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April 16 - April 21, 2020
Most people know someone in their organization who doesn’t perform well, yet manages to keep his job year after year. The usual reason, we find, is that the person’s leader doesn’t have the emotional fortitude to confront him and take decisive action. Such failures can do considerable damage to a business. If the nonperformer is high enough in the organization, he can destroy it.
If you spend the same amount of time and energy developing people as you do on budgeting, strategic planning, and financial monitoring, the payoff will come in sustainable competitive advantage.
They don’t ask the most important question: How good is this person at getting things done? In our experience, there’s very little correlation between those who talk a good game and those who get things done come hell or high water. Too often the second kind are given short shrift. But if you want to build a company that has excellent discipline of execution, you have to select the doer.
I’m not knocking education or looking for dumb people. But if you have to choose between someone with a staggering IQ and an elite education who’s gliding along, and someone with a lower IQ but who is absolutely determined to succeed, you’ll always do better with the second person.
You’re searching for people with an enormous drive for winning. These people get their satisfaction from getting things done. The more they succeed in getting things done, the more they increase their capacity.
You can easily spot the doers by observing their working habits. They’re the ones who energize people, are decisive on tough issues, get things done through others, and follow through as second nature.
The leaders whose visions come true build and sustain their people’s momentum. They bring it down to earth, focusing on short-term accomplishments—the adrenaline-pumping goals that get scored on the way to winning the game.
Deeply involved in all aspects of his business, he is curious and tireless—the personification of engagement. He never finishes a conversation without summarizing the actions to be taken.
Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill.
Some smother their people, blocking their initiative and creativity. They’re the micromanagers, insecure leaders who can’t trust others to get it right because they don’t know how to calibrate them and monitor their performance.
People who can’t work with others reduce the capacities of their organizations. They don’t get the full benefit of their people’s talents, and they waste everybody’s time, including their own.
Never finish a meeting without clarifying what the follow-through will be, who will do it, when and how they will do it, what resources they will use, and how and when the next review will take place and with whom.
The first things I look for are energy and enthusiasm for execution.
What does this person want to talk about? Does she talk about the thrill of getting things done, or does she keep wandering back to strategy or philosophy? Does she detail the obstacles that she had to overcome? Does she explain the roles played by the people assigned to her? Does she seem to have the ability to persuade and enlist others in a mission?
You can’t spend too much time on obtaining and developing the best people.
“How does he set priorities? What qualities is he known for? Does he include people in decision making? What is his work ethic and his energy level?”
The bottom line is that you have to be persistent in checking references and getting to the heart of the matter.
How leaders meet their commitments is at least as important as whether they meet them and is often more important. Meeting them the wrong way can do enormous damage to an organization.
When the wrong people get rewarded, the whole organization loses. Problems don’t get fixed, nonperformers get ahead, and the good performers start looking for jobs at places where their contributions will be recognized.
Nowhere is candid dialogue more important than in the people process. If people can’t speak forthrightly in evaluating others, then the evaluation is worthless—to the organization, and to the person who needs the feedback.
More often a manager thinks, If I sit down and tell this person she has a behavioral problem, that’s a confrontational discussion, and I don’t want to have that with her. Without guidance, practice, and support, moreover, many managers don’t have enough confidence in their objective judgments to be critical.
If you sit down with your boss and your boss hasn’t said something to you about your weaknesses, go back! Because otherwise you’re not going to learn anything.”
I tell my leaders they have to do the assessments in their everyday common language and in their words—not in human-resource-professional lingo.
A good, candid assessment talks about the things a candidate does well and the things he or she must do better. It’s that simple. It doesn’t use words that don’t say anything. It’s very straightforward. It’s specific. It’s to the point. It’s useful.
If I’m doing the appraisal, at the end I’ll say, “Now I’m going to give you the last line. You’ve heard what I think—what would you like to add to this?”
People who are not accustomed to giving candid appraisals will struggle with the process at first.
There’s nothing sophisticated about the process of getting the right people in the right jobs. It’s a matter of being systematic and consistent in interviewing and appraising people and developing them through useful feedback.
If you have leaders with the right behavior, a culture that rewards execution, and a consistent system for getting the right people in the right jobs, the foundation is in place for operating and managing each of the core processes effectively.
One of the biggest shortcomings of the traditional people process is that it’s backward-looking, focused on evaluating the jobs people are doing today. Far more important is whether the individuals can handle the jobs of tomorrow
Identifying the match between the right person and the right job is not always as clear-cut as in the case above. Sometimes it means replacing an excellent performer with a person who is better equipped to take the business to the next level.
The people process at companies like GE, Colgate, and Honeywell provide their bench strength. In the mid-1990s, when it had become clear that GE was the world’s best producer of leadership talent, its division presidents were all retention risks.
Identifying high-potential and promotable people avoids two dangers. One is organizational inertia—keeping people in the same jobs for too long (a common practice in some industries). The other is moving people up too quickly (such as the twenty somethings at dotcom companies who didn’t have the experience to handle senior management positions).
The assessor says a person is doing “wonderfully,” and under the heading for development needs he puts “none.” Who is this manager kidding? The good Lord had some development needs.
“I do not see your successor in your organization. You must develop your replacement. This is a worldwide, complicated, exciting business where we need the best people.
Preserving the dignity of people who leave jobs is an important part of reinforcing the positive nature of the performance culture.
If you’re starting to think that human resources is less important in an execution culture, let us correct that impression. It’s more important than ever but its role has to change radically. HR has to be integrated into the business processes. It has to be linked to strategy and operations, and to the assessments that the line people ultimately make about people.
the execution of your new strategy.’ “When we consider whether a person is right for their job, we place them in one of three categories: a good fit, a stretch, or an action required.
“Before we started in 1999, it took us on average about sixteen weeks to fill a vice presidential position. After the second quarter this year, we’re down to seven because we’re much more efficient. We’ve got a lot of discipline there. We follow up on it weekly. We move right through it.
So now we don’t just say ‘He’s a good guy’ or ‘She’s really smart’—we say, ‘We don’t see in this person the ability to operationalize,’ or ‘That person is primarily operational and doesn’t seem to have the strategic perspective.’”
“One, a culture of accountability for high performance, which makes you demand the best individuals in your organization. Two, a leader who is not only willing but also ready to question an assessment. Three, a collegial culture among the top executives of the enterprise, where they hold each other mutually accountable to be reasonable and fair and will push back on one another, just as the chairman will push back. And four, giving me, as the head of HR, the right to push too, because I have a fundamentally different perspective because of the work I do. I’m not a small executive of the
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If a company has the right people, in all likelihood its strategies will be in sync with the realities of the marketplace, the economy, and the competition.
Corporate-level strategy is the vehicle for allocating resources among all of the business units. But it should not be simply the sum of those parts. If it is, then the business units could do just as well standing on their own (or better, since they wouldn’t bear the burden of corporate overhead). Corporate leaders must add value to strategies created at the business unit level.
At GE, for example, the boundarylessness that Jack Welch introduced assures a constant exchange of ideas and best practices among diverse business managers, significantly multiplying the company’s intellectual capital.
GE’s celebrated people process started as a Jack Welch initiative for human resources to produce a systematic way of assessing talent that would help develop future leaders.
A business unit strategy should be less than fifty pages long and should be easy to understand. Its essence should be describable in one page in terms of its building blocks, as we’ve shown for AT&T and the automotive parts manufacturer. If you can’t describe your strategy in twenty minutes, simply and in plain language, you haven’t got a plan.
“But,” people may say, “I’ve got a complex strategy. It can’t be reduced to a page.” That’s nonsense. That’s not a complex strategy. It’s a complex thought about the strategy. The strategy itself isn’t complex. Every strategy ultimately boils down to a few simple building blocks.
A good strategic plan is a set of directions you want to take. It’s a roadmap, lightly filled in, so that it gives you plenty of room to maneuver.
To be effective, a strategy has to be constructed and owned by those who will execute it, namely the line people. Staff people can help by collecting data and using analytical tools, but the business leaders must be in charge of developing the substance of the strategic plan.
