Winning - Jack Welch [26]
There is no edict in the world that will make people take risks or spend their time learning. In most cases, their risk-reward equation just isn’t obvious enough.
If you want to change that, set the example yourself. You’ll love the exciting culture you create and the results you get—and so will your team.
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RULE 8. Leaders celebrate.
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What is it about celebrating that makes managers so nervous? Maybe throwing a party doesn’t seem professional, or it makes managers worry that they won’t look serious to the powers that be, or that, if things get too happy at the office, people will stop working their tails off.
Whatever the reason, there is just not enough celebrating going on at work—anywhere. When I travel, I frequently ask audiences if they’ve done anything to recognize their team’s achievements—large or small—over the past year. I’m not talking about those stilted, company-orchestrated parties that everyone hates, in which the whole team is marched out to a local restaurant for an evening of forced merriment when they’d rather be home. I’m talking about sending a team to Disney World with their families, or giving each team member two tickets to a great show in New York, or handing each team member a new iPod or the like.
But to my question “Do you celebrate enough?” almost no one raises a hand.
It’s not as if GE was immune to this phenomenon. I harped on the importance of celebrating for twenty years. But during my last trip as CEO to our training center in Crotonville, I asked the hundred or so managers in the class, “Do you celebrate enough in your units?” Even knowing what I wanted them to say, less than half answered yes.*
What a lost opportunity. Celebrating makes people feel like winners and creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy. Imagine a team winning the World Series without champagne spraying everywhere. You just can’t! And yet companies win all the time and let it go without so much as a high five.
Work is too much a part of life not to recognize moments of achievement. Grab as many as you can. Make a big deal out of them. If you don’t, no one will.
There is no easy formula for being a leader. If only!
Leadership is challenging—all those balancing acts, all the responsibility, all that pressure.
And yet, good leadership happens—and it comes in all kinds of packages. There are quiet leaders and bombastic ones. There are analytical leaders and more impulsive ones. Some are tough as nails with their teams, others more nurturing. On the surface, you would be hard-pressed to say what qualities these leaders share.
Underneath, you would surely see that the best care passionately about their people—about their growth and success. And you would see that they themselves are comfortable in their own skins. They’re real, filled with candor and integrity, optimism and humanity.
I am often asked if leaders are born or made. The answer, of course, is both. Some characteristics, like IQ and energy, seem to come with the package. On the other hand, you learn some leadership skills, like self-confidence, at your mother’s knee, and at school, in academics and sports. And you learn others at work through iterative experience—trying something, getting it wrong and learning from it, or getting it right and gaining the self-confidence to do it again, only better.
For most of us, leadership happens one day when you become a boss and the rules change.
Before, your job was about yourself.
Now, it’s about them.
6
Hiring
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WHAT WINNERS ARE MADE OF
SOMETIMES WHEN I APPEAR before business audiences, I get a question that totally stumps me, as in: I have no clue about the right answer. A couple of years ago at a convention of insurance executives in San Diego, for instance, a woman stood up and said, “What is the one thing you should ask in an interview to help you decide whom to hire?”
I shook my head. “The one thing?” I said. “I can’t come up with one. What do you think?”
“That’s why I’m asking you!” she replied.
The audience roared,