Personalize the Story

Senior leaders who take the time to personalize the transformation story unlock significantly more energy than those who dutifully present the content that their working team has prepared for them. In practice this means that senior leaders need to think carefully about such questions as: “How does this relate to me and my role?”; “Why does it matter to me personally?”; “What hopes and fears do I personally have about my and our ability to pull this off successfully?” Then they need to share the answers with others. If the interactive story cascade that we described in Chapter 5 is used as part of the change program, this type of reflection and sharing is built into the process.

Effective leaders often talk about pivotal experiences and formative influences in their own lives to underline their determination and demonstrate that obstacles can be overcome. Indra Nooyi, the former CEO of PepsiCo, is open about the struggles she had after setting off from India with a scholarship and not much else: “I had the immigrant feeling arriving in the U.S…. I had to do an extra-good job; if it didn’t work out, where was I going to go?”³ She used the story as a rallying cry to get her colleagues to work harder in the battle of the brands in the hope of one day getting to the very top.

Andy Grove, a former CEO of Intel, the world’s largest maker of semi-conductor chips, conveyed the importance of courage and decisiveness by describing his escape from Hungary during the Russian occupation and his determination to make a new life in the United States. John Chambers, former CEO of Cisco, describes growing up with a learning disability to illustrate “how we can overcome anything that comes our way, and why it is so important to treat others as you would want to be treated.”⁴ David Roberts alluded to lessons from his hero Monty Roberts (the real-life horse whisperer) when he talked about the transformation he led as CEO of Personal Financial Services at Barclays Bank.

David Novak, the former CEO of Yum! Brands, which owns franchises including KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, neatly summarized how a personal approach helps employees feel connected to the collective effort: “They see their CEO and it makes a big company small.” He points out that when employees get knowledge directly from their senior leader, they “care more about the company and [they’re] more committed.”⁵

Openly Engage Others

Once the senior leader has crafted a clear transformation story, success comes from seizing every opportunity to talk about it with employees, explain what it means, draw out its relevance to different parts of the business, and prompt others to find a personal meaning of their own.

Leaders of successful change invest huge personal effort in taking their story out into the organization. While he was the CEO at IBM, Lou Gerstner flew more than a million miles to meet thousands of customers, employees, and business partners.⁶ He famously had a sign in his office that declared, “A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world,” to act as a constant reminder of the importance of engaging with people inside and outside the organization.⁷ As Intuit former CEO Steve Bennett explains, “A CEO can’t make a series of changes by sending out e-mails. Change management has to happen face to face. It’s a big commitment of time.”⁸ Bennett saw this approach pay off in his turnaround of Intuit from an underperforming tech start-up into a producer with double-digit revenues and four times the earnings it had when he took the helm. When Corrado Passera became CEO of Banca Intesa, he traveled the length and breadth of Italy to start spreading the change story to the bank’s 60,000 employees: “It is a long process, but you have to put your face in front of the people if you want them to follow you.”⁹

Sometimes leaders need to work especially hard to engage challenging stakeholder groups. Om Prakash Bhatt, former chairman of State Bank of India, invested a considerable amount of his time with trade unions: “I spent four days with 30 leaders from across the country … [even though] some of my best advisers at the bank warned that the leaders weren’t trustworthy and could be disruptive … what hooked them was not only the quality of the discussions and the revelations but that the chairman was willing to spend so much time with them, eating and drinking, even singing and dancing.”¹⁰

When engaging employees, it’s important for senior leaders to also keep in mind the lessons we shared in Chapter 6 regarding two-way communications: use simple and memorable language, balance “telling” and “asking,” and use multiple channels—both in person and electronic.

Spotlight Success

As the change program progresses, an engaging way to reinforce the story is to spotlight where success is being achieved. This helps crystallize what the change means and gives people confidence that change really is happening. And when it comes personally from the senior leader, it’s eminently more meaningful than a generic corporate communication.

Former Infosys chairman N. R. Narayana Murthy describes how he personally invited high-performing teams to make presentations to employees across the company “to show other people that we value such behavior.”¹¹ Harry M. Jansen Kraemer Jr., former chairman and CEO of healthcare company Baxter International, forwarded his entire 55,000-strong workforce an e-mail from a woman thanking them for creating a product that had extended her father’s life by 15 years. He told his employees, “This is what we do,” and emphasized that changes being made would enable them to do more of it. Daniel R. DiMicco, former CEO of Nucor, one of the largest steel producers in the United States, personally shared the story of a shipping department supervisor to illustrate the importance of taking initiative. The supervisor asked for US$2,000 to study sister plants in other regions, and duly returned with ideas to save more than US$150,000 a year in his area alone. At Brazilian bank Itaú Unibanco, the chairman and top team take part in an awards night to acknowledge and celebrate people’s efforts in driving desired changes. The event is followed up with extensive communications throughout the bank. When leaders spotlight successes in these ways, they are sending a strong message in line with Tom Peters’ adage, “Celebrate what you’d like to see more of.”

As a final thought, bear in mind that “success” doesn’t necessarily mean getting things right. Failure—for the right reasons—can be equally worth celebrating when it provides valuable lessons for your organization. That’s what happens at Google, as former CEO Eric Schmidt explains: “We celebrate our failures. This is a company where it’s absolutely okay to try something that’s very hard, have it not be successful, and take the learning from that.”¹²

Undergo Personal Change

Earlier in the book, we discussed people’s tendency to think they are better at certain things than they really are (see our discussion of the optimism bias in Chapter 3 and the self-serving bias in Chapter 6). Research shows that this phenomenon becomes more pronounced at the top of an organization. Kevin Roberts, former CEO of global advertising agency Saatchi and Saatchi, notes, “The further up the company you go the stupider you become … you start believing your own stuff.”¹⁴

His observation is backed by research. Take, for example, Jimmy Cayne, former CEO of Bear Stearns. On his last day, when leaving the ailing bank, he claimed there wasn’t a dry eye in the house, and that heartbroken bankers sent him away with a standing ovation. According to research by author James Cohen in his book House of Cards, Cayne was so widely disliked that if he had stayed on for another year, there would have been a mass exodus of staff.

On reading Cayne’s story, business school professor Sebastien Brion ran a series of tests to see how much leaders overestimate their subordinates’ good opinion of them. The conclusion? Bosses set too much store by their strengths and habitually overestimate their ability to win respect and support from their employees. They also lose the aptitude to read subtle cues in others’ behavior—so much so that Brion found that when a boss tells a joke to a subordinate, he loses the ability to distinguish between a real or fake smile.¹⁵

As a result of this phenomenon, we encourage the most senior leaders to eschew the advice that says, “Be the change you want to see in the world.” Why? Because they probably think they already are! Instead, we suggest senior leaders heed the similar sounding but altogether different meaning advice of, “For things to change, first I must change.” Senior leaders needn’t just model the desired end state of the change (the “to” mindsets and behaviors), but also the act of changing oneself. After all, the change program is asking everyone else to change! It doesn’t matter if the senior leader is already great (or thinks he is, anyway) at role modeling desired mindsets and behaviors; his job is to role model the abililty to become even better.

This level of humility is not easy for leaders who are literally at the top of their organizations, which is precisely why it’s so powerful. As John Akehurst, the former CEO of Woodside Petroleum, reflects, “It took a lot of effort for me to recognize that I, as the chief executive, am entirely responsible for the culture of the organization … When I took the time to really look at it, I had an amazing insight into how dysfunctional my behavior was, what an impact it had on other people, how much baggage we were all carrying around.”¹⁶

Coupled with the humility to accept the challenge of personally learning and growing, it takes courage to step out of one’s comfort zone to trial and adopt new ways of working. When N. R. Narayana Murthy decided to relinquish his authority as CEO to take on the novel role of “chief mentor” at Infosys, he had to reinvent himself: “You have to sacrifice yourself first for a big cause before you can ask others to do the same … A good leader knows how to retreat into the background gracefully while encouraging his successor to become more and more successful in the job.”¹⁷ This type of change doesn’t have to involve a lot of fanfare. When “Neutron Jack” Welch traded in the tough-guy image he’d acquired during the cost-cutting era at GE and adopted a “hard-headed, soft-hearted” persona instead, he didn’t make a big deal about it. All the same, it signified a huge cultural change for both him and his organization.

Some leaders point out that if they knew what they could improve on, they’d already be doing it. After all, shame on them if they aren’t already being the best they can be. To this end, we always ask them if they’ve formally gathered 360-degree feedback on how their perceived mindsets and behaviors tie in with the objectives of the broader change program. We also suggest they have their calendar analyzed to reveal how much time they actually spend on areas related to change priorities. Then we query whether the leader is open to being professionally coached, in response to the findings.

We’re yet to find a leader who has done these things and not found areas to work on that have a profoundly positive role modeling impact on the rest of the organization. One senior leader, for example, was surprised to find that for every meeting he attended in the spirit of signaling the importance of the topic at hand, three more meetings would be created for others that otherwise wouldn’t have taken place. As part of the change program related to combating bureaucracy, he was actually adding to it! Another leader was surprised to receive feedback that she didn’t role model having a customer focus, which was an organizational health goal of the change being pursued. It was hard to escape the feedback, however, when the calendar analysis showed she hadn’t spent a single minute with customers in the last month, and a word cloud of her last three company-wide addresses included the word “customer” a total of only three times.

Insights of this nature can be kept private and simply acted on, or they can be shared more broadly. Kevin Sharer, former CEO of Amgen, for example, asked each of his top 75, “What should I do differently?” and spoke candidly to them as a group about his development needs and commitment. In doing so, he inspired his team and others to do the same level of introspection and analysis about what personal change they could undergo in order to be even more effective in moving the organization forward.

Take Symbolic Actions

For the most senior leader, the quickest way to send shockwaves through an organization is to perform one or two thoughtfully conceived symbolic acts that signal clearly, “Things will be different from now on.”

When John Wilder, former CEO of the Texas energy utility TXU, gave a large bonus to a woman who had taken leadership of a key business initiative, he says, “It helped employees understand that rewards will be based on contributions, and that ‘pay for performance’ could actually be put into practice.”¹⁸ Daniel DiMicco of Nucor underscored his “focus on the frontline” by flying commercial airlines as opposed to private jets, forgoing an executive parking place, and making a fresh pot of coffee in the office if he happened to take the last cup.

Personal compensation is one area where simple steps by senior leaders can send powerful messages to everyone else in the organization. When times are hard, some leaders choose to draw a nominal salary and take their compensation in the form of stock options instead to show their commitment to creating value in the long term. John Mackey, CEO of Whole Foods Market, has gone a step further. He is so committed to his company’s mission that he’s decided not to take compensation of any kind: “I have reached a place in my life where I no longer want to work for money, but simply for the joy of the work itself and to better answer the call to service that I feel so clearly in my own heart.”¹⁹

Going to work at the frontline can be another powerful symbolic act. To show the value he placed on creating a friendly and welcoming atmosphere for customers and colleagues, former Southwest Airlines CEO Herb Kelleher spent his holidays serving peanuts with flight attendants, loading baggage, and assisting ground crews. Michael Dell reinforces the need to stay focused on the customer by spending one day a month in Dell’s call center working alongside the staff who deal with customer queries.

We’d like to end with a warning: important though it is for a senior leader to take action that supports organizational change aspirations, it’s just as important to avoid behaving in a way that contradicts or undermines them. One packaged goods company was undergoing a change program to capture the value of collaboration. When problems that cut across businesses were brought to his attention, the hockey-loving CEO would dismiss them with, “I don’t care how you do it. Crash ‘em against the boards if you have to—just get it done.” The result: things didn’t get done, employees were dismayed at the mixed messages, resistance to change mounted, and cynicism prevailed.

Get the Right People

The senior team of an organization undergoing a large-scale change often includes the same leaders that led it into the state from which it needs to change. In some cases, the need to change is driven by external factors, and as such, is not a reflection of the team. In other cases, however, the choices and actions of the leaders have landed the company in a challenged situation. Regardless, a senior leader should always ask whether the leaders are the right people in the right roles for the journey ahead.

Senior leaders should take time to assess the capabilities of the individual team members and then act swiftly on their findings. Some seek third-party input to create an objective basis on which to make their assessments. Many find just taking the time to map team members on a simple matrix of skill (versus what’s required in their role going forward, e.g., technical competence, problem-solving capacity, emotional intelligence) and will (versus what’s needed to make the change happen, e.g., felt need for change, grit, servant leadership) provides insight into what needs to be done. Some also find it clarifying to use methods such as forced rankings or forced distributions to help them think through where each person on the team stands in terms of capability and commitment.

Once a senior leader is equipped with all the relevant facts, it’s not hard to know what to do with team members who are low in both skill and will—those who deliver poor results and exhibit unhelpful behavior. But what about individuals who are “high skill, low will”—those who deliver strong results but behave in unhelpful ways? The answer may lie in coaching and mentoring, redefining roles, and adjusting incentives. Beware, however, the organization will be watching closely to see how these people in particular are dealt with. Jack Welch was in no doubt: “If you get results without living our values, I’m coming for you.”²⁰ Corrado Passera concurs: “If necessary, you have to get rid of those individuals—even the talented ones—who quarrel and cannot work together.”²¹ When we asked senior leaders to reflect on what they’d do differently on their change programs, 44 percent indicated they’d “move faster to neutralize people resistant to change.”²²

But how do senior leaders know when to act? The following questions, inspired by the influence model, offer a litmus test: does the team member know exactly what the expectations are of them in driving the change? Is it clear what the consequences are if he doesn’t get on board? Has she been given a chance to build the skills and confidence needed? Is the team member surrounded by others (including oneself) who are role modeling the desired mindsets and behaviors? If the answer to all these questions is yes, then decisive action is justified.

When leaders make tough decisions like these, it shows that they mean business. Some leaders hesitate as they worry such actions might instill an unproductive fear in the organization. In our experience this is almost never the case. Instead, high-performing employees breathe a sigh of relief, grateful that the real issues are finally being dealt with from the top. Low performers begin to opt out, as they see the walls closing in. The majority in the middle get jolted out of their complacency, with many people becoming reinvigorated and choosing to raise their game.

Align the Team

It falls to the most senior leader to ensure the team is aligned, that it spends time on the right things, and that the time spent is effective. To align the team, the most senior leader should head the “lottery ticket” lesson we introduced in Chapter 3 and have reiterated often since. Even if he or she feels they have the answer, it’s important to let the team work through getting there (or to a better place) on their own. A powerful approach to creating shared conviction among a senior team on a performance and health aspiration and the plan to get from here to there is to conduct what we refer to as a “hold up the mirror” workshop.

These sessions start by enabling the team to jointly review the fact base, typically in a gallery walk-type format involving pairs reviewing and discussing posters with the relevant analyses so that they can self-pace their way through versus being marched through a presentation. Then areas of agreement and disagreement on the implications of the fact base are quickly identified, often using electronic polling technology. Real time is then spent on understanding and resolving areas of disagreement, facilitated in ways that ensure the fundamental assumptions come to the surface (an external facilitator is typically used given that the “from” mindsets and behaviors will otherwise very likely characterize the conversation, even though every participant won’t feel they are complicit). Where consensus doesn’t come, the most senior leader makes the call, and next steps are agreed upon.

Once the performance and health direction is set, the next order of business is for the team to discuss and align on what their collective role in driving the change forward will be—in other words, what can only be achieved by the team working together, as opposed to its individual members? What behaviors should they expect of themselves in order to collectively role model desired mindsets and behaviors? In the spirit of leadership not just being about what leaders do, but what they allow in their presence, what behaviors should they refuse to tolerate? More tactically, what topics and issues should the team spend team time on, and what shouldn’t be discussed as a group? How often will the team meet? And where? These elements are often codified into what is referred to as a “team charter” that can then be used as a touchstone for how the team works together going forward.

Achieve High Performance

Even with the right team in place sharing an aspiration, it takes work to ensure a group of smart, ambitious, and independent-minded individuals stay aligned and deliver on it. Consider the 1992 U.S. men’s Olympic basketball team. The names read like a list of the greatest players in the history of the sport: Charles Barkley, Larry Bird, Patrick Ewing, Magic Johnson, Michael Jordan, Karl Malone, Scottie Pippen, and so on. Yet, even though the best players in the world were on the team, in the first month the team lost to a group of college players because, in the words of Pippen, “We didn’t know how to play with each other.”²³

On the flipside, consider the 2016 German National football team (soccer for our American audience). They won the World Cup, as commentator Søren Frank on World Soccer Talk noted, due to “team effort and a collective approach … no German player is a star … the German team has been set up by Löw [the coach] to function as a team, to work like a team, to defend like a team, to attack like a team.”²⁴ Michael Jordan reinforces this recipe for success when he says, “Talent wins games, but teamwork and intelligence wins championships.”²⁵

Once the team has an aligned direction, the team needs to spend time together on their priorities. The team charter should be formally revisited periodically so that the team can reflect on how it’s working together, what’s getting in the way of being even more high performing, and take steps to remove any interference. Corrado Passera brought his team together periodically to “share almost everything,” “be clear to everyone who is doing what,” and “keep the transformation initiatives, budgets, and financial targets knitted together.”²⁶

As a rule of thumb, 80 percent of the time the team spends together should be devoted to dialogue, and just 20 percent to presentations. Effective dialogue requires a well-structured agenda. Ideally, binding decisions on important topics shouldn’t be made until the team has spent ample time on three separate activities: personal reflection, small group discussion, and large group dialogue.

Personal reflection time ensures that members form an independent point of view from the beginning of the conversation. This shouldn’t be left to simple pre-reading unless it comes with pre-work that involves providing survey responses to the information. In the meeting, it can be effective to ask everyone to share their views one-by-one, although this approach risks significant biases distorting the conversation. A very efficient and effective way is to use electronic polling. Everyone essentially talks at once, and if everyone agrees, victory can be quickly declared, and the next topic moved to—thus avoiding people talking in “violent agreement.” If there are diverse views, those can be surfaced and dealt with in a manner where all parties know the extent to which they may be outliers in the conversation.

Small group discussion typically happens in anywhere from pairs to groups of up to five team members. These discussions enable participants to refine their thinking by exploring assumptions at a deeper level than can be achieved as a full group, act as a way to create initial alignment so that a more focused set of possible solutions will be put forward in the larger group, and strengthens bonds between team members who have the opportunity to better get to know how each other think about the topic at hand. This sometimes isn’t possible in video conference formats, though creativity can be used by having hubs where those on video conference convene, and each hub then acts as its own small group (or groups). Note that we don’t mention conference calls for a reason. We agree with former Disney CEO Michael Eisner who ruefully noted, “The worst decisions I ever made were on conference calls. It is critical for successful alignment to get your team together and discuss eyeball to eyeball.”²⁷

Once there has been personal reflection and small group discussion, then a whole-team discussion is in order. If the first two steps have been taken, these conversations tend to be extremely targeted, efficient, and meaningful. Taken together, all three steps create a team experience that is wholly different than what we too often see—overpacked agendas where presentations dominate, the few questions that are asked lead to deep dives into minutiae while the rest of the team disengages, getting by with noncommittal head-nodding.

Building a high-performing team in the manner we’ve described is harder work than taking a more “dog and pony” show style approach, but it’s always worth it. When Steve Luczo made teamwork the top priority in his turnaround of Seagate, for example, it had the desired effect. As his colleague, former CFO Charles Pope, noted, “People in the company now see us as a team. We get feedback that we are on the same wavelength. We are synced now. We respect one another. We’ve built the ability to align goals.”²⁸

Roll Up Your Sleeves

In any large-scale change program there will be numerous initiatives on the “performance placemat” that we described in Chapter 5. A shortlist of those initiatives—those with the most significant customer, financial, and symbolic value—should have the most senior leader’s direct and personal involvement to ensure maximum impact. By being in the flow of the priority initiatives, the senior leader signals their importance, understands the details enough to make decisions that accelerate impact, and provides wisdom and quality control to ensure value is maximized.

For some senior leaders, the need to roll up their sleeves may require them to rethink their priorities. Larry Bossidy, former chairman and CEO of AlliedSignal and former chairman of Honeywell, notes, “Many people regard execution as detail work that’s beneath the dignity of a business leader. That’s wrong … it’s a leader’s most important job.”²⁹ Mickey Drexler, known as the “merchant prince” due to his track record of turning around major retailers such as Gap, Inc., and Ann Taylor, affirms that in leading change, “You have to go, you have to see, you have to feel.”³⁰

Leaders who roll up their sleeves are willing to come down from the executive suite and help resolve issues. Peter Gossas, head of Sandvik Materials Technology, observes, “If there’s a problem, it can be helpful if I come to the work floor, step up on a crate so that everyone can see me, and have a discussion with a shift unit that may be negative to change.”³¹

Some senior leaders feel getting involved in initiatives is disempowering to the leaders they’ve tasked to deliver them. This is true if the senior leader doesn’t listen and tries to take over without having a real understanding of what’s happening. If, on the other hand, involvement comes from a place of conveying that the initiative is important, the senior leader won’t let anything get in the way or slow it down that can be controlled, and they are there both to coach and learn in the process—that’s generally viewed as nothing short of inspirational leadership.

Hold Leaders Accountable

The most senior leader can’t and shouldn’t be involved in every initiative on the change placemat. However, they do have responsibilities across the full portfolio of initiatives: chairing reviews to assess progress against plans, celebrating successes, helping to solve problems in review meetings, and holding other leaders accountable for keeping the change on track.

Holding leaders accountable involves looking at both activities (Are people doing what they said they would?) and impact (Is it going to create the value we expected?). The most senior leader is also the one who sets the tone for whether equal time and energy in reviews will be spent on performance and health matters, ensuring that short-termism and an over-bias to financial measures doesn’t overwhelm those that foreshadow the sustainability of such results.

In keeping with the fairness principle introduced at the end of Chapter 7, one of the roles of the most senior leader is to ensure that decisions are firmly rooted in facts. When Kevin Sharer kicked off the transformation of Amgen, he made it clear that where review meetings were concerned, “The days of winging it are over.”³²

Staying on top of a change program isn’t easy. As Larry Bossidy comments, “This immense personal commitment is time-consuming and fraught with emotional wear and tear in giving feedback, conducting dialogues, and exposing your judgment to others.”³³ Ultimately, holding people accountable is vital; however, as in the words of Stephen Covey, “Accountability breeds response-ability.” ³⁴

■ ■ ■

The role of the most senior leader is vitally important in making change happen at scale. It is up to this person to make the change meaningful by personalizing the change story, openly engaging others, and spotlighting success. The leader can role model change by undergoing personal change and taking thoughtful symbolic actions. Furthermore, this person ought to build a strong and committed top team by ensuring the right people are in the right roles, investing time in aspiration alignment, and building it into a high-performing team while driving the change forward. Lastly, the most senior leader should relentlessly pursue impact by rolling up her sleeves to support and enable key initiatives and holding leaders accountable to take the right actions and deliver the needed performance and health results.

We acknowledge that to many “type A” senior leaders, the role we’ve described includes too many soft elements. If you are one of these, we observe to you that research and experience are unequivocal in indicating that these elements matter, regardless if you see immediate value in them or not. We also observe that given your predisposition, getting them right will likely be very hard for you—which makes them ideal starting points for fulfilling your “undergoing personal change” mandate!