CHAPTER 5
The 100/0 Principle: 100 Percent Responsibility/Zero Excuses
There are always constraints. The question is what will you do in spite of them.
In 1998, a relatively unknown bank, Synovus, was named the best company to work for in America by Fortune magazine. Each year, Fortune compiles a list of the one hundred best companies to work for, and to be named the very best among thousands of contenders is quite an honor. Given that I had never heard of the bank, I decided to do some research on this “best company to work for in America.” What I discovered was a hundred-year-old bank that had grown like a wildfire throughout the southern United States, a company that had an enviable record of double-digit profit growth and that was beating the pants off much bigger banks in most of their markets. Needless to say, I was intrigued.
Three months later, I was sitting in the office of then-CEO Jimmy Blanchard, who had been CEO for over thirty years at the time. When I asked him the bank’s secret and why it might have been named the best company to work for in America, he offered a simple reason: “It is the power of love. We are successful because we love each other, and we love our customers. When one part of this company cries, the whole company cries with them. We love our customers and each other; it’s that simple.” Then he set me loose to talk to others throughout the bank and its subsidiaries.
Over the next few days I heard an awful lot about love, but I also kept hearing people talk about a concept called 100/0. Finally, I asked a teller in one of the branches, “What is the 100/0?” She said, “The 100 stands for 100 percent responsibility. You never say, ‘This would be a great bank if the CEO did his job,’ ‘I’d have made the deadline if not for the other department,’ ‘I would be having a better day if my boss was nicer,’ or ‘It’s not my job to take care of that customer.’” She said all employees had to take 100 percent responsibility for themselves and for the success of this bank because, “It is up to each one of us to keep this company great and keep the customers happy. And the zero,” she said, “that stands for no excuses. There are always reasons you did not come through, but at the end of the day you work with what you have, so there are no excuses for not giving your best.”
In a meeting a day later I asked Jimmy Blanchard that if the secret to the bank was the “power of love,” then what was with the 100/0? He replied, “Well, I guess it is tough love.”
After leaving the bank it occurred to me that those two numbers are transformative. For a company, for a person, and maybe for the world! When we take 100 percent responsibility and give ourselves no excuses for why we can’t or shouldn’t act to make things different, everything changes.
I can’t tell you how many times I have seen people turn those numbers around. There are lots of 0/100 people in the world. It seems as though they don’t think anything is their responsibility, and they have all kinds of excuses why they can’t change. People say things like these: my marriage would sure be better if she would be different; morale around here stinks, and I sure wish the manager would do something about it, but I’m not going to take any action until he does; my restaurant is not doing very well, but we are in a bad location, and the place is kind of run down; if the company would just spend some money, business would pick up. Bottom line: it is not my fault, and here is the long list of reasons why I can’t do anything about it.
There is a disease of 0/100 thinking in our society. No excuses may seem a bit extreme, but the point is not so much that there are never any constraints but that there are always constraints that could keep us from stepping up. When we focus on those constraints instead of on what we can do given those constraints, we wind up acting like victims. Make no mistake, your career will be very limited if you become known as one of those people who always has a reason why they did not come through.
When I interviewed CEOs and senior executives for this book, they told me that people who always have a reason for not coming through drive them crazy. Don Knauss, the CEO of Clorox, summed up the feelings of many of those executives I interviewed: “What really drives me nuts is when people rationalize losing. There is a real sickness in organizations around rationalizing losing.”
Don’t get me wrong. I am not saying that constraints aren’t real or that there is never a legitimate reason for failure. I am saying that if we decide to work with whatever deck we have been dealt and go from there, we will accomplish much more. Another way I like to think of it is this: Some excuses are true, but none of them are useful. Focusing on what you can change is useful, but focusing on the reasons you can’t succeed or act is wasted energy.
A Woman Who Had Every Excuse to Fail . . . but Didn’t
Here is a case in point. Joanne Beaton wanted to get back into operations inside her company but did not anticipate the assignment she received. She was asked to take over the operator services business for TELUS, a large telecommunications company in Canada. It was hardly a plum assignment. For one thing, it was a dying part of the industry, since just about everyone could see that technology eventually would replace human beings for most of the functions operators once played in the telephone business. Long gone were the days when every call went through a human interface or even when calling Information was the main route to find phone numbers. The service was losing money and losing steam. In fact, most TELUS competitors in telecommunications were trying to outsource operator services to reduce the cost of providing those services.
The attractiveness of the assignment was hardly enhanced by the workforce she inherited. Engagement and morale were low. She was told that the one thousand or so workers, mostly unionized, were deeply in an entitlement mentality and waiting for someone else to fix their eroding business. Her leaders told her that the most likely ultimate solution was to outsource the business, but in the meantime her marching orders were to cut costs. Some colleagues wondered aloud why she would take such a tough assignment.
Joanne had every good excuse to follow the natural path of reducing costs and eventually getting some outside vendor to do it cheaper. There was every reason to think the business would die a slow death. That is probably what would have happened in most cases. But that is not what happened. It is not even in the ballpark of what happened.
The no excuses part of 100/0 means that we begin by not surrendering to the excuses that could keep us from stepping up. No excuses means recognizing that while some excuses may be true, they are almost never useful. The question is always, What are you going to do in spite of those constraints?
Joanne says the difference between a good leader and a really good leader is that the really good leaders ask, “What can I do with the constraints?” while others come up with reasons why they could not, did not, deliver what they said they could.
Joanne Beaton and her team worked with the constraints. Some people might not have seen it as their responsibility to save that declining business for TELUS, but she did. When Joanne took over as leader, some people on the team had an alternative idea of the future, however unlikely it seemed. They believed that they could become the place where others brought their outsourced operator services. Even though the company had dabbled in those waters, the idea seemed farfetched, given the cost structure and employees’ low level of engagement.
Joanne met with every team member at operator services and basically said, “No one else is going to save this business but us.” She encouraged employees to act like owners and asked them to consider this question: if you were the competition, what would you do to put us out of business? She pretty much said, “Let’s go big or go home.” She said they had a choice to be outsourced or to step up and make theirs the best operator services in the world, so good that it would be the outsourcer instead of the outsourced. And she emphasized, “If we want to become the outsourcer instead of the outsourced, we will have to take responsibility and make it happen. No one else will do it. We need to save ourselves!”
Well, the team did take responsibility and threw out the excuses. The team, not the leader, came up with a simple theme: Our Business, Our Customers, Our Team, and My Responsibility. To save their business all employees had to step up and ask what they could do to make the business successful. They realized that they needed to make it happen. And they did.
They began to benchmark their services against competitors, talked about how to improve the business, and figured out how to raise morale and productivity. Within three years, the engagement scores of this work unit went from low to supercharged! Not only did their jobs not get outsourced, but they grew the business threefold, increased their productivity by 1,000 percent, and became a high-service, low-cost operator. Eventually, they won awards for the best operator services in North America and became a sustainable profit center! TELUS operator services became a major provider of operator services for many of their competitors. Headcount grew fourfold instead of shrinking. They transformed a dying business into a growing enterprise.
As Joanne looks back on this experience, she says, “People had told me we have been trying for eight years to shift this, these folks can’t change. But I did not accept the story.” And when people on her team pointed fingers at others, she kept putting it back on them. “I kept telling them, look stop blaming others, let’s take the levers we can move and do it.” Joanne makes it clear, “I was the leader, but everyone stepped up and took responsibility, and that is why we succeeded.”
Years later, in 2005, a customer call center within the same company was in a similarly tough position. Rumors said the company was considering closing down the call center in a remote community, which made sense as it was the last call center outside a major urban area. The leaders and employees in that business unit could have acted 0/100, coming up with lots of reasons to sit back and accept their likely fate. But that is not what happened.
A few key frontline supervisors stepped up and asked for a meeting with senior managers in the company. They said, “What do we need to do so you won’t close us down?” As is often the case, a few people began what later became a ripple. Notice that people who step up focus not on what someone else will do for them, but on what they can do for themselves. The senior leaders, impressed with the supervisors’ initiative but unsure of the ultimate outcome, said, “If you create a highly productive and engaged call center focused on great service, we’d be fools to close you down.” And that is exactly what they did.
Groups of employees began to meet with managers to ask everyone to step up. They worked hard to create an infectious spirit and eventually became one of the most highly engaged work units in the company with over 90 percent of their team members giving high scores on the company wide employee engagement survey. Considering that call centers provide notoriously low-morale, high-turnover jobs, this was no small feat. The spirit became so infectious that the company kept its word. Not only did company leaders not close the call center, but they also recently made a series of significant investments to grow that center as a reward for those employees and managers’ stepping up. Bottom line: we can either sit around and be victims or ask what we can do to change things. Which do you think the world rewards?
How 100/0 Changes Everything
If you doubt the power of these two numbers, 100/0, for even a moment, think about this. How would your company be different if all employees felt 100 percent responsible for the company morale, for the image of the brand, for cutting costs, for their own happiness and careers, and for winning customers? What if instead of looking for someone else to solve a problem, they just began by asking themselves what they can do personally to make things better?
When the employee survey numbers came back, imagine if all team members asked both how they had contributed to the current level of engagement and how they could make things better. Of course, senior managers in a company have a big influence, and there are real constraints that get in the way of stepping up. But when all employees step up and take responsibility for what they can do, the energy shifts.
How might your company—or even your life—be different if you decided not to surrender to your excuses? What would happen if we realized that there are always constraints, and the only question was, How will we work to accomplish our goals given those constraints? Joanne Beaton’s team could not change the fact that operator services was and is a dying business, but by not giving in to that story they focused on stepping up in spite of it.
Think about the impact of those two numbers in a marriage (or in any relationship in our personal or work lives). As was mentioned earlier, in my first career as a Presbyterian minister, I was often called upon to counsel couples who were having trouble in their relationships. Never once in those seven years did a couple arrive with one partner saying, “Wait. Before we even start, I want you to know it’s me who needs to change.” The pervasive norm was the polar opposite, with each person arriving with fingers wagging at the other—if she would just . . . and if he would just . . . then everything would be better.
Now I will grant you as an objective outsider that it often seemed to me as if one person was a little, and sometimes a lot, more responsible. But what I discovered was that if I could get people to look at themselves instead of at the other person, the whole energy shifted. If they said there was not a lot of romance, I would ask, “So tell me what you think you can to bring more romance into the relationship?” It really does not matter what percentage of any problem is created by you; all that really matters is whether you are doing what you can to make it better. One hundred percent responsibility; it’s that simple.
It may be a natural human tendency to focus on what they need to do, but trust me, you will be a lot happier if you focus on what you can do. When you find yourself focusing on an excuse as to why you can’t succeed—whatever excuse it might be—ask if the excuse is useful instead of asking if it is true. What would you do in spite of that excuse to get what you want?
Let me give you a personal example. Historically, I have not been a good networker, which is not a good thing when you run your own business. Once I have a relationship with someone I am very social, but I have a strong fear of reaching out to people I don’t know well. I have a whole list of excuses, all of which are true, for why I am not a good networker: I am shy by nature, did not have good mentors, I had bad acne in high school that played havoc with my self-esteem. All of these excuses are true, valid, and help explain my poor track record as a networker. They also all happen to be useless. The more I focus on them, the more I let myself off the hook. Excuses may be true, but they are rarely useful. Focusing on our excuses, even when they are legitimate, merely locks us into a cycle of inaction.
Part of being 100/0 is a willingness to look in the mirror first, instead of looking outside. When we look inside, we move to a place of responsibility instead of blame. When we take responsibility, full responsibility, for every problem, even if we are only a small contributor, everything changes.
Let’s look at two real life examples of what happens when we take responsibility and when we don’t. A friend of mine is the CEO of a nonprofit. It is his first assignment in such a senior position, and about a year after he became the CEO he ran into some trouble. His board called him to task and basically told him that he needed to make some pretty significant changes in his behavior or they would let him go. At first, his reaction was defensive, 0/100 if you will. He focused on the organization, on its challenging history, and on a few key board members who were dysfunctional. Soon, however, he came to an important realization.
First, he could not fix them any more than you can fix your wife, your husband, your boss, the economy, your history. Second, if he chose a path of self-reflection, this situation could provide a meaningful learning opportunity for him. Instead of focusing on what they were doing, he focused on his part of the problem. He sought feedback, listened without becoming defensive, and asked for board members’ help. He took 100 percent responsibility for the situation. Right now, he and the board are back on track, and most everyone who works with him says he is a better leader than he was before.
The second example has a far less happy ending. Another friend was executive director at a different nonprofit. He felt he was being questioned by his board and blew up several times during meetings, showing some significant emotional immaturity. He bristled when the board wanted to give him some difficult feedback. This executive stayed focused on what others had done to him. Admittedly, he had a somewhat dysfunctional board, but it was no more dysfunctional than many boards. Also, the board had not provided good guidance or feedback for him. But because he never owned his part and stayed focused on what others were doing—rather than on what he could do—the situation deteriorated. Eventually he had to resign.
I am convinced that both of these executives were equally competent, their situations equally redeemable. One chose 100/0, and one chose 0/100. One is gainfully employed now and the other is not.
True Grit
This capacity to work through challenges is probably one of the most underestimated competencies of successful people, which is why I am fascinated by the work of Angela Duckworth, author of Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance. She has studied a concept she calls grit, which she defines as “the tendency to pursue long-term challenging goals with perseverance and passion.” Much of grit as Duckworth has defined it involves the willingness to work hard through adversity to achieve success. She has published a series of journal articles studying this concept and produced a series of videos that you can find on YouTube. One fine article is “Deliberate Practice Spells Success: Why Grittier Competitors Triumph at the National Spelling Bee,” published in 2010 in Social Psychological and Personality Science.
Her research has shown that grit is a better predictor than intelligence of grade point average, retention at the US Military Academy in West Point, and ranking in the national spelling bee. That is, the capacity to work through adversity is a pretty good predictor of success in most any endeavor. Getting started is one thing but staying with a goal even when it gets hard may be the real trick to stepping up.
Rex Weyler and his compatriots did not find the Russian whaling fleet with ease. They endured months of planning, hard disappointments, and moments at sea feeling literally and figuratively lost. If it sounds as though Joanne Beaton and her team at TELUS cruised in turning that business around, think again. There were moments of despair and many times when it looked as if things might not work out. Stepping up requires grit, a willingness to work through the hard times and stay focused on your goal.
To step up and change things we need first to have vision and a naïve belief that things can change, but we also need to take 100 percent responsibility. There will be constraints. Things will get in the way. You will have excuses, but none of them will help you. So repeat after me: “I can change things, and I will take responsibility.”
I am fond of quoting John Wooden on this matter. Wooden happens to have won more national championships than any coach in US men’s college basketball history. He once said, “Things turn out best for those who make the most of how things turn out.”
Ways to Step Up
Determine your part. Whenever you encounter a problem, ask yourself what you have done to contribute to the problem. Then ask, “What can I do to change the situation?”
Don’t make excuses. Next time you are given a tough assignment, don’t make excuses as to why you can’t succeed. The odds are pretty good that your boss or others already know about the constraints and will be more impressed with your willingness to try than with your list of reasons for failure.
Work through adversity. Most everyone who steps up and accomplishes anything had to endure setbacks along the way. Grit may be one of the most important characteristics of people who step up and make things happen. Next time you experience a setback on your way to achieving something, ask yourself, “How else can I get this done?” There is a time to raise the white flag of surrender, but most of us raise it far too soon.