Winning - Jack Welch [48]
Now, Denis—like most change agents—is not always easy to work for. He constantly asks questions, pushes people hard, and just never settles. In the process, some people can feel threatened or scared. But Denis is not a whatever-works, smooth-things-over kind of person. Successful change agents rarely are.
The point here is that to make change, you need true believers at the top, and get-on-with-it types everywhere else. Take the case of Bob Nardelli at The Home Depot.
The Home Depot, like GE’s appliances business, was a company where the idea of change seemed ludicrous to most people in the organization. When Bob arrived in December 2000, the company looked perfect from the outside, and everyone inside was thrilled with the level of earnings and growth. The founders of the company had done a remarkable job of building the company from nothing, along the way sharing stock options with thousands of employees, who loved the ride as the profits soared through the 1990s.
But two things were happening that no one wanted to face. The business had gotten big with few internal processes in place—careful inventory tracking, stocking policies, and buying guidelines, to name three—and was having trouble maintaining its competitiveness. Lowe’s, its principal competitor, was chipping away at Home Depot’s lead with better service and more modern stores.
Bob was running the company for about a month when he started boldly talking about these problems, using tons of data. But few people at any level were buying his story of Home Depot as a fixer-upper. Many employees from the good old days openly pined for the times when the founders ran the company and everyone was getting richer by the hour. Who could blame them for the nostalgia?
But things had to change, and Bob knew that he couldn’t do that with the team he had inherited. He quickly brought in his own people—true believers—and promoted several longtime employees whom he had identified as get-on-with-its. Together, they put the missing processes into Home Depot and got growth back into the company. Bob had no wind at his back, but he did have the right people by his side.
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3. Ferret out and remove the resisters, even if their performance is satisfactory.
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When it comes to making change, this is the hardest practice to implement. In the last chapter, I talked about how hard it is to let anyone go, but it is particularly difficult to fire people who are not actually screwing up and may in fact be doing quite well.
But in any organization, as the Appliances and Home Depot stories show, there is a core of people who absolutely will not accept change, no matter how good your case. Either their personalities just can’t take it, or they are so entrenched—emotionally, intellectually, or politically—in the way things are, they cannot see a way to make them better.*
These people usually have to go.
Maybe that sounds harsh, but you are doing no one a favor by keeping resisters in your organization. They foster an underground resistance and lower the morale of the people who support change. They waste their own time at a company where they don’t share the vision, and they should be encouraged to find one where they do.
Take this extraordinary example. It’s about Bill Harrison, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, who asked a well-respected, high-level executive to leave during his change process at the bank. His move was even more stunning in that Bill did it when his own political capital was low—in the middle of the Enron collapse, when many people wondered if Bill would personally take the fall for the bank’s loans to Enron and to other high-profile troubled companies.
During this period, Bill was instituting an executive