INTRODUCTION

How Do the Best Get Better?

The task of leadership is not to put greatness into people, but to elicit it, for the greatness is there already.

—John Buchan

Since the original publication of this book in 1998, the workspace—indeed, much of the world—has been stood on its head. Oh, people (most of us, anyhow) still have jobs that produce income that allows us to sustain ourselves. But nearly all the terms of the deal have changed.

The old Protestant work ethic to which our parents and grandparents subscribed—the maxim that suggested that good things will happen to you if you keep your nose to the grindstone and your mouth closed—busted. The notion that, by definition, all work occurs within the confines of an employer’s workplace—gone. Loyalty and obedience to the organization—vamoose, along with job security and defined pension benefits. The bright line between personal and professional time and activities—completely blurred. The assumption that there must be something wrong with you if you are unemployed for more than a few weeks—forget it. The expectation that workers would receive training before starting a new job function—outsourced, eliminated, or relegated to do-it-yourself status.

In a nutshell, the game has changed in material ways. The rules are different, the field is bigger, the pace exponentially quicker, the goalposts narrower, shareholders less forgiving, and the talent is more elusive, cynical, and mercenary. An entire project or career can be launched or terminated with 138 characters and an RT.

One aspect of workspace physics remains rock solid, however: the precept that focused, fully engaged workers produce more and better stuff, yielding better outcomes. Motivated people move faster; they always have and always will. When you view this through the other end of the telescope, it is obvious that no one—repeat, no one—despite repeated attempts by a number of commercial airlines, can achieve success by foisting disgruntled, disenfranchised workers upon paying customers. It’s a simple, relatively understood and accepted concept—at least in theory.

It’s another thing altogether in practice, however. We tend to lose sight of what motivates people to want to contribute more, become weak-kneed at the prospect of actually doing those things, or arrogantly (and mistakenly) conclude that a weak labor market overrides the need to be concerned about them.

Our purpose is to once again bring front and center the very real, tangible benefits of treating people right in the workplace and to clearly define just what “right” means. (Hint: It may not be what you think.)

How does one organization achieve unprecedented levels of success over a substantial period of time while a nearly identical competitor struggles—or goes down the tubes completely? Is the former’s success the result of better mousetraps, dumb luck, or maybe just better execution? Consider, for example:

• How Google could blow right past Microsoft, Yahoo!, and Baidu to totally dominate the search space with greater than 80 percent market share.
• How 150-year-old General Mills continues to capture an ever-greater share of supermarket shelf space and your kitchen cupboard with brands such as Progresso, Bisquick, Wheaties, and Pillsbury.
• And will somebody please explain how it can be that North Carolina–based Nucor Steel is able to operate a $20 billion business (one of the largest steel companies on earth) with a headquarters staff of fewer than 100 people—and do it in one of the worst economies in a century—without laying people off?

In each of the aforementioned cases, and in every similar success story we have been able to find, managements are taking strikingly similar approaches. Our mission is to discover, chronicle, and help others replicate those approaches. As Thomas Edison said, “There is a better way. . . . Find it!”

Discretionary Effort—Nobody Has Moved the Cheese

Not much has changed about human nature since psychologist Elton Mayo first studied the relationship between motivation and productivity at the Hawthorne Works of the Western Electric Company in the late 1920s—and that was more than 90 years ago!

In a series of motivational experiments titled the Harvard Hawthorne Studies, Mayo—using a real company, real managers, and real employees—first uncovered the unmistakable relationship between worker attitudes and production, or output. Essentially, he learned two things:

In a nutshell, what Mayo learned—which has been reinforced by a number of subsequent experiments and surveys—is that there is an increment of human effort that individuals can apply exclusively at their discretion. This finding led to the coining of the term discretionary effort (DE), which is defined as the difference between that minimally necessary level of effort and that which we can, in fact, achieve. In short, it represents the distinction between obedience and high performance and between those who are managed versus those who are led. Its expenditure is clearly (and completely) a matter of choice. In the workspace, it is the difference between the minimum level of effort that employees must expend to keep their jobs and that of which they are truly capable. The equation therefore is:

Personal Capability − Minimum Requirements = Discretionary Effort

The context within which Mayo discovered DE at Western Electric was one in which employees were withholding it, for a variety of reasons. They were consciously performing at only a minimally satisfactory level, or, as some might put it, they kept showing up at work (and getting paid) even though they were essentially on strike.

Unfortunately, not much has changed. The only difference between then and now is that workers withheld discretionary effort much more covertly back then. People are open about it today, because the stick—the punishment for lack of effort, as in “carrot and stick”—has absolutely been worn out and thus has little effect. Moreover, it is relatively easy to sleep through meetings with your eyes open and make shopping on eBay or playing Cow Clicker look like work.

It’s Your People, Stupid

As Richard Pascale of the Stanford Graduate School of Business put it, “The trouble is, 99 percent of managerial attention today is devoted to the techniques that squeeze more out of the existing paradigm—and it’s killing us. Tools, techniques, and ‘how-to’ recipes won’t do the job without a higher order . . . concept of management.”

As managers careen wildly from one tool or tactic to another, many lose sight of the fact that the critical difference between a brilliant strategy and one that gets successfully executed resides in the hearts and minds of people—specifically, the members of your workforce. We can scream, exhort, and rattle the saber all we want, but we’ll never achieve successful organizational change without their willing participation.

In many cases, establishing alternative precepts (or the “higher order” as Pascale puts it) flies dead in the face of a definition of the managerial role that’s been held and nurtured for literally hundreds of years—namely, the old, authoritarian, “plantation mentality” scenario that features the manager as “order giver” and the employee as “order taker.”

This failure to change our outlook toward the management of human effort has become the chief impediment to competitiveness for many, both here and elsewhere. We certainly don’t lack the brains, ability, or technology. Rather, it’s a matter of will, specifically the will to change. Some have it, and some haven’t gotten there yet.

Our purpose is to entice those in the latter category to move along by calling attention to a few organizations that do “get it”—while highlighting the very real, hard, bottom-line impact they (and their shareholders) are enjoying as a result.