CHAPTER 5

First You Feed the Troops

I sincerely believe that to be a successful commander, you must care.

—Major General Melvin Zais, U.S. Army

On a bleak and windy night on the remote island of Orkney off the northern coast of Scotland, Sergeant Major Jim Prentice of the Gordon Highlanders—a Scottish regiment of the British Army—was leading 36 soldiers in maneuvers to prepare for the World War II battles soon to come in far-off Burma. A sudden snowstorm had made it too dangerous to return to their camp, so Prentice enlisted the hospitality of the nearest farmhouse’s inhabitants to provide a place for his men to sleep in the adjacent barn.

Happy to help, the farmer insisted that the soldiers be fed before retiring for the night. He and his family prepared an inelegant feast of ground beef, potatoes, turnips, carrots, and pancakes. Six at a time, the soldiers warmed themselves and filled their insides in the modest farmhouse’s kitchen, while the others waited appreciatively in the barn.

The farmer’s nine-year-old son watched curiously as Prentice, obviously the ranking soldier among them, ushered each sextet into the house. Only when all the troops had been served did the sergeant major sit down and eat. Curious at this unexpected behavior, the boy, who had been invited by the sergeant major to join him at the rough-hewn table, asked, “Why’d you go last? You’re the leader!”

Prentice looked the young man in the eye and said with both conviction and instruction, “Lad, first you feed the troops. They’re no good to you hungry.”

It was a maxim by which Prentice led his troops through more than three hellish years in the Southeast Asian jungle and which he later credited for their safe return to Scotland. After the war, again using the philosophy that “first you feed the troops,” he built a successful commercial construction company in Scotland’s Clyde Valley region.

No softie, Jim Prentice was a pragmatic business owner with an eighth grade education who knew how to get the most from people—both on the battlefield and the building site. He knew what the leaders of Contented Cows know: first you feed the troops. They’re no good to you hungry.

You Can’t Fake Caring

Let’s first establish the fact that caring is not a program, a technique, or something that can be taught or bought. It’s not a quid pro quo, nor does it require you to coddle people, make them feel “comfortable,” or provide false hope or security.

Your team members are a lot more rational than they get credit for. They really don’t expect a “free ride.” They know that you can’t insulate them from anxiety and job stress any more than their homeowner’s policy can keep a hurricane from roaring through their neighborhood. They also know that you really can’t guarantee their job security. But they do expect you to be fiercely Committed to things like being scrupulously honest with them, believing in them, helping them succeed, and being there for them when they need it—and rightfully so. They know that when push comes to shove, you either care or you don’t, and that nobody is a good enough actor to fake it for long.

According to legendary former Los Angeles Dodgers manager Tommy Lasorda, a wise manager goes out of his or her way to let people know how important they are on a regular basis. As Lasorda explained, “I want my players to know that I appreciate what they do for me [and] that I depend on them. When you, as a leader of people, are naive enough to think that you, not your players, won the game, then you’re in bad shape.”1 This is doubtlessly one of the reasons Lasorda was frequently the first one out of the dugout to congratulate his players for making a big play.

The Best of All Worlds at Incepture

Earnie Franklin, CEO of Jacksonville-based staffing company Incepture, beams every time he talks about the team he’s led over the past five years.

What began as a vertically integrated staffing function for Blue Cross and Blue Shield of Florida has evolved into a leading provider of contract staff in the health care and technology sectors. Incepture was also named one of Florida Trend magazine’s “Best Companies to Work For” in 2011 and one of the Jacksonville Business Journal’s “Best Places to Work” for the same year.

When Franklin took the helm in 2007, he wanted to create a place that combined the best of all the worlds in which he’d worked before, while omitting all the bad stuff. After spending most of his career in big corporate settings, he got the chance to run TriServe Alliance, a small entrepreneurial company that provides health care services to the U.S. Armed Forces.

“All the weight of the corporate bureaucracy had been lifted off me [when I began at TriServe],” Franklin told us. “One day, a friend with whom I was having lunch said he noticed a real difference in me. He said I seemed happier, more enthusiastic, and really excited about what we were doing. And I was. We had the freedom there to make decisions by information, not politics, or committee. People would come to work there and say, ‘Wow! This is great!’”

“I’d been both in the big companies, and now in an agile, flexible setting, and I knew which one I did better work in,” he added.

So when the opportunity arose for Franklin to take over Incepture, he knew exactly what he would do. He’d combine the processes, structure, and logistical thinking of his corporate experience with the people orientation of an entrepreneurial company and turn it into a mission-based company where people could pursue what they wanted to be—both professionally and personally. “I was convinced we could do that and still make money. And I don’t have to tell you this,” he winked, “but I was right.”

“The more you genuinely care about the people you work with, the better,” he went on to say. “At one point, I got confused about how close you can get with people at work, especially if you’re in a leadership role. You can’t become their best friend. It’s not like that. But at least here, with our size, it is like family, in a sense.”

“I always want people to feel they can come and talk to me. So as a part of my business strategy, I intentionally spend a lot of time with the people who work here. I talk to them, and mentor some of them, because I learn so much from them when I do. It really is a lot more about the people you lead than it is the leader.”

Something about Franklin’s philosophy and practices seems to resound both with employees and with clients. Since 2008, in the midst of a soft labor market, the company has more than doubled its contractor placements.

I feel that you have to be with your employees through all their difficulties, that you have to be interested in them personally. I want them to know that Southwest will always be there for them.

—Herb Kelleher, cofounder, chairman emeritus, Southwest Airlines

Delta’s Gerald Grinstein—A Class Act

Workers understand the concept that senior executives earn more than worker bees, but there’s a multiple at which the “caring” argument loses credibility. As Delta Air Lines CEO from 2004 to 2007, Gerald Grinstein led the Atlanta-based carrier through bankruptcy and has been more or less universally credited with its successful reincarnation. In 2005, he took a self-imposed 25 percent pay cut to an annual salary of $338,000 which was less than the salaries of some of his subordinates, and substantially lower than the pay of peers at some of Delta’s equally beleaguered competitors. “There has to be restraint on the part of management,” Grinstein said. “Everybody has made sacrifices, and incentives for management can’t sound excessive.”2 Upon Delta’s exit from bankruptcy protection in April 2007, Grinstein declined the postbankruptcy bonus to which he was entitled. He instructed that the $10 million amount be used instead to fund scholarships and emergency hardship assistance for Delta employees, families, and retirees.

The day after Delta’s emergence, I had the occasion to speak with and congratulate several of their employees while traveling to Atlanta for a meeting. In separate conversations, two of these people volunteered that had it not been for Grinstein’s leadership, they doubted the bankruptcy would have ended when it did, if at all. Each of them brought up Grinstein’s refused bonus, and one man remarked, “I would follow him to hell and back.”

A May 18, 2007, piece in USA Today noted that Mr. Grinstein’s counterparts at United and Northwest (both also recently bankrupt) had apparently decided to be a little (make that a lot) less magnanimous with their own postemergence party favors. The article went on to note the presence of angry employees at two of the aforementioned airlines. Wanna guess which two?

Caring is not a photo-op. Rather, it’s an attitude reflected by personal and organizational priorities. Organizations that care about their people take pains to ensure that human considerations are in the forefront of their decision-making process, whether developing corporate programs and policies; acquiring and designing facilities, equipment, and systems; or scheduling and arranging work. This is not something they do some of the time, or most of the time, but always—even when it’s unpopular or seemingly less profitable to do so.

An organization’s degree of caring is evidenced not by what it says but by what it does. After all, what rational company would claim not to care?

R-E-S-P-E-C-T at Plantronics Mexico

When Alejandro Bustamante assumed the role of president of Plamex, the Mexican division of headset maker Plantronics, in the mid-1990s, he encountered a largely disaffected workforce in a factory struggling to meet the demands of a growing market fueled by rapidly changing technology. Quickly assessing the situation he’d walked into, Bustamante determined that he couldn’t fundamentally change anyone, but what he could do was institute a culture in which everyone—everyone—was treated with respect. He soon restored respect and a real sense of dignity in the plant, and as a result, he and his team have pulled off a business turnaround of gigantic proportion. The company’s output, quality, profitability, and reputation as the place to work in Mexico have all soared.

“The job of a leader,” he told me, while standing in the entrance to the Tijuana facility’s large main factory, “is to create the atmosphere to get the results we want. It’s as simple as that. It’s not always easy to do, but it’s not complicated.”

When I asked Bustamante to explain how Plamex had gone from its 1995 state to being named the number one Best Place to Work in all of Mexico by the Great Place to Work Institute in 2011, the Tijuana native had a ready answer:

There are three things we want for every one of our 2,286 associates here. First, we want to give everyone the respect they deserve. Second, we want to develop each one of them, to let them do as much as they want and go as far as they want. And third—and this is probably the most important—we want to improve the quality of their lives, and the lives of their families. When you do those things, you get their very best. And that’s what we need—their very best.

Making telephone headsets is a labor-intensive process. And even in an area populated by more than 2 million people, it’s long been difficult to find enough skilled workers to staff the many maquiladoras in the Free Trade Zone area of Tijuana. The Plamex workforce is comprised of about 20 percent locals and a whopping 80 percent who come from other states in the interior of Mexico. Many employers in the area spend heavily on recruiting, owing in part to the talent shortage and exacerbated by working conditions that lead to high turnover. But not at Plamex.

It’s the Little Things . . . Always the Little Things

As an early demonstration of respect, Bustamante had business cards printed for and distributed to every worker in the factory, cards that they proudly showed to family and friends in their communities. Soon, as a direct result of the business cards, this “badge of honor,” as his associates saw it, his HR department had more applicants than they could hire, coming from all over the country. A nearby factory manager complained to Bustamante that Plamex was getting all the good workers and that he couldn’t compete because he couldn’t spend the money, as Plamex had, to print business cards for everybody.

“How much do you spend every year on advertising and recruiting?” Bustamante asked his neighbor.

“About $200,000” was the reply.

“Spend a few hundred instead on business cards, and then we’ll be on a level playing field,” Bustamante told him.

A New Take on “Employee Engagement” Whoda Thunk It?

My visit to Plamex in Tijuana revealed more than we have room to share here about the striking results that stem from overtly caring about your workforce. One of the most remarkable parts of the Plamex culture, and one that illustrates the importance of family at Plamex, is their unconventional practice of hosting employee weddings on-site.

Until recently, Mexican couples desiring a marriage license were required to produce their original birth certificates, which could be obtained only by making a pilgrimage to the town of their birth. As 80 percent of Plamex’s workforce is nonlocal, this presented a logistical nightmare for most. As a result, many couples who wanted to marry simply couldn’t. Yet, being together out of wedlock presented an awkward dilemma for some on both social and religious grounds. To help with the problem, Plamex began granting associates time off to retrieve their documentation. A number of employees made use of the privilege.

Bustamante decided it might be nice to actually host a mass wedding, uniting the couples right there in the plant. He negotiated a special discounted license fee with local authorities and even convinced a judge to mass produce the nuptials for the price of a single wedding. (It is a factory, after all. ) Plamex associates provided the food, music, and decorations, and Bustamante opened the factory’s capacious dining hall for the festivities.

After the first group wedding, which was an unqualified success, two teenagers, a brother and sister, came up to him and said, “Mr. Bustamante, thank you so much for doing this. We are so proud that our parents are now able to be married.”

“That’s all it took,” Bustamante told me, “and I knew we were doing a good thing.”

Plamex lobbied the Mexican government to change the law, and now getting a marriage license no longer requires a trek home. Still, the weddings were such a hit that the practice continues. Every year around Valentine’s Day, the company hosts a mass wedding of some 20 to 30 couples, at least one member of which is a Plamex associate. Total cost to Plamex for each event: about $300. This practice, along with so many others that make up the way of life at Plamex, helps fulfill the organization’s goal of optimizing business outcomes by first demonstrating in tangible ways that they truly care about workers.

A leader should possess human understanding and consideration for others. Men are not robots and should not be treated as such. I do not by any means suggest coddling. But men are intelligent, complicated beings who will respond favorably to human understanding and consideration. By these means their leader will get maximum effort from each of them. He will also get loyalty.

—General Omar Bradley

Order Up

For years, my office in Jacksonville was across a busy street from a place called The Sandwich Store, a little nondescript eatery owned and operated by Renee Curry. The food was good—very good, in fact—but what was really impressive was the speed with which Curry and her three coworkers could make a sandwich, fill a soft drink cup, ring up the order, get it all correct, and get people on their way—and the fact that they did this somewhere between 300 and 400 times every day!

These folks (the same three employees for years, I hasten to add) were focused like a laser on that objective. They executed so well that we would highly recommend the place to the industrial engineers at McDonald’s and Burger King who could no doubt learn a thing or two.

One reason that Curry was able to keep the same folks making her “Incredible Roast Beef Creations” and frying frozen potatoes for so long is that she cared about those often nameless faces who fed the masses each day. “These are the people who are making me money!” she shrieked at me as though it should be obvious, and she was right. Curry lent her employees money when they were in a pinch (which wasn’t often), and not one ever abused her kindness. They all had their evenings free, so at least three times a year she would take the crew out to dinner. They earned paid vacation—in a sandwich shop! And during the Christmas season, she put up a little tree, like a special holiday tip jar, to which many appreciative customers paper clipped “gifts.” (Who says money doesn’t grow on trees?)

“I care about them, and they care about me, and about each other. It’s great,” said this strong businesswoman with a personality that doesn’t suffer slackers lightly. She once offered an employee the extra bedroom in her house, rent free. Did she feel that she had a social obligation to take in the down-and-out? No, Curry told me, “It’s because she was a damn good worker, and I knew that she’d be at work every day if she had a place to stay that was nearby. I was right, and she made us both a bunch of money.”

Safety Is No Accident at Alaska Clean Seas

Concurrent with the belief that workers are, in the words of Jim Prentice, “no good to you hungry” is the recognition that people can’t work as well (or at all) if they’re hurt (or worse).

No sensible person would argue the merits of a safe workplace. Most of its benefits are self-evident. There are other benefits, however, that are less obvious, but no less significant. Workers who have to spend one nanosecond worrying about their own safety, or who have to make cumbersome adjustments to their work in order to stay out of harm’s way, can’t possibly give their full measure of effort. They’ve got to slow down—beyond the reasonable slowdown that comes with giving due care to the job.

Let’s be clear: safety is everyone’s job. It’s the leader’s job to be sure that everyone knows that.

When leaders show (as opposed to merely mouthing the words) that safety is a big deal, they demonstrate in a clear and compelling way that they care about their followers. And take this to the bank: we know that people absolutely, positively reserve their best effort for leaders who care about them as humans.

Safety is an integral part of caring.

One of the more unique projects we’ve worked on was with Alaska Clean Seas (ACS), an oil spill response organization with offices in Anchorage and operations in the North Slope oil fields, 300 miles inside the Arctic Circle.

As you might imagine, the risks involved with cleaning up oil spills—even tiny ones—in the frozen tundra and icy waters, in temperatures that commonly dip to more than 40 degrees below zero Fahrenheit (which also happens to be −40°C) are formidable. As a result, there’s a pervasive—some would say obsessive—emphasis on safety in the ACS culture.

The conditions on the Slope also drive the unique work schedule that, although typical in the world of oil drilling (and the work that supports it), is unusual for the rest of us. These folks, like most Slope employees, work a two-week “hitch” of 14 straight 12-hour days and then fly home (wherever home might be, often outside the state), where they can do whatever they like before flying back up for their next hitch two weeks later.

In January (brr!) 2011, I visited ACS’s Prudhoe Bay operation in preparation for the event we facilitated the following April in Anchorage. Before leaving for the aptly named Deadhorse Airport, I was fed constant reminders of how thoroughly safety is woven into everything on the Slope and at ACS. I was required to wear special clothing, including special shoes, before they would allow me to board the shared service flight that ferries oil workers from Alaska’s largest city to its northernmost region. An ACS representative met me in Deadhorse, issued safety goggles and a hard hat before getting into the truck, and reminded me to fasten my seat belt. Later, I was caught not holding onto the handrail when boarding the company minibus and my behavior was corrected.

Although every ACS worker I encountered made me highly safety-conscious, the issue of safety has no greater champion at ACS than president and general manager Ron Morris—who eats, breathes, and lives safety. I guess I was a slow learner when it came to the handrail thing, because even in the relatively safe confines of the camp’s living facilities, Morris was talking casually with me and stopped midsentence as we ascended a flight of stairs to interject, “Handrail, please.” He didn’t apologize, but he did explain: “It’s a reflex. It’s just baked into me.”

ACS holds safety meetings once a week. Although this isn’t unusual in industrial settings, the one I attended on radon contamination in the home demonstrated how much ACS cares about workers’ safety both on the Slope and off through its Taking Safety Home program. ACS not only includes safety incentives in its bonus plan, but an employee who participates in a safety presentation earns points toward the annual bonus. Every year, if at least 50 percent of the company’s employees participate in conducting a presentation at a safety meeting, more money gets thrown into the shared bonus pot.

What’s been the effect of this unrelenting focus on safety at ACS? The event for which they brought us to Anchorage in April was, among other things, a celebration of a remarkable milestone: 10 years without a single lost-time accident . . . 10 years! Take just a moment to let that sink in—an entire decade with more than 3 million worker hours, and no lost-time accidents. That’s impressive for even the least hazardous of office environments, but under the conditions inherent in ACS’s work, it’s incredible!

An achievement such as this doesn’t happen by . . . well . . . by accident. It happens only through leadership and a Commitment by everyone in the company.

One distinguishing feature of ACS’s emphasis on safety is its Behavior-Based Safety Process, the objective of which is to change behavior, not necessarily the person. Certified peer observers (no managers allowed) evaluate workers performing tasks associated with their jobs and describe the behaviors they observe in terms of “safes” and “at-risks.” What’s somewhat remarkable is that they conduct these checks with the worker’s full knowledge and permission. The process’s success derives in part from its nonconfrontational and nonpunitive nature—one that is founded on education, not reprimand. The results of the observation are documented, but without identifying anyone by name or gender.

“It’s not so important to know who did what,” said Emily McBride, a warehouse lead in charge of the program, “only to learn from what we’ve observed.”

Safety is so much a part of ACS that we weren’t surprised when Ron Morris opened the Anchorage meeting—held on the 10th floor of the Captain Cook Hotel—with a safety briefing. Having already checked out the emergency exits personally, Morris let us all know how to escape in the event of fire, earthquake, or anything else that makes outside look better than inside. The fact that we were meeting in a hotel that was built directly on the site and in the immediate aftermath of one of the strongest quakes ever recorded on Earth certainly made this Florida boy sit up and listen.

One element of the Anchorage event was a video we produced that featured ACS employees, and in a few cases, their family members. “It’s all about getting home to my family every two weeks,” one long-term spill technician told the camera. One of the wives, referring to the fact that these workers are paid handsomely for this less-than-cushy job, mentioned that no amount of money was worth having to worry every time her husband went up for his hitch. She expressed her appreciation to the company’s leadership for making safety such a paramount priority.

Although cynics might claim that this emphasis on safety is based more on a healthy fear of lawsuits and Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) regulations than on a genuine sense of caring about people, a single visit to ACS in Deadhorse, Alaska, would swiftly alter that perspective.

Later in the year, we keynoted Graycor Industrial Constructors, Inc.’s Annual Safety Boot Camp. The sole reason for this gathering of company managers was to showcase the importance of safety, continue to reinforce the company’s standards, and provide additional practical training in the how-to’s of safety.

The message from Graycor’s leaders, although not in these exact words, was crystal clear: “We’re serious about safety. We want (and expect) you to take it seriously as well. We’re not going to go wink-wink-nod-nod when you don’t do little things by the book. And if you commit, or allow others to commit unsafe practices—either by your permission or your silence—we’re going to show you what else hammers can be used for.”

That, too, is caring.

So, leaders, if you care about your people—which of course means caring about their safety—here are a few to-do’s to ensure you’re executing your leadership responsibilities in that regard:

• Mind yourself first. Model safety in all you do—both at work and away. Use seat belts, helmets, and handrails; drive well; operate machines correctly; and make smart moves—whatever means safety in your world.
• Keep your eyes and ears open for hazards, especially of the not-so-obvious variety.
• Keep your mind open to suggestions from others about potential hazards and ways to make your workplace safer.
• Develop methods and processes that encourage safety awareness, and make it easy to comply with them. Be sure people fully understand the consequences of carelessness.
• Learn about, then consider implementing, a behavior-based safety program.
• Be like the folks at Graycor—totally unambiguous about your standards with regard to safety issues.
• Emulate our friends at Alaska Clean Seas: celebrate your success with respect to safety, but never grow complacent.

Motivation Doesn’t Necessarily Follow Money

Let’s take time out right now to debunk a fairly popular myth: caring about your people does not mean lavishing them with money and expensive benefits or increases and extras that they haven’t earned, the market doesn’t require, and you can’t afford. U.S. automakers and airlines are but two examples of industries that have been guilty of all three of these activities in their pattern of frequent capitulations to their respective labor unions. Absent compelling reasons for these actions, the companies in these sectors have, over their long histories, done themselves and their employees (not to mention customers and shareholders) a huge disservice—and everyone involved knew it. Not unlike a “one night stand,” it may have felt good at the time, but they’ve been paying for it ever since.

People don’t care how much you know until they know how much you care.

—Anonymous

It wouldn’t have taken an economic genius to see the June 2009 eventual undoing of General Motors coming—a failure that resulted in the fourth largest bankruptcy filing in American history. We actually predicted the company’s demise in the first version of this book when we chronicled its downward spiral through the decades of the 1980s and 1990s, on the backs of the same ills that brought it to its knees in the first decade of the new millennium. And the ability of the company’s leadership to right the listing ship appeared not to have improved one iota since then GM boss Roger Smith said, in 1993, “I don’t know. It’s a mysterious thing,” when asked to explain what had happened.3

It’s a mystery to us how Smith could claim not to know. One need only look at GM’s share of the U.S. car market and their market value to realize that something went seriously wrong. That share slid from 32 percent to 19.6 percent between 1995 and 2011, and the company’s market value plummeted from $56 billion in 2000 to about $7 billion by 2008.4 The world’s largest automaker, once a behemoth of industry on the world stage was, at that point, worth about half as much as cosmetics company Avon.5

By providing “benefits” such as fully funded, zero-deductible health, vision, and dental care and supplemental unemployment insurance, GM had ratcheted its production labor costs into the $40 per hour vicinity by early 1996. By 2008, it was a staggering $73.26 per hour!6—juxtaposed against a comparable rate at Toyota of about $48 per hour in its older U.S. plants and less than that in newer ones. Now, you’ve got to be pretty good to give your competitors a $25 an hour head start and still expect to beat them in the marketplace. It would seem that someone might have deduced that something was terribly amiss when the cost of “benefits” started exceeding the cost of the steel needed to make cars. Yet no one did. And between 2005 and mid-2009, General Motors managed somehow to lose an unfathomable $88 billion!7

Although admittedly a matter of opinion, we happen to believe that the problems at GM had far more to do with worker attitudes and commitment level (demoralized by an inattentive and uncaring management and a fractious relationship with the United Auto Workers union) than with engineering, design, marketing, finance, or manufacturing processes. Think about it: GM enjoyed a huge brand name advantage, employed some of the best designers and marketing minds on the planet, and had spent enough of their capital reserves on technological improvement to have bought Toyota outright . . . and yet they were still making crummy cars! Go figure.

Just who benefits when GM is forced to close 14 plants and three distribution warehouses; when more than 20,000 people, most with families to support, lose their jobs and ways of life; when the U.S. government has to bail the company out to the tune of $52 billion; and when that same government still, as of this writing, owns a substantial portion of the company?

In our view, two of the most uncaring things you can do to people are (1) to give them something—whether they’ve earned it or not—knowing full well you’ll have to ask for it back and (2) to blow smoke up their noses (or other bodily orifices). How do you think your people see it?

In fact, we submit that inordinately high wages, salaries, and unwarranted benefits not only aren’t the answer but that they are often a large part of the problem. Moreover, companies often use or view them as a way to counterbalance or compensate for serious deficiencies elsewhere. Granted, no organization can expect to maintain esprit de corps by paying substandard salaries, but a lot of damage is done when people see money being thrown around. Once this occurs, pay loses its meaning, because people assume that the money must have been easy to get. They know they’re not worth that much. Remuneration loses its relevance and impact, like a Christmas morning when all the presents under the tree have your name on them.

Money will not necessarily buy you a peak performing organization either. An analysis of team payrolls versus team performance in the 2009–2010 National Football League (NFL) season shows that by and large, money did not predict success. In fact, some of the winningest teams in the NFL had among the lowest payrolls, and vice versa. Further to the point that motivation doesn’t necessarily follow money:

As George Steinbrenner, legendary New York Yankees owner learned, although it does take money to acquire and retain the best players, a fat payroll in no way guarantees team performance.

Google Is Great—But It’s Not for Everybody

One of the first questions we ask when conducting a leadership seminar is, “What are some organizations that you believe would be great to work for?” Neither of us can recall asking that question in the past five years and having Google not make the list.

This isn’t surprising. When it comes to lists, Google seems to be ever present, topping the Fortune “Best Places to Work” list in 2007, 2008, and again in 2012, and holding the not-too-shabby number 4 slot in the intervening years. Almost everyone who follows workplace issues (and many who don’t) have heard of the legendary perks: free gourmet meals, all day, every day; yoga classes; in-house doctors; dry cleaning; massage service; swimming pool; and even hi-tech Wi-Fi-equipped biodiesel buses that transport workers to and from the company’s Mountain View, California, headquarters. (See more on Google’s benefits in Chapter 9.)

And who wouldn’t be attracted to and excited by these creature comforts? But since there’s more (much more) to a job than the things you do when you’re not actually working, we were not surprised to learn that, in fact, Google is a fantastic and highly fulfilling workplace—that is, for a relatively narrow band of people. To the company’s credit, they’ve learned (for the most part) how to select from the 1 million-plus applicants they receive each year, only those people who—by virtue of both talent and temperament—have the potential to be happy, productive, and successful working at Google—a company with a well-defined and highly uncommon culture.

At Google, it’s not just about feeding your face at any time of the day but also about feeding your passion for creativity and innovation and solving challenges our parents wouldn’t even have thought of. Let’s be honest; they’re challenges most of us wouldn’t have thought of.

Googlers, as the company’s employees call themselves, work hard—very hard. And they’re expected to meet some very high standards. Laboring with an inventor’s fervor and focus, they often put in seemingly interminable hours, working on such cool stuff that most report that they hardly even notice . . . while they’re working anyway.

If you enjoy having people listen to and consider your creative ideas, working at Google might be for you. If you have a need for structure in your workday and around your schedule, then it’s likely not the place for you. If you like working with truly brilliant thinkers, Google is likely to turn you on. For those with lots of outside responsibilities or interests—a high-maintenance family situation, time-consuming pastimes or hobbies—a Google job is something you’ll probably only read about.

If you do better in low-pressure, routine environments, then you’d do better to look elsewhere. But if you thrive on doing work that has well-above-average impact, then you’d probably fall in love with Google work. We say impact because Google—whether it be the ubiquitous search tool or one or more of their other products (Docs, Maps, Gmail, Translate, Voice, YouTube, you name it)—has become an immeasurable part of life in almost every corner of the developed world. Indeed, this book was written on Google Docs. Just as it’s hard for us to imagine the world without the Internet, it’s hard to imagine the Internet without Google.

And it’s hard to imagine achieving Google’s success without attracting and retaining the kinds of people they need to fuel their engine. Hell, a single share of their stock is more than I paid for either of my first two cars!

Google’s ability to massage its workers’ creative juices—even more than their achy shoulder muscles—is what differentiates their employer brand from that of its competitors for highly specialized talent. And this is a resource that, even in periods of high unemployment, is too scarce to satisfy its demand.

Pebble Beach Company—If You Care, You Listen

Like thousands of other organizations, the Pebble Beach Company (PBC)—operator of the famous golf resort on California’s Monterey Peninsula—performs periodic employee engagement surveys. What they know that a lot of others don’t grasp, however, is that such surveys, well used, are an opportunity to listen—really listen to their workforce. And indeed listening is one of the foremost ingredients of caring.

It’s been our firm’s privilege to manage their survey projects since 2004. Unlike so many other companies, Pebble Beach management doesn’t just ask the questions, tabulate the results, and then go back to sleep. They listen, they learn, they take the results seriously, and actually do something with them.

On a recent trip to Pebble Beach to discuss the results of the just-completed survey, we were only a little surprised when CEO Bill Perocchi began rattling off—from memory and with incredible precision—specific results from a survey they’d conducted six years earlier!

Okay, maybe that’s not so surprising for a former General Electric auditor like Perocchi. But what is worth more than mentioning is that the company makes strategic use of its survey results in managing its business—and we’d advise you to do the same if you’re going to do a survey. It’s but one of the many inputs that PBC uses to determine leadership assignments, coaching opportunities, and investment in employee benefits and programs. Perhaps most important, it speaks to how the company is doing in managing its culture, that elusive but oh-so-visible quality that keeps guests returning to this special place by the sea.

We’ve all heard the criticism he talks too much. When was the last time you heard someone criticized for listening too much?

—Norm Augustine

Chapter Summary

Better Practices:

Notes

1. “Business Secrets of Tommy Lasorda,” Fortune, July 3, 1989, 131.

2. Rick Newman, “Delta Takes Flight,” U.S. News and World Report, May 20, 2007.

3. “Dinosaurs?” Fortune, May 3, 1993, 37.

4. “Ahead of Wall Street,” Wall Street Journal, January 4, 2012.

5. “GM’s Market Value Is Only $7 Billion—Half that of Avon,” CNBC, June 26, 2008.

6. “UAW Contract Talks at a Glance,” Associated Press, November 19, 2008.

7. “General Motors Loses $4.3 Billion, Says Profit Is Possible This Year,” Washington Post, April 8, 2010.