“We’d be a great company right now if it weren’t for one thing. Our people.”
The Chief Operating Officer of a major telecom said this to me over lunch back when I was in corporate communications. I was charged with writing a speech for him to deliver at the annual employee summit. The goal, in his words, was “to motivate the troops. And finally get them off their duffs.”
I found it hard to envision how this might be achieved given his disdain for the people he presumed to lead. I did my best, but his hectoring efforts to inspire fell flat. “The troops” sat inertly through his address, and failed to ask a single question.
While TB, as I’ll call him, may not have roused his intended audience, he had a big impact on me, igniting my interest in what makes leaders effective— or not. Within a year, I was writing my first book on the subject.
TB wasn’t a bad guy. He knew the business cold, was super smart, and could be charming and quite funny. But his facetious framing did not disguise the contempt he felt for the company’s employees. He routinely referred to them as “the bureaucrats.” As if he, an executive in what was then a highly-regulated industry, was by contrast a hard-charging entrepreneur.
I was reminded of this experience by several responses to my newsletter last week about allegedly bold leaders who seek to totally remake their organizations upon taking power. Such leaders routinely discount the skills and experience of their people, viewing them as a problem rather than as a resource and potential partner in transformation.
My friend and colleague Nancy DeViney, a former executive at IBM, noted that her old boss Lou Gerstner had restored the company to greatness and profitability by not declaring a “whole new day,” but rather building on the strengths of those he was charged with leading.
Gerstner’s ascendancy could have provided him with a perfect excuse for announcing, “I’m here to change everything.” Especially given that he’d been hired as IBM’s first outsider CEO at a time when the company was losing billions.
Desperate times might have seemed to call for desperate measures, as they’re still often purported to do. But instead, Gerstner demonstrated his maturity and respect for IBMers by looking inside the company for teams to help lead the transformation, rather than bringing outsiders. Which is what leaders hired to shake things up routinely do.
Gerstner also made clear that he viewed IBM’s distinctive culture as a resource to be engaged rather than as a liability to be addressed. He saw his task as understanding how the company’s strong identity could support a strategic shift— an effort that required humility on his part, as well as a whole lot of listening. It was an approach his successor, Sam Palmisano, continued.
Whole-new-day leaders, by contrast, tend to fixate on strategy rather than culture, no doubt because strategy seems like something they can both define and control. Yet as Gerstner noted, strategy is inadequate for bringing a company back from the brink. “You don’t ‘win’ with strategy, since strategy can be imitated, while culture cannot.”
That’s because culture is embedded in the values, practices, and self-perception of the people who comprise the organization. Contrary to my old boss TB’s assumption, most people want to be part of something inspiring and successful. They don’t need to be hounded to “get off their duffs.” They just need to be heeded, and shown that their contributions are valued by those who lead them.
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