Winning - Jack Welch [21]
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RULE 1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach, and build self-confidence.
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After the Boston Red Sox finally broke an eighty-six–year drought and won the World Series, you couldn’t turn on the TV or open a paper without hearing speculation as to why 2004 was “the year.” There were theories about everything, from centerfielder Johnny Damon’s hairstyle to the lunar eclipse!
Most people agreed, however, that the reason wasn’t mysterious at all. The Red Sox had the best players. The pitching staff was the league’s best, the fielders were good enough, and the hitters…well, they were sensational. And they were all bound together by a winning spirit so palpable you could feel it in the air.
There are lucky breaks and bad calls in any season, but the team with the best players usually does win. And that is why, very simply, you need to invest the vast majority of your time and energy as a leader in three activities.
You have to evaluate—making sure the right people are in the right jobs, supporting and advancing those who are, and moving out those who are not.
You have to coach—guiding, critiquing, and helping people to improve their performance in every way.
And finally, you have to build self-confidence—pouring out encouragement, caring, and recognition. Self-confidence energizes, and it gives your people the courage to stretch, take risks, and achieve beyond their dreams. It is the fuel of winning teams.
Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a year in performance reviews. That’s not even close.*
People development should be a daily event, integrated into every aspect of your regular goings-on.
Take budget reviews. They are a perfect occasion to focus on people. That’s right, people. Yes, you need to talk about the business and its results, but in a budget review you can really see team dynamics in action. If everyone around the table sits silent and frozen while the team leader pontificates, you’ve got some serious coaching to do. If everyone’s involved in the presentation and the whole team is alive, you’ve got a great opportunity to give immediate feedback that you like what you see. If the team has a real star or a dud in its midst, share your impressions with its leader as soon as you can.
There is no event in your day that cannot be used for people development.
Customer visits are a chance to evaluate your sales force. Plant tours are an opportunity to meet promising new line managers and see if they have the ability to run something bigger. A coffee break at a meeting is an opening to coach a team member who is about to give his first major presentation.
And remember in all these encounters, evaluating and coaching are great, but building self-confidence is, in the end, probably the most important thing you can do. Take every opportunity to inject self-confidence into those who have earned it. Use ample praise, the more specific the better.
Besides its huge impact on upgrading the team, the best thing about using every encounter for people development is how much fun it is. Instead of mind-numbing meetings about numbers and plant tours showing off new machines, every day is about growing people. In fact, think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a can of fertilizer in the other. Occasionally you have to pull some weeds, but most of the time, you just nurture and tend.
Then watch everything bloom.
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RULE 2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision, they live and breathe it.
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It goes without saying that leaders have to set the team’s vision and most do. But there’s so much more to the “vision thing” than that. As a leader, you have to make the vision come alive.
How do you achieve that? First of all, no jargon. Goals cannot sound noble but vague. Targets cannot be so blurry they can’t be hit. Your direction has to be so vivid that if you randomly woke one of your employees in the middle of the night and asked him, “Where are we