Winning - Jack Welch [18]
I might add that in business, energetic and extroverted people generally do better, but results speak for themselves, loud and clear. Differentiation hears them.
If you want the best people on your team, you need to face up to differentiation. I don’t know of any people management system that does it better—with more transparency, fairness, and speed. It isn’t perfect. But differentiation, like candor, clarifies business and makes it run better in every way.
4
Voice and Dignity
* * *
EVERY BRAIN IN THE GAME
RUDY GIULIANI HAS A SAYING: “Know what you believe.” I think he’s right, so I want to conclude this section of the book with one of my core beliefs. I mention it because it is the hinge for every principle you’ve just read about—mission and values, candor, and differentiation.
The belief is this: every person in the world wants voice and dignity, and every person deserves them.
By “voice,” I mean people want the opportunity to speak their minds and have their ideas, opinions, and feelings heard, regardless of their nationality, gender, age, or culture.
By “dignity,” I mean people inherently and instinctively want to be respected for their work and effort and individuality.
If you’ve just read the above and said, “Well, obviously,” then fine. I am assuming that most people are having that response. And maybe the belief in voice and dignity doesn’t even need to be stated, it is so widely accepted and its importance is so self-evident. But I have been surprised over the past couple of years at how often I end up coming back to this value when I talk about winning.*
Last year in China, a young woman in the audience stood and, literally in tears, asked how any businessperson in her country could practice candor and differentiation when “only the voice of the boss is allowed.”
“We, the people underneath, have so many ideas. But we cannot even imagine speaking them until we are the boss,” she said. “That is fine if you are an entrepreneur and start your own company. Then you are the boss. But some of us are not able to do that.”
I said that in the early days of GE’s operations in China, I had seen the difficulties she had just described at our factories in Nansha, Shanghai, and Beijing. But as the plants developed and business practices evolved, I had seen an enormous improvement in how the Chinese leaders who worked for GE were listening to employees. I told her that I was confident that, with China’s expanding market economy and the maturation of its management practices, a more inclusive approach would eventually spread.
But the repression of voice and dignity is hardly a Chinese problem. In fact, while the Chinese woman was very emotional in her questioning, people in every country I’ve visited share some of her frustration and concern on this matter.
Now, when you are running a unit or a division, you rarely think that people aren’t speaking up or that they’re not respected. It feels like the people around you certainly are, and your days are filled with visits, calls, and notes from people with strong opinions. But it ends up that what you experience is a skewed sample. The majority of people in most organizations don’t say anything because they feel they can’t—and because they haven’t been asked.*
That became clear to me in the late 1980s, just about every time I had a marathon session at our training center in Crotonville. Detailed questions about local business issues—questions that should have been answered back on home turf—were thrown at me from every direction. “Why is the refrigeration plant getting all the new equipment while we’re letting laundry suffer?” and “What are we moving the GE90 engine assembly to Durham for, when we can do it right here in Evandale?”
In frustration, after