Start With Why (12 page)

With trust comes a sense of value—real value, not just value equated with money. Value, by definition, is the transference of trust. You can’t convince someone you have value, just as you can’t convince someone to trust you. You have to earn trust by communicating and demonstrating that you share the same values and beliefs. You have to talk about your WHY and prove it with WHAT you do. Again, a WHY is just a belief, HOWs are the actions we take to realize that belief, and WHATs are the results of those actions. When all three are in balance, trust is built and value is perceived. This is what Bethune was able to do.

There are many talented executives with the ability to manage operations, but great leadership is not based solely on great operational ability. Leading is not the same as being the leader. Being the leader means you hold the highest rank, either by earning it, good fortune or navigating internal politics. Leading, however, means that others willingly follow you—not because they have to, not because they are paid to, but because they want to. Frank Lorenzo, CEO before Bethune, may have been the leader of Continental, but Gordon Bethune knew how to lead the company. Those who lead are able to do so because those who follow trust that the decisions made at the top have the best interest of the group at heart. In turn, those who trust work hard because they feel like they are working for something bigger than themselves.

Prior to Bethune’s arrival, the twentieth floor of the company’s headquarters, the executive floor, was off-limits to most people. The executive suites were locked. Only those with a rank of senior vice president or higher were permitted to visit. Key cards were required to get onto the floor, security cameras were ubiquitous and armed guards roamed the floor to eliminate any doubt that the security was no joke. Clearly, the company suffered from trust issues. One story handed down was that Frank Lorenzo would not even drink a soda on a Continental plane if he didn’t open the can himself. He didn’t trust anyone, so it is no great leap of logic that no one trusted him. It’s hard to lead when those whom you are supposed to be leading are not inclined to follow.

Bethune was very different. He understood that beyond the structure and systems a company is nothing more than a collection of people. “You don’t lie to your own doctor,” he says, “and you can’t lie to your own employees.” Bethune set out to change the culture by giving everyone something they could believe in. And what, specifically, did he give them to believe in that could turn the worst airline in the industry into the best airline in the industry with all the same people and all the same equipment?

In college I had a roommate named Howard Jeruchimowitz. Now an attorney in Chicago, Howard learned from an early age about a very simple human desire. Growing up in the suburbs of New York City, he played outfield on the worst team in the Little League. They lost nearly every game they played—and not by small margins either; they were regularly annihilated. Their coach was a good man and wanted to instill a positive attitude in the young athletes. After one of their more embarrassing losses, the coach pulled the team together and reminded them, “It doesn’t matter who wins or loses, what matters is how you play the game.” It was at this point that young Howard raised his hand and asked, “Then why do we keep score?”

Howard understood from a very young age the very human desire to win. No one likes to lose, and most healthy people live their life to win. The only variation is the score we use. For some it’s money, for others it’s fame or awards. For some it’s power, love, a family or spiritual fulfillment. The metric is relative, but the desire is the same. A billionaire doesn’t need to work. Money becomes a way to keep score—a relative account of how things are going. Even a billionaire who loses millions due to poor decisions can get depressed. Although the money may have zero impact on his lifestyle, no one likes to lose.

The drive to win is not, per se, a bad thing. Problems arise, however, when the metric becomes the only measure of success, when what you achieve is no longer tied to WHY you set out to achieve it in the first place.

Bethune set out to prove to everyone at Continental that if they wanted to win, they could win. And most of the employees stuck around to find out if he was right. There were a few exceptions. One executive who once held up a plane because he was running late was asked to leave, as were thirty-nine more of the top sixty executives who didn’t believe. No matter how experienced they were or what they brought to the table, they were asked to leave if they weren’t team players and weren’t able to adapt to the new culture that Bethune was trying to build. There was no room for those who didn’t believe in the new Continental.

Bethune knew that building a team to go out and win meant more than giving a few rah-rah speeches and bonuses for the top brass if they hit certain revenue targets. He knew that if he wanted to build a real, lasting success, people had to win not for him, not for the shareholders and not even for the customer. For the success to last the employees of Continental had to want to win for themselves.

Everything he talked about was in terms of how it benefited the employees. Instead of telling them to keep the planes clean for customers, he pointed out something more obvious. Every day they came to work on a plane. The passengers left after their flight, but many of the flight attendants had to stay on for at least one more trip. It’s just nicer to come to work when the environment is cleaner.

Bethune also got rid of all the security on the twentieth floor. He instituted an open-door policy and made himself incredibly accessible. It was common for him to show up and sling bags with some of the baggage handlers at the airport. From now on, this was a family and everyone had to work together.

Bethune focused on the things they knew to be important, and to an airline the most important thing is to get the planes running on time. In the early 1990s, before Bethune arrived, Continental had the lowest on-time rating of the nation’s ten largest airlines. So Bethune told employees that each month Continental’s on-time percentage ranked in the top five, every employee would receive a check for $65. When you consider that Continental had 40,000 employees in 1995, every on-time month cost the airline a whopping $2.5 million, But Bethune knew he was getting a deal: being chronically late was costing it $5 million a month in expenses like missed connections and putting passengers up overnight. But most important to Bethune was what the bonus program did for the company culture: it got tens of thousands of employees, including managers, all pointed in the same direction for the first time in years.

Gone were the days when only the brass would enjoy the benefits of success. Everyone got their $65 when the airline did well and no one got it when the airline missed its targets. Bethune even insisted that a separate check be sent out. It wasn’t just added to their salary check. This was different. This was a symbol of winning. And on every check a message reminded them WHY they came to work: “Thank you for helping make Continental one of the best.”

“We measured things the employees could truly control,” Bethune said. “We made the stakes something the employees would win or lose on together, not separately.”

Everything they did made people feel like they were in it together. And they were.

The reason the human race has been so successful is not because we’re the strongest animals—far from it. Size and might alone do not guarantee success. We’ve succeeded as a species because of our ability to form cultures. Cultures are groups of people who come together around a common set of values and beliefs. When we share values and beliefs with others, we form trust. Trust of others allows us to rely on others to help protect our children and ensure our personal survival. The ability to leave the den to hunt or explore with confidence that the community will protect your family and your stuff until you return is one of the most important factors in the survival of an individual and the advancement of our species.

That we trust people with common values and beliefs is not, in itself, a profound assertion. There is a reason we’re not friends with everyone we meet. We’re friends with people who see the world the way we see it, who share our views and our belief set. No matter how good a match someone looks on paper, that doesn’t guarantee a friendship. You can think of it on a macro scale also. The world is filled with different cultures. Being American is not better than being French. They are just different cultures—not better or worse, just different. American culture strongly values ideals of entrepreneurship, independence and self-reliance. We call our WHY—the American Dream. French culture strongly values ideals of unified identity, group reliance and joie de vivre. (Notice that we use the French word to describe the joy-of-life lifestyle. Coincidence? Perhaps.) Some people are good fits in French culture and some people are good fits in American culture. It is not a matter of better or worse, they are just different.

Most people who are born and raised in one culture will, for obvious reasons, end up being a reasonably good fit in that culture, but not always. There are people who grew up in France who never quite felt like they belonged; they were misfits in their own culture. So they moved, maybe to America. Drawn to the feelings they had for America’s WHY, they followed the American Dream and emigrated.

It is always said that America is fueled in large part by immigrants. But it is completely false that all immigrants make productive members of a society. It’s not true that all immigrants have an entrepreneurial spirit—just the ones that are viscerally drawn to America. That’s what a WHY does. When it is clearly understood, it attracts people who believe the same thing. And assuming they are good fits for what Americans believe and how they do things, those immigrants will say of America, “I love it here,” or “I love this country.” This visceral reaction has less to do with America and more to do with them. It’s how they feel about their own opportunity and their own ability to thrive in a culture in which they feel like they belong versus the one they came from.

And within the big WHY that is America, it breaks down even further. Some people are better fits in New York and some are better fits in Minneapolis. One culture is not better or worse than the other, they are just different. Many people dream of moving to New York, for example, attracted to the glamour or the perception of opportunity. They arrive with aspirations of making it big, but they fail to consider whether they will fit into the culture before they make their move. Some make it. But so many don’t. Over and over, I’ve seen people come to New York with big hopes and dreams, but either couldn’t find the job they wanted or they found it but couldn’t take the pressure. They are not dumb or bad or poor workers. They were just bad fits. They either stay in New York and exert more effort than they need to, hating their jobs and their lives, or they move. If they move to a city in which they are better fits—Chicago or San Francisco or somewhere else—they often end up much happier and more successful. New York is not rationally better than other cities, it’s just not right for everyone. Like all cities, it’s only right for those who are good fits.

The same can be said for any place that has a strong culture or recognizable personality. We do better in cultures in which we are good fits. We do better in places that reflect our own values and beliefs. Just as the goal is not to do business with anyone who simply wants what you have, but to do business with people who believe what you believe, so too is it beneficial to live and work in a place where you will naturally thrive because your values and beliefs align with the values and beliefs of that culture.

Now consider what a company is. A company is a culture. A group of people brought together around a common set of values and beliefs. It’s not products or services that bind a company together. It’s not size and might that make a company strong, it’s the culture—the strong sense of beliefs and values that everyone, from the CEO to the receptionist, all share. So the logic follows, the goal is not to hire people who simply have a skill set you need, the goal is to hire people who believe what you believe.

Early in the twentieth century, the English adventurer Ernest Shackleton set out to explore the Antarctic. Roald Amundsen, a Norwegian, had only just become the first explorer ever to reach the South Pole, leaving one remaining conquest: the crossing of the continent via the southernmost tip of the earth.

The land part of the expedition would start at the frigid Weddell Sea, below South America, and travel 1,700 miles across the pole to the Ross Sea, below New Zealand. The cost, Shackleton estimated at the time, would be about $250,000. “The crossing of the south polar continent will be the biggest polar journey ever attempted,” Shackleton told a reporter for the
New York Times
on December 29, 1913. “The unknown fields in the world which are still unconquered are narrowing down, but there still remains this great work.”

On December 5, 1914, Shackleton and a crew of twenty-seven men set out for the Weddell Sea on the
Endurance
, a 350-ton ship that had been constructed with funds from private donors, the British government and the Royal Geographical Society. By then, World War I was raging in Europe, and money was growing more scarce. Donations from English schoolchildren paid for the dog teams.

But the crew of the
Endurance
would never reach the continent of Antarctica.

Just a few days out of South Georgia Island in the southern Atlantic, the ship encountered mile after mile of pack ice, and was soon trapped as winter moved in early and with fury. Ice closed in around the ship “like an almond in a piece of toffee,” a crew member wrote. Shackleton and his crew were stranded in the Antarctic for ten months as the
Endurance
drifted slowly north, until the pressure of the ice floes finally crushed the ship. On November 21, 1915, the crew watched as she sank in the frigid waters of the Weddell Sea.