How - Dov Seidman [153]
Seeing through the lens of HOW leads you to make decisions based on principle—a sound, central core of beliefs that expresses long-term values. In a transparent world, where everything that can be known will be known, only principled decision making can guide the kind of consistency of purpose you need to build trust and reputation. Acting from principle rather than pragmatism also makes you more efficient and nimble. Because you will not spend as much time dancing with rules or comparing short-term gains, you can act more intuitively and with more clarity rather than in a slow and calculated fashion. The best possible decision will be more immediately apparent to you because it will spring from your deepest values. You will act with more certainty, confidence, and trust in your choices.
If you want to become enduring and self-sustaining, you must focus your thinking through the lens of principled thought, and let those values-based considerations inform everything you do or say.
Be Rigorous about the Truth of the Present
Shortly after Steve Wynn opened the eponymous Wynn Las Vegas resort in 2005 to great fanfare and acclaim, he realized he had a problem. 14 Dealers and floor people in Wynn’s casinos are usually the best-paid in the industry and derive most of their income from tips that are pooled and divided among the frontline service personnel who run the gaming tables. “I made a mistake,” he told me from Macau, where he was working on his newest project. “It turned out, unfortunately, that the dealers were making all of the tips and the floor people and supervisors who serve the customers side by side with the dealers were not receiving any, meaning the dealers were making more than their supervisors. This disparity caused dissatisfaction and resentment among the floor people, who thought it unfair. Plus, because of the inverted compensation structure, I had difficulty recruiting dealers to step up and become supervisors. The casino was suffering.”15
You can only take risks, as we know, when you have a strong foundation of trust. Trust enables risk, which allows innovation and leads to progress: TRIP. But when mistakes are made and realized, a leader has only two choices: to let them be and absorb the cost or to expend the resources necessary to correct them. In Wynn’s case, he had to choose between an inverted and unfair compensation structure that was detrimental to the growth of his operation, and disrupting the morale of his dealers by altering their pay package and jeopardizing their trust. “It was a terrible scenario,” Wynn said. “I thought about it for months, but I couldn’t let it stand. This was the first time in my whole career that I had to double back and do something that would hurt my employees’ compensation package. It felt like cutting off one of my fingers.”
No matter how painful or personally embarrassing the truth may be, leaders step up and face it head-on. Over the course of many face-to-face meetings, Wynn told his dealers he was revamping the way the tip pool was divided to create greater rewards for those who stepped up and accepted more responsibility. “I told them I had made a mistake, that it was my job to treat everyone fairly, that a group of them were getting screwed, and that I was going to make a change. I said, ‘Look, I’m here, and I’m going to meet with every employee in this company, every dealer, because I owe you now and forever an explanation of the thinking behind our decisions, especially one that impacts your life.’ ”
Despite his transparency, the dealers were predictably (and perhaps understandably) upset. Even after many discussions, some of them filed suit in the district courts and with the Labor Commission. Ultimately, those lawsuits were dismissed. Even after the rigors and combativeness