Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (24 page)

Indra knew she had to make very certain she was doing the right thing, so over her holiday break, she studied the problem from every angle. In fact, the word
studied
hardly explains what she did. In her own words:

I bought 10 books on ERP, IT, data warehouse, all of this stuff, and read, cover to cover, these textbooks. I had some professors on call who were all available to me through the Christmas and New Year’s holidays every time I needed clarification or had questions to be answered. IBM had done an architecture study for us and for each of the studies, the binder was inches thick. The IT guys dropped them off in my office, thinking I wouldn’t read them. I read both binders cover to cover and made notes on as many pages as I could just to send the message, “Guys, I’m going to read this stuff because I’m not going to commit $1 billion of the company’s money unless I know what we’re committing it to.” So I overpowered [the skeptics] through knowledge and competence, and I concluded after that that we had no choice but to replace the IT systems. And I never regret that decision I made. The team doesn’t regret it
either.

Be wary of anyone who says they’re absolutely sure of the outcome before they’ve even gotten a chance to work it through (and that includes you). All any of us can do is make the right call in the moment with as much information as we can gather. If you’ve done this step
right by listening to and addressing all the concerns and gaining any additional know-how required to answer the skeptics, then it’s time to move ahead with intentionality. Your plan can be further tweaked along the way if necessary, but no one will ever really know the outcome until you’ve all given it your best shot.

Anything can be done. The issue is never that you can’t do it. It’s how much does it cost, how long is it going to take, and what are the resources? It’s what do you have to stop to get it done? I mean, you can do anything.

—
TOM RYAN, RETIRED CHAIRMAN AND CEO OF CVS/CAREMARK

Once a decision has been made about which objections to incorporate into your plan and how, then you should expect your team, even the naysayers, to put their opinions aside and work together with full effort and attention. Until you get some data from the marketplace that tells you it’s time to rethink things, it should be full steam ahead for everyone.

If that’s not what happens, then it may be time to get rid of those whom advertising genius David Ogilvy called “sad dogs who spread gloom.” Positive energy will lift your team members up; negative energy will bring them down. I once heard a great analogy for this kind of situation: If a flashlight has one bad battery, it ruins the effectiveness of the entire instrument. You have to replace that bad battery before the other batteries can do their job. By the same token, if someone continues to be negative about your initiative in a way that is bringing down your team, he or she needs to work someplace else.

Whenever I go into a new leadership situation, I always look for the person that everybody wants fired and then I fire him. I’ve found that the best way to show people that things are going to be different is to get rid of the person who is difficult to be around, who is not displaying the values of the company, and who is not the kind of person you
are looking for in terms of leadership. Doing so really gets people’s attention.

You owe it to the organization to always listen to those people and to their point of view, because guess what? They may be right. So you can’t be dismissive of that. But what I’ve found is that there tends to be a pattern. The naysayers tend to be the naysayers, and pretty soon you say to yourself as you’re coming up with a new initiative, “I know Ted’s not going to like this.” You can debate it and have an open and clear discussion, but at the end of the day, a decision has to be made. And when you finally make a decision, you say to the naysayers, “The train’s getting ready to leave the station and I really hope you’re on it.” Now what’s unsaid is, if they’re not on it, they might be happier somewhere else.

—
DAVID GRISSOM, CHAIRMAN, MAYFAIR CAPITAL, AND CHAIRMAN, GLENVIEW TRUST

There was this guy in our legal department at Yum! who was brilliant, but he didn’t buy into our recognition culture; he wouldn’t even pretend to participate. One time, when our roving recognition band started playing to honor someone receiving an award, he came out of his office and yelled at everyone to pipe down because he was trying to work. I couldn’t imagine anything that would undermine the spirit of giving and receiving recognition more than that. He had to go. Everyone else was working hard to create a positive environment where people knew they were appreciated and wanted to come to work every day. I just couldn’t have someone around who was actively working against that.

When I became president of KFC, I was also looking for that person to fire, and it didn’t take me long to find him. There was a CFO who was so focused on making the profit plan, he proposed cost cuts at every opportunity, and people were sick of it. Every meeting, he’d come in with another cost-cutting idea—we should remove all the color from
our packaging or get rid of the bacon in our green beans—and then he’d tell everyone exactly how much money that one cut would save us. Well, collectively, those cuts were undercutting our efforts to please our customers and grow our business.

Wayne Calloway, the late chairman of PepsiCo, came to town shortly after I started the job to check on our progress. Over dinner, I told him about this guy whom I really wanted to fire. “He’s just so negative,” I told Wayne, “always looking for ways to cut costs rather than build value. I just can’t stand that about him.”

Wayne asked me, “Does he know how you feel?” “No, but I want to fire him anyway,” I replied, only half jokingly.

Wayne, who was a very wise man, said, “Well, before you do that, why don’t you give him a chance to change. I know John. He’s ambitious. I think he’ll respond to some direct feedback.” I was sure Wayne was wrong, but I calmed myself down and decided to do as he suggested. First thing the next morning, I marched into the CFO’s office and told him I had a problem with his attitude, giving him several specific examples of what I meant. And then I said, “If you’re going to stay here, I want you to wake up every morning and look in the mirror and say to yourself, as if you have it stamped on your forehead, ‘I am Mr. Growth.’ I want you focused on growing this company so we don’t have to cut back on what we’re offering our customers.”

You know what? He did it. He made a complete transformation from Mr. Cynic to Mr. Growth. He really got behind our recognition program, for example, and even developed a method to expand it so it worked better, not just in management, but at the store level. Besides that, he and I became really good friends, which we are to this day. I still believe in replacing people who are getting in the way of progress, but you need to be a coach first, before you can make the right call. Otherwise, you might find that you’ve made a huge mistake.

Self-reflection

Exercises

Review your People Map and answer the following questions:

•   Who will say it can’t be done?
  
•   What are their biggest concerns?
  
•   Are they valid?
  
•   If so, how have you incorporated their concerns?
  
•   How can you either motivate them or move them out if necessary?
  

Recognizing the behaviors you want and those you don’t is essential to keeping your people on track toward achieving your Big Goal. It’s important to do this formally, with things like performance reviews and raises, but even informal recognition can have a big impact. I recently heard a great example of this while talking with the CEO of Ford Motor Company, Alan Mulally, who has presided over what many consider a miraculous turnaround. When he took the position in 2006, profits were in free fall, and by the end of that year, the company had lost a total of $17 billion. Just a few years later, however, Ford was telling a dramatically different story: In the first quarter of 2010, it made $2.1 billion, the best quarterly performance in more than six years.

Obviously a lot of things had to happen for such a remarkable turnaround to take place, but Mulally described to me what he believed to be the turning point. Soon after he took the job, he started bringing all the functional leaders and line managers from around the world together to review the status of all current projects, more than three hundred of them in all. Protocol was to display the status of each project on a color-coded chart: Red stood for serious problems, yellow meant progress was slow, and green meant everything was on track. But something curious was happening. For the first six weeks he was there, every single chart was green. Mulally told me, “I said to the team, I’m getting ready to announce a $17 billion loss and all our projects are green. Is anything not going well?”

I think that recognizing the wrong is equally important. Obviously to recognize the right is easy and good and everyone cheers. But sometimes it’s also great to acknowledge that there was a defeat, something that went wrong, something that we planned incorrectly. And if it’s used to your advantage for the next step, I think it can be very, very valid in the same way. Now if in a company there are too many wrongs too often, then it’s another kind of issue. But really I think that in going forward, you always have to try things. Some are going to go wrong, and it’s good to acknowledge them and find out why.

—
MASSIMO FERRAGAMO, CHAIRMAN, FERRAGAMO USA

Two weeks later Mark Field, leader of their Americas group, showed up with a chart that was bright red, the only one in the room. Something had gone wrong with the Edge car in Canada, a mechanical problem that had caused him to delay the scheduled release for a week or two so they could fix it. Mulally described the room as “deathly quiet” after that, and everyone turned toward him for a response. He told me, “I knew they were all wondering, ‘What’s going to happen now? Is it really safe to say how it’s going?’ So I said to Mark, ‘This is fabulous visibility,’ and then everyone in the room started to chip in with ideas on how we could solve the problem. The exchange took only about twelve seconds. Then I started to clap and said, ‘This is the kind of teamwork we need.’”

Things started to change after that. At the status meeting the following week, a few more red charts showed up. And the week after that, there were some reds and some yellows. The third week, Mulally says, “Three hundred sixty charts all of a sudden looked like a rainbow. I said to myself, oh my God, no wonder we lost $17 billion. On the other hand, for the first time, I really knew deep down I would be able to turn the company around because we were finally acknowledging reality.” And to think it all started with one small moment when Mulally chose to recognize those who were doing the right things.

In order to ensure that you are recognizing the right things in your business, you’re going to need a system whereby you can track progress and identify when things are going well and when they aren’t. People are moved by what is truly measured. What you choose to measure is a signal to your people as to what you care about and what they need to do to get ahead in your organization.

When I talk about measurement, people often think only of bottom line results: How much money has someone made the company this year? How much have they been able to cut costs in their department? These things are important, but you also have to track the behaviors that
drive
those results. For example, David Cote, CEO of Honeywell International, told me recently that they wanted their people to be thinking more about teaming, so they started measuring group performance and giving out team awards in addition to individual achievements.

In our company, we measure both the hard and the soft things, because we know that both sides are important. Our CEO of Taco Bell, Greg Creed, calls this being “smart with heart.” The “smart” is the hard stuff like net number of new units, same-store sales, return on invested capital, earnings per share—the things we talk to Wall Street about. And the “heart” is the soft, which for us means 360-degree feedback, whether people are living up to our How We Win Together cultural principles, employee engagement surveys, leadership capability assessments, and so on. It’s the combination of these two things that leads to sustainable results.

I learned a great example of the importance of measurement in areas outside of business recently when our company signed up for a health and wellness plan called Kinetix. The program’s founder, Jamie Brunner, stresses the critical importance of journaling your eating and exercising behaviors as you lose weight and improve your health. “In the fitness world, the journal tracks our behavior and reveals our results,” Jamie told me. “It allows us to troubleshoot when results are weak and replicate when results are strong.” He says the journal is so important
that he and his team can accurately predict clients’ results before they even step on a scale, simply by looking at their journals. It’s a near-perfect measure of their progress.