won’t work as hard. If that’s the case, I
would contend that the real problem is you have the wrong people working for you.

Self-reflection:

Exercise

Take some time to think through
all
the things that show you’re making progress toward your Big Goal. What are the numerical benchmarks of success for your particular project?

Then look back at
chapter 10
in which we talked about culture. What are the “soft” things that create the kind of work environment that will breed the kind of success you want? How well are you and your team members doing in that department?

As a leader, how much time/effort do you spend focusing on and/or talking about:

•   Hard Stuff:  ____
  
•   Soft Stuff:  ____
  

100 percent

This idea of your work never being over is true for your goal, and it’s true for your business overall. As one of my board members, Massimo Ferragamo, said to me once, “If someone says that the changes are over, they are over. I personally believe that every arrival point is a departing point, and you have to always think that way.”

Massimo’s business is a family business, started by his father, so he’s been in a unique position to witness just how true this is over the long term. When he started working in the United States, trying to make his Italian shoe brand popular in a new market, there was really just one major competitor in the ladies’ shoe market and one in the men’s shoe market. So his team studied every detail of those competitors, from pricing to positioning to incentives given to salespeople. He says, “We went after [those competitors] like they were our target. And the success story was that we beat them both by looking at exactly what they were doing and trying to do it a little bit better.”

Massimo remembers it as a continual process of improvement to reach that goal, and they never stopped wondering how they could get another extra edge. But now other companies are targeting his and trying to evolve in the same way that they did. Less than a decade ago, no one was selling as many shoes in the United States as Ferragamo, but now the competition has just ballooned. “From being a company that was the leader out of maybe ten brands, today we have big fights to keep our position out of seventy or eighty brands. So the landscape has
changed completely, and we are back in a position that we have to think the same way we were thinking twenty years ago about getting back that number-one spot.”

Our U.S. Pizza Hut general manager, Brian Niccol, recently visited Google in order to gain some insights into how to improve Pizza Hut’s e-commerce business. Brian returned with an idea that affected not just that goal, but his overall business perspective. He had noticed that on the Google search engine, staff tells users when they are in beta, so he asked about it. Jim Lecinski, a managing director at Google, replied that they are “always in beta” and that they advertise this fact to users as a promise to be constantly improving. The message also serves as a reminder to employees that change is their norm.

It’s a powerful way to think about business. Niccol returned home and talked to his team about having an “always in beta” mind-set. He says it has really “pushed all to be forward-thinking and focused on making history versus talking about history.”

In order to drive through the change you want, you’re going to have to keep your Big Goal front and center in your own mind and in the minds of your target audience. The three best ways to keep the focus are through persistence, constant communication, and by playing like you’re behind, even when you’re not.

PERSISTENCE, PERSISTENCE, PERSISTENCE
: In business there can be a lot of diversions and a lot of white noise. It’s your job to figure out how to keep the focus on what really matters and not get sidetracked. I’ve told my board of directors that the moment I stop talking about customer mania, they need to ask for my resignation. We still have a lot of progress to make in terms of satisfying our customers, and if I take my eye off the ball, I know that will signal to the rest of the organization that they can too. And then we’ll never get there. As a matter of fact, the focus of my 2011 New Year’s message was that we must make
operational excellence our number-one business initiative, and I revised all of our major Yum! documents, including our How We Win Together principles, to give it even more emphasis. And even more important, we are revamping our priorities and totally
committed to holding people accountable for making significant progress.

I talked before about how great companies have process and discipline around what really matters, around keeping the slots working in Vegas, for example. You’ve got to have process and discipline too, in terms of applying your own resources—your time, your energy, your know-how—toward getting done what you set out to do.

RELENTLESS COMMUNICATION
: Help keep the focus on your goal by never stopping communication with your people. The advertising concept
effective reach
refers to the fact that people don’t even begin to be affected by your message until they’ve heard it at least four times. The same holds true for the leader’s message. You have to keep talking about what you want to accomplish, why you want to accomplish it, and how you plan to do it.

I once heard a story about the CEO of Brown & Williamson who was so in love with a new print campaign that the agency had the engraving of the ads framed to hang on his wall. Every day he’d look at these ads while he was in his office until, after some time had passed, he decided it was time to call up his account director. “You know, I think we need a new campaign,” he said to him. “This one is wearing out.” The account director replied, “What do you mean it’s wearing out? Those ads haven’t even run yet. We gave you the engravings, but the ads don’t hit the magazines until next week.”

This is just what leadership is like. We forget how close we are to the thing we’re working on, when in truth we are much more focused on it than anyone else around us. That means that even if you think the message you’re trying to push through is old news by now, it probably isn’t to anyone but you.

When I teach my Taking People with You program, I don’t assume that everyone in the room has absorbed it all by the end of our three days together. I follow up to make sure the message is getting through and
that people don’t return to their offices and just continue with business as usual. I get progress reports on how things are going with their Big Goals after forty days. I send them regular updates in return on how I’ve been using the lessons of the program to improve my own performance. I do webinars to connect with participants, and I write a regular blog that everyone in the company can read, no matter where they are around the world. As an aside, when I wrote the blog about the birth of my new granddaughter, Audrey Louise Butler, I got more responses by far than on anything else I’ve ever written. Things like this help make a big company small, and they keep the communication
going. You have to figure out ways to keep those channels open between you and your own people.

First, everywhere you go in the company, you’ll see something on “performance with purpose.” Second, every speech I give, I’ll relate back to “performance with purpose” in some shape or form. And every one of the senior executives in the company have also learned to talk about “performance with purpose.” … And then, what we do is every year when we publish the annual report, the consultants always have a new idea for the cover. I told them, “Don’t bother. As long as I’m CEO, it’s ‘performance with purpose.’” So the first year was “Performance with Purpose”; second year was “Performance with Purpose … The Journey Continues”; third year was “We Are Performance with Purpose.” So it doesn’t matter what they suggest, as long as it has the words “performance with purpose.”

—
INDRA NOOYI, CEO OF PEPSICO

PLAY AS THOUGH YOU’RE BEHIND
: You should be going to work every day believing that you’ll succeed, but playing as though you’re behind in the score. That’s the attitude that will give you the best chance at success. Complacency is one of the biggest killers of any initiative, but if you have it in the back of your mind that your plan
could all fall apart at any moment, then that will keep you sharp. You’ll keep looking to identify the unfinished business, keep figuring out what’s not working as well as it could and make changes, and keep focused on what’s changing in the marketplace that might affect your outcome.

It’s actually more fun to be an upstart, to be someone people don’t expect to be good, and to fight to make it to the major leagues or the Super Bowl. But if you’re actually one of the leaders, you have more people kind of attacking you. You can’t be arrogant and say, “Well, we’re the leader.” You have to say to people, “OK, now we’re in the major leagues and we want to get to the playoffs, the Super Bowl, every single year.” And our discipline has to be, we’re going to be faster, tougher, leaner, at a much more disciplined and deeper level, because a lot of people are coming up behind us. When I talk about the competition, I always remind our people they are there and they’re coming. And so don’t spend a lot of time looking at how well you did in the last game. You should spend a lot of time thinking that they’re coming.

—
JAMIE DIMON, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, JPMORGAN CHASE

Our China CEO, Sam Su, does this better than any leader I’ve seen. No matter how much success we’ve achieved, he and his team constantly challenge one another to raise their game and not settle for the status quo. The result is stellar performance year after year.

The opposite reminds me of the 1948 election, in which Truman won out over Dewey even though the odds against him going in seemed all but hopeless. It wasn’t just that Truman outplayed Dewey; it was that, toward the end, Dewey ran his campaign as if it were already in the bag. Both men went on a train tour of the country to connect with voters, but as Truman biographer David McCullough described, “Dewey would travel nowhere near so far, and at a much more leisurely pace. And he would deliver far fewer speeches.” In fact, Dewey articulated his point of view to fellow Republican politicians whom he met along the campaign trail—“When you’re
leading, don’t talk,” he’d say. Since there is no mention of a President Dewey in any American history textbook, we all know how well that strategy worked out for him. If he had ignored the hype about his inevitable win and
campaigned like the one behind in the polls with ground to make up, things just might have been different for him.