Winning - Jack Welch [35]
Along with stature, pastor-parent types have got integrity oozing out of them. That integrity comes from unrelenting candor and trustworthiness. Pastor-parents listen with uncommon care, tell the truth, and hold confidences tight.
They also know how to settle a disagreement.
We’d all like to believe that good companies don’t need referees. But they do. People get passed over for promotions. Interdivisional sales cause all kinds of who-gets-the-credit issues. Bonus pools are perceived to be unfairly distributed.
I was lucky enough to have a few pastor-parent types on my team at various points in my career, the last one being Bill Conaty, whom I’ve mentioned before in this book. Bill started out in GE’s manufacturing training program and eventually became the manager of the locomotive diesel engine plant in Grove City, Pennsylvania. He then jumped ship to the HR business. He was a natural. No matter with whom he was dealing—a senior executive or an hourly worker—he was as straight as could be with good news and bad. He was a great listener and so discrete that you couldn’t squeeze a secret out of him with a vise.
I came to appreciate Bill when he was head of HR for Aircraft Engines. The business had a huge crisis in ’89, when it was discovered that one of its employees had bribed an Israeli air force general to get a jet engine contract. What impressed me was how Bill dealt with the people involved in the mess, some of whom were his peers and friends. He had to make incredibly painful recommendations about letting people go, and he did it with the kind of candor, compassion, and diplomacy that is the ultimate hallmark of a pastor-parent.
If your HR is on track, pastor-parents are ready to handle frictions and crises—channeling anger, forging compromises, and if need be, negotiating dignified endings.
They are there to help managers manage people well.
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PRACTICE 2: Use a rigorous, nonbureaucratic evaluation system, monitored for integrity with the same intensity as Sarbanes-Oxley Act compliance.
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Remember what happened when corporate scandals rocked the American economy? The government reacted quickly by passing the Sarbanes-Oxley Act, which mandates a fine or jail time or both for any CEO or CFO who wittingly signs off on bad numbers.
The Sarbanes-Oxley Act was necessary to get credibility in financial reporting and restore investor confidence.
I just wish that evaluation systems got the same kind of attention and rigor. After all, financial violations happen because of people.*
Yet people evaluation systems are too often just exercises in paper pushing.
Earlier in this book, in the chapter on candor, I mentioned that I often ask audiences, “How many of you have received an honest, straight-between-the-eyes feedback session in the past year, where you came out knowing exactly what you have to do to improve and where you stand in the organization?”
To repeat: 20 percent of the audience raises its hand on a good day, but the average yes-response is about 10 percent.
If this unscientific research is anywhere near right, very few companies have meaningful evaluation systems in place.
That’s not just bad—it’s terrible!
You simply cannot manage people to better performance if you do not give candid, consistent feedback through a system that is loaded with integrity.
There is no one right way to evaluate people. Every company will devise different forms and different methodologies. But any good evaluation system should share some characteristics.
It should be clear and simple, washed clean of time-consuming bureaucratic gobbledygook. If your evaluation system involves more than two pages of paperwork per person, something is wrong. I evaluated my twenty or so direct reports with frequent handwritten notes