Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (5 page)

The point is this: These politicians are incredibly accomplished people. Plus, they have top advisers to help them create an image that will appeal to the public, yet they still get tripped up when they try to be something they’re not. Being true to yourself is a daily challenge that’s hard for everyone, no matter what your job title is.

People know and follow the real deal when they see it, those who walk through life on their own terms, who stay true to their beliefs, and who don’t back down. We can all name people like this, and there’s often a pretty broad consensus that such diverse figures as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Muhammad Ali, and Winston Churchill are (or were) all real deals, which goes to show that authenticity can be demonstrated in many different styles.

I call this having “extraordinary authenticity,” which means having the ability to be yourself even in the toughest situations. This requires living with a paradox: To inspire as a leader, you need to know your stuff, but you also need to be able to admit when you don’t know stuff. You need to be both confident and vulnerable at the same time. I struggled with that paradox myself when, in 1996, at the age of forty-three, I was given the job of president of KFC.

It was the first time I’d been the president of anything, and because it had been a career-long goal of mine to one day be in charge of running a business, I was excited to get started. I really wanted to be good at it, to have a positive impact on the brand and the people working with me, and I wanted to turn around what had been a business in decline and have some fun along the way. But like many people with the best of intentions, I learned the hard way what I wasn’t good at. For example, for the life of me, I have never been able to tell a scripted joke.

Toward the end of my first year as president of KFC, I brought all of our company restaurant general managers, more than two thousand of them, to our headquarters in Louisville for a meeting. Business was improving, and I wanted to give us all a chance to celebrate the accomplishment and encourage everyone to continue in the right direction. As we were gearing up for the event, someone in my office came up with the idea of making a video to play on the bus ride from the hotel to our facilities, which would welcome the RGMs to Louisville and tell them what to expect in the days ahead.

The video, with me as narrator, started out with a spoof of the David
Letterman show, complete with an opening monologue and Letterman-style Top Ten List. When you see the video, you can tell I’m reading jokes off a teleprompter, and even though I wasn’t on the bus while it was playing, I’m certain that the only laughs I got were from the laugh track the tech guys included on the tape.

I still cringe for that guy up there in the video when I watch it. He hardly seems like me at all. I’m not a formal guy, but I look so stiff. I’ve never been very good at reading off teleprompters, preferring good old-fashioned paper notes when I have to give a speech. The only part of the video that works is when I threw the script away and asked for some feathery chicken feet I knew we had in storage for special kid events. Then I just had fun being myself as I walked through the KFC headquarters talking to whomever I met along the way about everything from the history of Colonel Sanders to what we do in our research kitchen.

I’ve showed that video at my leadership seminars for years and it always gets a big laugh (at me, of course, not at my jokes). It certainly drives home the point about how easy it is to tell when someone isn’t being themselves. But more important, when I show it, I let everyone know how much I still hate seeing myself bomb like that. Being yourself means letting your weaknesses show too.

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable can be hard enough for most of us, but in the business world, the idea of being yourself is further complicated by the fact that it’s also important to get along with all sorts of people while staying true to yourself. You obviously can’t just say to colleagues or customers, “This is me being myself, take it or leave it.” Not if you want to get ahead. Instead, you have to figure out how to be you in a way that broadens your appeal and impact versus turning people off or unnecessarily clashing with company culture.

The CEO of PepsiCo, Indra Nooyi, really struggled with this when she first came to the United States from India early in her career. “There were many times that I felt like a fish out of water,” she told me, “times that I said to myself, ‘Do I even fit in?’ ”

Rather than completely change herself, Indra found ways to adapt that felt comfortable to her. One such way had to do with her lifelong
love of cricket. No one in this country followed the game, but they did follow baseball, another bat-and-ball sport. So she threw herself into baseball and into the local team, the New York Yankees, reading everything she could on the subject until she could comfortably talk about it. “Once I did that,” she said, “I could then say, ‘I really like this game and I like the Yankees,’ as opposed to pretending.”

Nooyi could have learned about football or taken up golf in order to better fit in with her American colleagues, but that wouldn’t have suited her personality or her interests. At the same time, she didn’t just sit back and say, “I don’t care about any of these silly American pastimes. If the guys around here want to get to know me, they can ask me about myself.” Instead, she sought out ways to connect with people that suited both her and them. “Rather than completely change myself to be something I couldn’t live with, on the margin I tried to adapt and fit in, but in a way that made me comfortable.” It took work to figure out how to be herself in a new environment, but Indra did it in a way that was uniquely and authentically her.

MIND-SET CHECK

Refer to the tool for choosing powerful versus limiting mind-sets on page 28. In each one of the chapters in this section, you will be asked to contemplate your mind-set in relation to the topic at hand. Ask yourself: Is my mind-set helping me be a better leader and get big things done? Or is it getting in the way of my success? Is there a more powerful way of thinking that I could adopt?

“There is always room to grow and improve
and be a better me.”

versus

“I don’t need to change. I’m good enough just as I am.”

Part of what’s hard about being ourselves is we don’t always know exactly who we are, especially early in our careers. It takes time and experience to develop the confidence and knowledge you need to do this successfully.

Early in my career, I worked with a lot of accomplished people with MBAs from Ivy League schools, whereas I had only a bachelor’s degree, and it wasn’t even in business; it was in journalism from the University of Missouri. I was different and I knew it, but it took a while before I had the confidence to admit it. As silly as it may seem, for years when conversation turned toward the subject of where people had earned their MBAs, I’d excuse myself to go to the bathroom so I wouldn’t have to answer the question.

Thankfully, I eventually realized that hiding wasn’t going to get me what I wanted. Maybe I didn’t have an MBA, but I was pretty good at seeking out the knowledge I needed to move ahead. When I was head of marketing at Pepsi-Cola Company, I went to the CEO, Craig Weatherup, and asked him to make me chief operating officer even though, up until that point in my career, I’d had absolutely no operating experience of any kind. I knew, however, that I didn’t want to be a marketing guy my whole career and that if I wanted broader responsibilities, I needed broader experience. Craig and I got along pretty well, but I clearly wasn’t the obvious choice, so I made him a deal: Test me out in the position, and if I failed, he
could bump me back down to marketing, even fire me, whatever he thought was best. So he gave me a shot and neither one of us was ever sorry.

I had a lot of challenges getting comfortable in my own skin. When we went public, I was a terrible public speaker … so I certainly had to learn about that. When we started the business, I had never led anybody, but I had been on a lot of sports teams … I just sort of felt like, Well geez, if I can just make everybody feel like we’re on the same team, we’ll do well.

—
BOB WALTER, CEO, CARDINAL HEALTH

Self-awareness is a concept that will come up again and again throughout this book because you’ll never get better at what you do without it. It’s crucial for every great leader to know who they are and where they’ve been. The following exercise is an invitation to take a hard look at your past and think about the events that have most deeply shaped you, your values, and your goals. I’ve included my own lifeline as an example, and the events I mentioned above are included on it. I still look at and add to it from time to time to remind me of where I’ve been, what I’ve learned, and what lessons have not come easily to me. Knowledge doesn’t spring out of nowhere, and this exercise will give you a better picture of who and what have helped you learn.

To be a better you, you need to understand who you are and how you got where you are today. Use this exercise as a chance to think about these things and get to know yourself a little better. Take some time with this, and consider including on your lifeline both personal and career events that have affected you in some way.

Directions

1. When plotting your lifeline, consider key events in your life, such as graduations, marriage, deaths, job chances, etc., as well as other experiences: victories you’ve achieved, crises you’ve endured, fears you’ve overcome, stands you’ve taken, and lessons you’ve learned.
   
2. Place points above and below the horizontal line to correspond with the intensity of emotions that accompanied each event or experience.
   
3. Once you feel satisfied that you’ve captured the events and experiences that have shaped you, draw a line connecting the dots. Feel free to add notes, draw pictures, or otherwise embellish your lifeline … anything that makes it feel more personal.
   

I started out in the advertising business, and I did pretty well. In fact, at the tender age of twenty-seven, I was put in charge of one of the agency’s biggest accounts, Frito-Lay.

Now, my boss at the time thought I was a little rough around the edges. Plus, I was a good ten years younger than the clients I was dealing with. He thought I needed a little polish, so he sent me to an image consultant in Dallas by the name of Jack Byrum. Jack was a legend who had worked with numerous executives and celebrities, including
Tonight Show
host Johnny Carson.

Jack taught me a lot of great things about self-awareness and authenticity. But more important, he taught me to always be thinking about how I could improve on these fronts. Once you’ve gotten to know yourself, then what?

To help take my self-awareness to the next level and help me focus on where I wanted to go next, Jack taught me a very simple exercise called the three-by-five exercise. He asked me to write down on a three-by-five-inch index card short answers to two very simple questions:

What am I today?

How can I be even better tomorrow?

I still do this every year on New Year’s Day. What better time to take stock of where you are and where you want to be next year? For example, this past New Year’s I answered the questions this way: