Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (10 page)

As I mentioned earlier, I considered the turnaround at KFC not so much a business success as a triumph of the human spirit. It wasn’t business principles that really made a difference in this situation; it was people principles. It was the idea that if we trusted each other, we could work together to make something happen that was bigger than our individual capabilities.

Through the whole time period, we accelerated management. Instead of having weekly risk meetings, we had three a day. Instead of having twelve people there, [it was] bring whoever you’ve got to bring who knows the facts who can impart them very quickly. So it kind of changed all the rules right there. It doesn’t matter who you are, where it is, here’s the meeting, you’ve got something to say you come up. … People were working on weekends going through all the credits, all the accounts, all the companies that might be in trouble. … I tell you, it was a beautiful thing to behold.

—
JAMIE DIMON, CEO, JPMORGAN CHASE, ON HOW HIS ORGANIZATION MADE IT THROUGH THE FINANCIAL CRISIS

A couple years ago, I encountered a much more important and profound example of this when I was in Europe visiting some of our restaurants and decided to take a weekend trip to Normandy. I’m a bit of a history buff, and this trip had been on my “bucket list,” so I was excited to see the sites where the major events of D-Day unfolded, which turned the tide of World War II. I’d always believed it was important to build trust with your people and show them you care, but it really hit home for me when my French tour guide told me this story:

One of the many tales of heroism and leadership from that day centered on a place called Pointe-du-Hoc. There, a three-hundred-foot-high cliff juts out into the English Channel where Allied ships gathered to launch an assault. At the top of the cliff, you can look down on both Utah Beach on the left and
Omaha Beach on the right. At the top of that cliff on D-Day, German guns were within range of thousands of troops being deposited on the beaches below.

The companies charged with securing Pointe-du-Hoc suffered heavy casualties as they exited their boats, made their way across the wet sand, and scaled the cliffs. From D Company, for example, only twenty out of seventy men were still in fighting form when they reached the top. But the amazing thing was, those who remained on their feet, despite all the chaos, were still able to focus on their objective. This was true even after many of their leaders had fallen. When captains were killed, lieutenants took over. When lieutenants went down, sergeants took over. When sergeants fell, privates stepped up (and they were the ones who really won the battle). And so it went until they finished what they’d come to do.

Many things did not go as planned that day, but still the ultimate goal was reached: Allied troops got the foothold they needed on the western front. One of the reasons behind this success was General Eisenhower, who was in charge of the operation. Eisenhower allowed his people on the ground to make their own decisions in the heat of battle. He didn’t try to micromanage; he simply trusted his people and his preparations and then waited at headquarters for news.

Before sending troops into battle, however, Eisenhower relayed to his officers a message that must have sunk in at all levels: “This operation is not being planned with any alternatives. This operation is planned as a victory, and that’s the way it’s going to be. We’re going down there, and we’re throwing everything we have into it, and we’re going to make it a success.” The taking of Pointe-du-Hoc is just one example—and there are many, many more—of how that message spread all the way to the men on the front line who threw everything they had into making their part of the operation a success.

By contrast, when Allied forces landed on D-Day, Hitler was asleep. That’s not surprising considering the assault started around five thirty in the morning. What did surprise me—left me floored, in fact—was that, even though reinforcements were urgently needed, two of Hitler’s panzer divisions remained immobilized for hours. You see, they could only be moved if the Fuhrer himself gave the order (he trusted no one else to do
it), and none of his people had the guts to risk waking him up. The leader finally arose on his own around noon, and only then were his troops able to change their position. And to put that timing into perspective, Pointe-du-Hoc was secured by those brave Rangers by 9:00
A.M
.

You’ll force yourself to be a better leader if you let people know they can call you on it when you’re not living up to your position. Most people, however, are used to being held accountable by their leaders, not the other way around. In order to get people’s honest opinion about your business and about your own performance, you’re going to have to ask them for it.

Jamie Dimon, CEO of JPMorgan Chase, told me a story not long ago on this very subject. He was reading customer complaints one day, which he does periodically as a window into how the business is running, when he came across one from an elderly lady about their credit card protection program. Chase’s credit card business was sending out these rebate offers to customers, but as the fine print explained, when you returned the form to get your $9 rebate, you were also signing up for their protection program at an additional cost. This woman hadn’t realized what she was signing up for and she wanted out. Jamie agreed with her, so he asked his assistant to get the credit department on the line, to which she responded, “Oh, we get tons of these.” Jamie asked her why she hadn’t mentioned it before, and she told him she didn’t know that he wanted to hear that kind of thing from her. As Jamie told me,
“I adore my assistant, but I said to her, ‘Come on, if you think something is ridiculous, I want to know.’ And she said to me, ‘Well, that program is ridiculous.’ I called the credit card people and got them to cancel it. As I told them, if you wouldn’t treat your mother that way, don’t do it.” Like all good leaders, Jamie knows when you do right by the customers and people you serve, you always make more money in the end.

Right after becoming president of KFC, as I was wondering how I was going to handle the mess I had stepped into there, I stumbled upon a book that summed up the kind of leader I wanted to be. It was called
Walk the Talk,
and it talked about how leaders need to model the kind of good values they want their organization to live by, including the idea that each and every person in the company matters.

Trust helps you move quickly. It increases your speed. When it’s absent, you can see it—more checks, controls, and processes. That’s bureaucracy.

—
RANDALL STEPHENSON, CHAIRMAN AND CEO, AT&T

How often have you read a book, been affected by something in it, but then put it back on the shelf and largely forgotten about it? I didn’t want that to happen to me. So to make sure it didn’t, I gave
Walk the Talk
to every single person in our restaurant support center as a holiday gift and asked them all to hold me accountable to the principles within it. I did it to send a message: People are my priority. But I also did it for a very practical reason: As CEO, I have a lot of things I need to focus on, like our bottom line, the perception of our organization on Wall Street, and where the company needs to grow and improve. As leaders, it’s easy to miss things because there are so many details we should be focused on. You’ll do yourself a favor if you ask for help. As for me, I take all the help I can get.

Self-reflection

Exercise

Review your People Map from
chapter 1
and ask yourself the questions below. Use different colors, additional paper, etc., as you update and make notes on your People Map to capture your thoughts and actions.

•   Have you left anyone off your People Map? If so, add them!
  
•   Trust is important, so rate the level of trust you have with the people on your People Map. How can you increase trust between you?
  
•   Have you asked someone from every group for input on your Big Goal? Have you used their input or otherwise shown that you’ve listened? Have you recognized their contributions?
  

In this section on mind-set, I really haven’t focused much on the specific goal you set for yourself at the outset of the book. So far it’s been more about how you think and view the world as a leader.

Now is the time to get back to the goal at hand. Think for a moment about what you want to accomplish, and ask yourself: Do you truly believe you can make it happen?

If the answer to that question is not an immediate and emphatic
yes,
then you have some work to do. In this chapter I’ll talk about how to cultivate that can-do spirit in yourself and in those around you. It’s crucial that this happens before you move on to the nuts and bolts of getting things done, because no one has ever accomplished big things by starting with the attitude, “We could give it a try, but it’s probably not going to happen.”