Execution: The Discipline of Getting Things Done

by Larry Bossidy

Everyone pays lip service

to the idea that leading an organization requires strength of character. In execution it’s absolutely critical. Without what we call emotional fortitude, you can’t be honest with yourself, deal honestly with business and organizational realities, or give people forthright assessments. You can’t tolerate the diversity of viewpoints, mental architectures, and personal backgrounds that organizations need in their members in order to avoid becoming ingrown. If you can’t do these things, you can’t execute. It takes emotional fortitude to be open to whatever information you need, whether it’s what you like to hear or not. Emotional fortitude gives you the courage to accept points of view that are the opposite of yours and deal with conflict, and the confidence to encourage and accept challenges in group settings. It enables you to accept and deal with your own weaknesses, be firm with people who aren’t performing, and to handle the ambiguity inherent in a fast-moving, complex organization. RAM: You surely have noticed that the best leader is often not the most brilliant person in the outfit, or the one who knows most about the business. What gives this person more confidence to be a leader than others who are demonstrably better in one dimension or another? Here’s a clue. A certain executive lacked an essential quality that he needed to be a strong leader. He was the CEO of a large company I worked with, who had two executive vice presidents reporting to him. One VP, responsible...

them to avoid unpleasant situations by ducking conflicts, procrastinating on decisions, or delegating with no follow-through. On the darker side, they may drive the leader to humil...

Emotional fortitude comes from self-discovery and self-mastery. It is the foundation of people skills. Good leaders learn their specific personal strengths and weaknesses, especially in dealing with other people, then build on the strengths and correct the weaknesses. They earn their leadership when the followers see their inner strength, inner confidence, and ability to help team members deliver results, while at the same time expanding their own capabilities.

Getting things done depends ultimately on performing a specific set of behaviors. Without emotional fortitude, it’s tough to develop these behaviors, either in ourselves or in others. How can your organization face reality if people don’t speak honestly, and if its leaders don’t have the confidence to surface and resolve conflicts or give and take honest criticism? How can a group correct mistakes or get better if its members don’t have the emotional fortitude to admit they don’t have all the answers? Putting the right people in the right jobs requires emotional fortitude. Failure to deal with underperformers is an extremely common problem in corporations, and it’s usually the result of the leader’s emotional blockages. Moreover, without emotional fortitude, you will have a hard time hiring the best people to work for you. Because if you are lucky, these people will be better than you are; they will bring new ideas and energy to your operation. A manager who is emotionally weak will avoid such people out of fear that they will undercut his power. His tendency will be to protect his fragile authority. He will surround himself with people he can count on to be loyal and exclude those who will challenge him with new thinking. Eventually, such emotional weakness will destroy both the leader and the organization. In our years of working and observing in organizations, we have pinpointed four core qualities that make up emotional fortitude: AUTHENTICITY: A psychological term...

When you know yourself, you can master yourself. You can keep your ego in check, take responsibility for your behavior, adapt to change, embrace new ideas, and adhere to your standards of integrity and honesty under all conditions. Self-mastery is the key to true self-confidence. We’re talking about the kind that’s authentic and positive, as opposed to the kinds that mask weakness or insecurity—the studied demeanor of confidence, or outright arrogance. Self-confident people contribute the most to dialogues. Their inner security gives them a methodology for dealing with the unknown and for linking it to the actions that need to be taken. They know they don’t know everything; they are actively curious, and encourage debate to bring up opposite views and set up the social ambience of learning from others. They can take risks, and relish hiring people who are smarter than themselves. So when they encounter a problem, they don’t have to whine, cast blame, or feel like victims. They know they’ll be able to fix it. HUMILITY: The more you can contain your ego, the more realistic you are about your problems. You learn how to listen and admit that you don’t know all the answers. You exhibit the attitude that you can learn from anyone at any time. Your pride doesn’t get in the way of gathering the information you need to achieve the best results. It doesn’t keep you from sharing the credit that needs to be shared. Humility allows you to acknowledge your mistakes. Making mistakes ...

Most efforts at cultural change fail because they are not linked to improving the business’s outcomes. The ideas and tools of cultural change are fuzzy and disconnected from strategic and operational realities. To change a business’s culture, you need a set of processes—social operating mechanisms—that will change the beliefs and behavior of people in ways that are directly linked to bottom-line results.

I was observing a meeting at a newly formed division of a company in the Fortune 20. The division, with some 20,000 employees, was the product of a merger in 2001 of two companies in the same industry. It had a new leadership team, and this was only its second meeting. The central issue for the leadership team was how to create a new culture to improve unacceptable performance. Return on capital was less than 6 percent, and shareholder value was being destroyed. The new CEO of the division and the leadership team knew that cost savings through synergies would not be enough to make the division an outstanding performer. The general practice in both merged businesses was not to hold people accountable for commitments they had made individually. Under the rubric of so-called teamwork, each management team performed poorly. For example, each had lost market share and suffered from lower return on investment because its people did not reduce costs in logistics ahead of competitors. This task is one that is truly under management’s control, but the leader in charge of logistics received the same reward as other members of the management team.

The final question was: “After we change our group’s behavior, what do we do next?” The head of HR said, “Communicate it to twenty thousand people.” The leader asked, “How would that make anyone change? It won’t work by itself. What will work is the practice of accountability beginning right here with this team. After we hold ourselves accountable, the next phase is for this team to hold the three hundred managers in this division accountable for their performance, without which three thousand supervisors and seventeen thousand employees will not experience the culture and discipline of execution.” Then they discussed specific action steps for putting accountability into the culture at the top of the division and the three hundred managers reporting to the top team. They would have follow-through, feedback, and rewards tied to individual performance and behavior. The behavior included each management team member holding each of their direct reports accountable as well.

People who are setting out to change a culture often talk first about changing the set of values. That’s the wrong focus. Values—fundamental principles and standards, such as integrity or respect for the customer or in GE’s case boundarylessness—may need to be reinforced, but they rarely need changing. When people, especially those at the highest levels of the company, violate one of the company’s basic values, the leader must step forth to publicly condemn those violations. Anything less is interpreted as a lack of emotional fortitude.

The foundation of changing behavior is linking rewards to performance and making the linkages transparent. A business’s culture defines what gets appreciated and respected and, ultimately, rewarded. It tells the people in the organization what’s valued and recognized, and in the interest of trying to make their own careers more successful, that’s where they will concentrate. If a company rewards and promotes people

for execution, its culture will change.

Far too many companies do a poor job of linking rewar...

wimps.

LOL

Whatever approach you use to determine rewards, the goal is the same: the compensation system has to have the right yields. You should reward not just strong achievements on numbers but also the desirable behaviors that people actually adopt. You should increase the population of A-players, defined as those who are tops in both behavior and performance.

You should remove the nonperformers. Over time, your people will get stronger and you’ll get better financial results.

Linking rewards to performance is necessary to creating an execution culture, but it’s not enough by itself. All too commonly a tough new leader, striving for a performance culture, will set rigorous performance standards and then stand back to watch the play unfold. “Sink or swim” is the message. Lots of people proceed to sink, and the organization may sink too,

Other leaders design rewards for new behaviors of execution but implement them brutally. They don’t take the important step of helping people to master the new required behaviors. They don’t coach. They don’t teach people to break a major concept down into smaller critical tasks that can be executed in the short term, which is difficult for some people. They

don’t conduct the dialogues that surface realities, teach people how to think, or...

THE IMPORTANCE OF ROBUST DIALOGUE

entire section

You cannot have an execution culture without robust dialogue—one that brings reality to the surface through openness, candor, and informality. Robust dialogue makes an organization effective in gathering information, understanding the information, and reshaping it to produce decisions. It fosters creativity—most innovations and inventions are

incubated through robust dialogue. Ultimately, it creates more competitive advantage and shareholder value. Robust dialogue starts when people go in with open minds. They’re not trapped by preconceptions or armed with a private agenda. They want to hear new information and choose the best alternatives, so they listen to all sides of the debate and make their own contributions. When people speak candidly, they express their real opinions, not those that will please the power players or maintain harmony. Indeed, harmony—sought by many leaders who wish to offend no one—can be the enemy of truth. It can squelch critical thinking and drive decision making underground. When harmony prevails, here’s how things often get settled: after the key players leave the session, they quietly veto decisions they didn’t lik...

Informality is critical to candor. It was one of Jack Welch’s bywords. Formality suppresses dialogue; informality encourages it. Formal conversations and presentations leave little room for debate. They suggest that everything is scripted and predetermined. Informal dialogue is open. It invites questions, encouraging spontaneity and critical thinking. At a meeting in a formal, hierarchical setting, a powerful player can get away with killing a good idea. But informality encourages people to test their thinking, to experiment, and to cross-check. It enables them to take risks among colleagues, bosses, and subordinates. Informality gets the truth out. It surfaces out-of-the-box ideas—the ideas that may seem absurd at first hearing but that create breakthroughs. Finally,...

The reason most companies don’t face reality very well is that their dialogues are ineffective. And it shows in their results. Think about the meetings you’ve attended—those that were a hopeless waste of time and those that produced energy and great results. What was the difference? It was not the agenda, not whether the meeting started on time or how disciplined it was, ...

In the typical corporate meeting—a business review, for example—the dialogue is constrained and politicized. Some people want to shade and soften what they say to avoid a confrontation. Others need to beat those they’re talking to into submission. In groups that contain both types of people (which is the case in many meetings), dialogue becomes a combat sport for the killers and a humiliation or bore ...

Now think of a meeting that produced great results—that got to the realities and ended with a plan for results. How did it happen? Dialogue alters the psychology of a group. It can either expand a group’s capacity or shrink it. It can be energizing or energy-draining. It can create self-confidence and optimism, or it can produce pessimism. It can create unity, or it can create bitter factions. Robust dialogue brings out reality, even when that reality makes people uncomfortable, because it has purpose and meaning. It is open, tough, focused, and informal. The aim is to invite multiple viewpoints, see the pros and cons of each one, and try honestly and c...

How do you get people to practice robust dialogue when they’re used to the games and evasions of classical corporate dialogue? It starts at the top, with the dialogues of the o...

robust dialogue, others will take the cue. Some leaders may be short on the emotional fortitude required to invite disagreement without getting defensive. Others may need to learn some specific skills to help people challenge and d...

“The culture of a company is the behavior of its leaders. Leaders get the behavior they exhibit and tolerate.

Can you create an execution culture in your own business if it’s part of a larger organization that doesn’t have one? If you try, will you become a social outcast? The odds are that you can do it—especially once you start showing profit and revenue growth.

Given the many things that businesses can’t control, from the uncertain state of the economy to the unpredictable actions of competitors, you’d think companies would pay careful attention to the one thing they can control—the quality of their people, especially those in the leadership pool. An organization’s human beings are its most reliable resource for generating excellent results year after year. Their judgments, experiences, and capabilities make the difference between success and failure.

Yet the same leaders who exclaim that “people are our most important asset” usually do not think very hard about choosing the right people for the right jobs. They and their organizations don’t have precise ideas about what the jobs require—not only today, but tomorrow—and what kind of people they need to fill those jobs. As a result, their companies don’t hire, promote, and develop the best candidates for their leadership needs.

If you look at any business that’s consistently successful, you’ll find that its leaders focus intensely and relentlessly on people selection. Whether you’re the head of a multibillion-dollar corporation or in charge of your first profit center, you cannot delegate the process for selecting and developing leaders. It’s a job you have to love doing.

The most troubling problem I found when I joined AlliedSignal was the weakness of our operating management team—it wasn’t up to par with our competitors. And we were unlikely to produce future leaders, because we didn’t have any bench strength. When I retired from Allied Signal in 1999, I considered the greatest sign of our strength to be the extraordinary quality of our leadership pipeline. One measure of their quality was that several of our outstanding people had been recruited to lead other organizations, among them Paul Norris (who became CEO of W. R. Grace); Dan Burnham, hired as Raytheon’s CEO; Gregory L. Summe (CEO of PerkinElmer); and Frederic M. Poses (CEO of American Standard). That level of excellence didn’t happen by accident. I had devoted what some people considered an inordinate amount of time and emotional energy to hiring, providing the right experiences for, and developing leaders—between 30 and 40 percent of my day for the first two years and a good 20 percent later. That’s a huge amount of time for a CEO to devote to any single task, but I’m convinced it accounts in large part for AlliedSignal’s success.

This shows just how important leadership development and building bench strength is for a successful organization

I evaluated not only my direct reports but also the direct reports of direct reports, and I sometimes went even further down the organization. In my first three years at AlliedSignal, I personally interviewed many of the three hundred new MBAs we hired, whom we considered our future leaders.

I couldn’t interview everybody, but I knew that the standard I set would be followed in the rest of the organization: you hire a talented person, and they will hire a talented person.

RAM:

Good example

In November 2001 I was having lunch with the head of a consumer products company and his vice chairman. The company had been losing market share, and the discussion at the table identified the source of the problem: weak marketing leadership at the top. The company clearly needed to hire a chief marketing person—it would be a make-or-break job for 2002. The CEO had someone in mind. She had been recommended by Mark, the vice chairman, and the CEO sang her praises, saying, “She’s great, fantastic.” “In what ways?” I asked. When he answered in glittering generalities, I pressed and again asked why he

thought she was so wonderful. Remarkably, he couldn’t be specific, and his face turned crimson. I asked the CEO and the vice chairman what the three nonnegotiable criteria for the job were. After some discussion, they named the following: be extremely good in selecting the right mix of promotion, advertising, and merchandising; have a proven sense of what advertising is effective and how best to place this advertising in TV, radio, and print; have the ability to execute the marketing program in the right timing and sequence so that it is coordinated with the launch of new products; and be able to select the right people to rebuild the marketing department. After they articulated these cri...

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.

When the right people are not in the right jobs, the problem is visible and transparent. Leaders know intuitively that they have a problem and will often readily acknowledge it. But an alarming number don’t do anything to fix the problem. You can’t will this process to happen by issuing directives to find the best talent possible. As noted earlier, leaders need to commit as much as 40 percent of their time and emotional energy,

in one form or another, to selecting, appraising, and developing people. This immense personal commitment is time-consuming and fraught with emotional wear and tear in giving feedback, conducting dialogues, and exposing your judgment to others. But the foundation of a great company is the way it develops people—providing the right experiences, such as learning in different jobs, learning from other people, giving candid feedback, and providing coaching, education, and training. 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.

As we’ve noted earlier, in most companies people regard a good leader as one with vision, strategy, and the ability to inspire others. They assume that if the leader can get the vision and strategy right, and get his message across, the organization’s people will follow. So boards of directors, CEOs, and senior executives are too often seduced by the educational and intellectual qualities of the candidates they interview: Is he conceptual and visionary? Is she articulate, a change agent, and a good communicator, especially with external constituencies such as Wall Street? 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. LARRY: The person who is a little less conceptual but is absolutely determined to succeed will usually find the right people and get them together to achieve objectives. 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. I didn’t always understand that. I too was of the mind that the better...

Very important

Louis Gerstner, chairman and, until recently, CEO of IBM; Jim McNerny, CEO of 3M; and Art Collins, CEO of Medtronics.

Outdated

Some leaders drain energy from people and others create it. Suppose you interview someone who has great potential—he’s got an elite education, good work experience, and high marks for achievement. But he’s docile and reserved—he just sits there. Sometimes people like that just don’t interview well, and if he’s had great success, I may have to take a lot more time looking at his record before approving or disapproving him. But I’m wary about hiring him for an important leadership job. He’s likely to pick people like himself, and you’ll have to ring a bell to wake them up. I want people who arrive in the morning with a smile on their faces, who are upbeat, ready to take on the tasks of the day or the month or the year. They’re going to create energy, and energize the people they work with—and they’re going to hire people like that too.

Energy is contagious

Decisiveness is the ability to make difficult decisions swiftly and well, and act on them. Organizations are filled with people who dance around decisions without ever making them. Some leaders simply do not have the emotional fortitude to confront the tough ones. When they don’t, everybody in the business knows they are wavering, procrastinating, and avoiding reality.

Or suppose someone you really like isn’t cutting the mustard. Few tough issues are more challenging for indecisive leaders than dealing with people they’ve promoted who are not performing.

Getting things done through others is a fundamental leadership skill. Indeed, if you can’t do it, you’re not leading. Yet how many leaders do you see who cannot? 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. They wind up making all of the key decisions about details themselves, so they don’t have time to deal with the larger issues they should be focusing on, or respond to the surprises that inevitably come along. Others abandon their people. They believe wholeheartedly in delegating: let people grow on their own, sink or swim, empower themselves. They explain the challenge (sometimes at such a high level of abstraction that it amounts to superficiality) and toss the ball entirely into their people’s court. They don’t set milestones, and they don’t follow through. Then, when things don’t get done as expected, they’re frustrated. Both types reduce the capabilities of their organizations. Some people are just temperamentally unable to work well with others.

Learn how to get things done through others. Because if you can’t get things done through others, ultimately you’re going to sink or burn out.” If they promote others on the basis of very long hours worked—which they will, because that’s what impresses them—those people will have the same problem.

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.