Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (16 page)

Exercise

Practice making the vision for your Big Goal as simple and attention getting as possible! Find someone to share it with and ask for feedback.

Is it easy to understand? Is it big? Is it compelling? How could you improve it?

Once you’ve shared the business realities and your vision with your team, the third part of executing your strategy is to gain alignment. Alignment is hugely important. You can have the best idea in the world, but it won’t matter if you can’t get people onboard to help you make it happen. If you can’t get alignment, your great idea is not an effective idea.

I’ve had the misfortune of witnessing firsthand how big notions can fail because of a lack of alignment. This is so important that you have to do more than just
think
you have it; you have to
know
you have it. One of the biggest mistakes I’ve made since I started running Yum! Brands was that I didn’t follow through in getting
enough
alignment when it came to a big new concept, multibranding, which we were introducing throughout all our restaurant brands.

Multibranding is what we, in our industry, call restaurant units that encompass more than one brand—a combination KFC and Taco Bell, for example. The potential benefits of this concept were huge for our company. When we were spun off from PepsiCo, we owned three well-established brands, but each stood primarily for one type of food: KFC is about chicken; Pizza Hut is about pizza; Taco Bell is about Mexican food. Because the brands were so specialized, the consumer never gave us much credit when we tried to introduce different categories, like hamburgers at Taco Bell. If someone wants a hamburger, they go to Wendy’s or Burger King. Well, one of our most innovative franchisees, Al Luihn, had the ingenious idea to try adding the Taco Bell brand to his KFC because there
were no Taco Bells near his store. The results were fantastic. With just sign-age alone, no other advertising, sales jumped over 35 percent
because consumers loved the idea of branded variety. If some in a group didn’t want chicken, they could have a taco or burrito instead. Everyone was happy.

We opened more KFC/Taco Bells with similar success, but we couldn’t make it a big national idea because we already had stand-alone Taco Bells and KFCs near each other in most trade areas. Here again, our franchisees led the way with a solution to the problem. Larry Durrett requested the opportunity to add Long John Silver’s seafood to his Taco Bell in Texas. Jackie Trujillo had a similar idea to combine A&W All American Food, which had burgers, hot dogs, and root beer floats, with KFC in Utah. Again, the results were outstanding, so much so that we made the decision to acquire LJS and A&W in order to scale multibranding in a big way in the United States.

Even though our customers loved the idea and sales increases were substantial, I quickly learned that I hadn’t done enough to get inside the minds of my target audience and bring along the franchisees. Those who had tested multibranding were passionate about the idea, but their early-adopter mind-set was very different from that of the vast majority of our franchisees, most of which were dedicated solely to their own brands. They couldn’t imagine sharing their restaurants with another brand. It meant a new menu, new kitchen equipment, different training for the staff. It meant a commitment of time and resources for the owners and managers of these restaurants, and before I made the acquisition, I didn’t do enough to understand where the franchisees were coming from or show them how big the upside could be for them if they made it work.

Gaining true alignment is key to ownership and accountability. On paper, multibranding seemed like the next big thing in our business, and a lot of people were excited about it. In fact, I even went public, saying it was the biggest idea in our industry since the drive-through window. But the people who had to execute the idea, namely the franchisees, by and large, didn’t have their hearts in it. And at the end of the day, we were simply never able to make multibranding work in a big-time way. We are now in the process of selling LJS and A&W so we can focus on our much bigger growth opportunities.

Have you ever presented an idea to a group of people who seemed to like it—at least they didn’t raise any objections—only to find out later on that some of them were never really on board in the first place? You have to remember that simply giving a presentation on your plan is not enough. You have to follow it up by sniffing out those “slow-nos,” the people who don’t really like conflict and may not want to voice their concerns, but nevertheless, down the track, can kill your initiative.

If certain individuals are important in terms of moving your goal forward, you have to ask them directly: Are you on board? Have I satisfied your concerns? This is where knowing your people and how they think comes in. If you’ve got someone in the room who is usually against price increases and a price increase is a part of your plan, then you have to say to that guy, “Hey, I know you hate price increases. What do you think about this?” If you know the finance guy usually quibbles over the numbers but today he’s being unusually quiet, call him out and get him to declare publicly exactly what he thinks.

To sniff out those slow-nos and begin making sure you have alignment, rather than just thinking you have it, start with the following three steps:

1. Share the reality … help people understand the why:
   Don’t just tell people what you want to do, explain why you want to do it. It’s the why that engages people the most.
   
2. Ask for input … show that you’ve listened:
   Ask direct questions based on what you know about your challenge, and then let people know that you heard and appreciate what they had to say. If you use someone’s idea to make your plan better, give her credit. If you disagree with someone’s assessment, tell him why. If you agree with Sally’s concerns but don’t yet have an answer for her, say, “I’m going to spend some more time looking into the issue that Sally brought up, and I’d love her help in doing it.”
   
3. No involvement equals no commitment:
   Get your target audience involved, or they will never be truly committed to the goal. Think about any time someone has asked you to do something but didn’t ask what you thought. How committed were you, really? I can guarantee that the answer is “not very” or “not as much as I could have been.”
   

Getting alignment is very important, and how I gain it is by doing three things: You tell people what, you tell people how, but most important, and it’s something we’re not particularly good at, you have to tell them why. Now, telling them what engages their head. Telling them how engages their hands. And telling them why engages their heart and enables you to make an emotional connection. And it’s through an emotional connection that you get the best alignment.

—
GREG CREED, CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER, TACO BELL

How do you deal with conflict? This is an important question in terms of gaining alignment. How do the people on your team deal with it?

Most people dislike conflict. Too often, they try to avoid it, especially at work, where we sometimes don’t know people all that well but
are expected to be polite to everyone. But the road to real alignment is often paved with conflict.

Patrick Lencioni talked to us at one of our conventions about his bestselling book,
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team
, in which he identified a “fear of conflict” as dysfunction number two. He told us, “Teams that engage in productive conflict know that the only purpose is to produce the best possible solution in the shortest amount of time.”

The first step in dealing with this dysfunction is to acknowledge that you, and many others, tend to avoid conflict as a matter of habit. Then realize that conflict can be productive and make an effort to embrace it. Expect to be challenged on your ideas. Remember to thank people when they do so. Let them know you value these kinds of discussions and appreciate their feedback. And most of all, never allow yourself or others to say, “Let’s take this off-line.” This is a major pet peeve of mine. When you hear that phrase, you know that people are just avoiding conflict and delaying decision making, which will never get you alignment.

I have to admit, I sometimes have difficulty practicing what I preach, which is what happened recently while I was trying to improve our weeknight business at Pizza Hut. Pizza Hut has traditionally been mostly a weekend business, with the majority of our customers choosing us on Friday, Saturday, or Sunday nights. We had introduced some new products to draw in more customers—Tuscani Pastas and Wing-Street chicken wings. Although our customers liked these products, they weren’t coming in more often to have them. Instead, they were simply substituting pasta or wings for pizza when they used us over the weekend, so sales stayed basically the same.

I wanted us to do some promotions to leverage these new product categories and help spur on business during the week: Tuesday Night Pasta and Wednesday Night Wings. I kept suggesting the idea and became very frustrated that, while heads were nodding their agreement during meetings, it never seemed to actually happen. But my frustration was really my own fault. I never said, “Are we going to do this? When is it going to happen?” I never forced alignment or commitment. I never led a big enough discussion about the barriers the
team faced on its path to making it happen.

You want to get to the best decision, the best answers, and in order to get the best answers, you’ve got to ask people what their opinions are. With my personality, for example, if you were to disagree with me, I’m going to probably argue with you. I don’t want that to be a negative. I mean, that’s the way I am, but I don’t want that to stop you from setting forth your viewpoint in whatever way you want to. And when I had staff meetings, I mean, we had to take a break once in a while. Because everybody was yelling. But I think that’s OK. Get the ideas and thoughts out on the table, and then sit together and see if you can make the best choice. Not a consensus decision, they’re the worst ones, but the best decision you can make.

—
LARRY BOSSIDY, AUTHOR OF
EXECUTION
AND FORMER VICE CHAIRMAN OF GE AND CEO OF ALLIED SIGNAL

The team finally got the idea going and made it even better by figuring out how to do it as a value promotion: $9.99 pastas on Tuesdays and $.50 wings on Wednesdays. It took some time to align our franchisees, who were initially reluctant to take media dollars away from our weekend business to support the idea, but now our weeknight business is doing pretty well. In my view, however, it could have been possible to get it going a whole lot sooner if I would have gotten all the issues out on the table, including my own frustration.

As a final word on productive conflict, keep in mind that, as the leader, you do have to make sure you manage the debate. While avoiding conflict is bad, conflict that degenerates into pointless or hurtful argument is even worse for team morale. Let people get into it, but also recognize when some are getting uncomfortable or the level of discord has gotten too high. Bring people’s focus back to the fact that the purpose here is to debate and
solve.
Your willingness to get things out in the open and take on the fight will differentiate you as a leader. It takes courage, but it’s worth it.