Winning - Jack Welch [6]
IT’S IN THE NITTY-GRITTY DETAILS
When I first became CEO, I was certainly guilty of endorsing vague, too cryptic values. For instance, in 1981, I wrote in the annual report that GE leaders “face reality” and “live excellence” and “feel ownership.” These platitudes sure sounded good, but they had a long way to go toward describing real behaviors.
By 1991, we had made a lot of progress. Over the course of the previous three years, more than five thousand employees spent some portion of their time participating in the development of our values. The result was much more concrete. We printed them on laminated wallet cards. The text included imperatives such as “Act in a boundaryless fashion—always search for and apply the best ideas regardless of their source” and “Be intolerant of bureaucracy” and “See change for the growth opportunity it brings.”
Of course, some of these behaviors required further explana tion and interpretation. And we did that all the time, at meetings, during appraisals, and at the watercooler.
Since leaving GE, I’ve realized how much further still we might have been able to push the discussion about values and behaviors. In 2004, I watched Jamie Dimon and Bill Harrison work together to develop values and behaviors for the new company created by the merger of Bank One and JPMorgan Chase. The document they used to open the dialogue came from Bank One, and it listed values and their corresponding behaviors with a level of detail I had never seen before.
Take the value “We treat customers the way we would want to be treated.” That’s pretty tangible, but Bank One had literally identified the ten or twelve behaviors that made that value come to life. Here are some of them:
Never let profit center conflicts get in the way of doing what is right for the customer.
Give customers a good, fair deal. Great customer relationships take time. Do not try to maximize short-term profits at the expense of building those enduring relationships.
Always look for ways to make it easier to do business with us.
Communicate daily with your customers. If they are talking to you, they can’t be talking to a competitor.
Don’t forget to say thank you.
Another value Bank One had was: “We strive to be the low-cost provider through efficient and great operations.” Some of the prescribed behaviors included:
Leaner is better.
Eliminate bureaucracy.
Cut waste relentlessly.
Operations should be fast and simple.
Value each other’s time.
Invest in infrastructure.
We should know our business best. We don’t need consultants to tell us what to do.
If this level of detail feels overwhelming and even doctrinaire to you, I can sympathize. When I first saw Jamie’s single-spaced, five-page values-and-behaviors document, I nearly fell over. But as I read it, I saw its power.
With all the stories I have heard in the past few years from employees in companies around the world, I’m convinced you cannot be too specific about values and their related behaviors.
AND IT’S IN THE BACKUP
Clarity around values and behaviors is not much good unless it is backed up. To make values really mean something, companies have to reward the people who exhibit them and “punish” those who don’t. Believe me, it will make winning easier.
I say that because every time we asked one of our high-performing managers to leave because he didn’t demonstrate the values—and we said as much publicly—the organization responded incredibly well. In annual surveys over a decade, employees would tell us that we were a company that increasingly lived its values. That made people even more committed to living them too. And as our employee satisfaction results improved, so did our financial results.*
AND FINALLY, IT’S IN THE CONNECTION
A concrete mission is great. And values that describe specific behaviors are too. But for a company’s mission and values to truly work together as a winning proposition, they have to be mutually reinforcing.
It seems obvious, doesn’t it, that a company’s values should support