Winning - Jack Welch [22]
I had just that kind of experience last year when I was out hawking an investment fund for Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, where I consult. At one dinner session in Chicago, the room was filled with about a dozen investors, all focused on our investment criteria and projections for returns.*
Steve Klimkowski, the chief investment officer of Northwestern Memorial HealthCare, was one of them. But in the midst of all the financial chatter, he was just as interested in talking about his hospital’s mission to deliver “excellent patient care—from the patient’s perspective.” He had examples of how employees at every level—including him, the investment guy—had transformed their work to fulfill the vision. He had been coached, for example, never to give outpatients directions to a location in the hospital, but to walk them there. At his performance review, Steve had been asked to list several ways in which he personally had improved the patient’s experience at Northwestern Memorial. In fact, Steve’s understanding of his role in achieving the mission, and his passion for it, were so real that after talking to him for fifteen minutes, you could wake me in the middle of the night and I could tell you about it!
Clearly, Northwestern Memorial’s leaders had communicated the hospital’s vision with amazing clarity and consistency. And that’s the point. You have to talk about vision constantly—basically, to the point of gagging. There were times I talked about the company’s direction so many times in one day that I was completely sick of hearing it myself. But I realized the message was always new to someone. And so, you keep on repeating it.
And you talk to everyone.
One of the most common problems in organizations is that leaders communicate the vision to their closest colleagues and its implications never filter down to people in frontline positions. Think about all the times you have bumped into a rude or harried clerk at a high-service department store, or been put on hold by a call center operator at a company that promises speed and convenience.
Somehow, they haven’t heard the mission, maybe because it wasn’t shouted in their direction, loud enough or often enough.
Or maybe their rewards weren’t aligned.
And that’s the final piece of this particular leadership rule. If you want people to live and breathe the vision, “show them the money” when they do, be it with salary, bonus, or significant recognition of some sort. To quote a friend of mine, Chuck Ames, the former chairman and CEO of Reliance Electric, “Show me a company’s various compensation plans, and I’ll show you how its people behave.”
Vision is an essential element of the leader’s job. But no vision is worth the paper it’s printed on unless it is communicated constantly and reinforced with rewards. Only then will it leap off the page—and come to life.
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RULE 3. Leaders get into everyone’s skin, exuding positive energy and optimism.
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You know that old saying “The fish rots from the head.” It’s mainly used to refer to how politics and corruption filter down into an organization, but it could just as easily be used to describe the effect of a bad attitude at the top of any team, large or small. Eventually, everyone’s infected.
The leader’s mood is, for lack of a better word, catching. You’ve seen the dynamic a hundred times. An upbeat manager who goes through the day with a positive outlook somehow ends up running a team or organization filled with…well, upbeat people with positive outlooks. A pessimistic sourpuss somehow ends up with an unhappy tribe all his own.
Unhappy tribes have a tough time winning.
Of course, sometimes there are good reasons to be down. The economy is bad, competition is brutal—whatever. Work can be hard.
But your job as leader is to fight the gravitational pull of negativism. That doesn’t mean you sugarcoat the challenges your