Winning - Jack Welch [39]
The final relationship that cannot be ignored is with disrupters. These are the individuals who cause trouble for sport—inciting opposition to management for a variety of reasons, most of them petty.
Usually these people have good performance—that’s their cover—and so they are endured or appeased.
A company that manages people well takes disrupters head-on. First they give them very tough evaluations, naming their bad behavior and demanding it change. Usually it won’t. Disrupters are a personality type. If that’s the case, get them out of the way of people trying to do their jobs. They’re poison.
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PRACTICE 5. Fight gravity, and instead of taking the middle 70 percent for granted, treat them like the heart and soul of the organization.
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As practice 4 would suggest, managers end up spending the vast majority of their people-management energy on charged relationships—too often trying to salvage sliders or disrupters. That’s natural, but it’s a mistake.
Most work in an organization gets done by the people in the middle 70, those solid performers who don’t quite shine but work hard and well, and perhaps could shine with enough care and attention. You just can’t allow the middle 70 to toil away in a form of obscurity, like a well-behaved, mild-mannered middle child in a family of attention-grabbing prodigies and troublemakers.
Well-managed companies fight that pull. In fact, they make sure managers spend at least 50 percent of their people time on their biggest constituency, evaluating and coaching them. Further, they don’t forget the middle 70 when it comes to rewards, recognition, and training.
One important note. In larger companies, the middle 70 can be a highly differentiated group. In a way, it has its own top 20, valuable middle, and bottom 10 percent. You need to recognize those performance variations—you can be sure the employees do. In fact, a common and damaging dynamic is the departure of the best performers in the middle 70. Some of these individuals are almost stars—their performance is that close. But when they get lumped with the middle 70 and are not managed attentively, they leave in frustration for a company where they will be more appreciated. That’s a real loss.
Future stars are very often hard at work—quietly—in the middle 70. A good company recognizes that and makes it clear that this ranking is just a snapshot in time. It encourages this group, using every tool in its people management kit.
The point is: The middle 70 matters a lot. It is the heart and soul—the central core—of any company.
If you’re going to manage people well, you simply cannot forget the majority of them.
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PRACTICE 6. Design the org chart to be as flat as possible, with blindingly clear reporting relationships and responsibilities.
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In 2004, Clayton, Dubilier & Rice purchased Culligan International, the water treatment and supply business with about $700 million in annual sales and about five thousand employees spread across thirteen countries. One of CD&R’s partners, George Tamke, the former co-CEO of Emerson Electric, was named chairman. George was well aware that Culligan had been through ten owners in the previous fifteen years, but he couldn’t believe the organizational disarray that hit him when he walked through the door. George found that many employees simply didn’t know where they fit in—whom they reported to, who reported to them, and what results each person was responsible for.
George had had the luxury of studying the business for ninety days prior to CD&R’s closing the deal, so he had a clear idea of how Culligan should be organized. Within thirty days, George and Culligan’s relatively new CEO, Mike Kachmer, had designed and implemented a new org chart that eliminated any confusion.*
It’s too early to talk about the impact of this change on Culligan’s