Executive Edge Newsletter - Lessons from Leaders

Demonstrate Authenticity

David Novak is the chairman and chief executive officer of Yum! Brands, Inc. In Taking People With You, he writes about being your best self.

People know and follow the real deal when they see it — those who walk through life on their own terms, who stay true to their beliefs, and who don't back down. We can all name people like this, and there's often a pretty broad consensus that such diverse figures as Nelson Mandela, Mahatma Gandhi, Oprah Winfrey, Muhammad Ali and Winston Churchill are (or were) all real deals, which goes to show that authenticity can be demonstrated in many different styles.

I call this having "extraordinary authenticity," which means having the ability to be yourself even in the toughest situations. This requires living with a paradox: To inspire as a leader, you need to know your stuff, but you also need to be able to admit when you don't know stuff. You need to be both confident and vulnerable at the same time.

Allowing yourself to be vulnerable can be hard enough for most of us, but in the business world, the idea of being yourself is further complicated by the fact that it's also important to get along with all sorts of people while staying true to yourself. You obviously can't just say to colleagues or customers, "This is me being myself, take it or leave it." Not if you want to get ahead. Instead, you have to figure out how to be you in a way that broadens your appeal and impact versus turning people off or unnecessarily clashing with company culture.

Lead Every Moment

Appointed President and CEO of Campbell Soup Company in 2001, Douglas Conant led the company until July 31, 2011. Under Conant's leadership, Campbell reversed a precipitous decline in market value and employee engagement. In TouchPoints, he writes about the power of the planned or spontaneous moments that can bring your strategies and priorities to life.

It's 3:30 p.m. You're holed up in your office, trying to grab some time to finish a proposal that's critical to the future of your department — and your own career — when a team member knocks on your door to ask for advice. How do you respond? Do you give in to the flash of irritation and tell him to come back later? Or do you stop what you are doing and help him right now? It's your choice.

As a leader, you make these choices all day, every day. The "knock of the door" happens over and over again — phone calls, meetings, emails and text messages, all with questions to answer and fires to put out. The workload is expanding, and the time you have to deal with each issue is shrinking. Some days it feels as if the information age has morphed into the interruption age.

But what if you could step back and look at these interactions with a fresh perspective? What if instead of seeing them as interfering with your work, you were to look at them as latent leadership moments? What if these moments held the answer to leadership in today's busy world, turning ordinary moments into TouchPoints?

TouchPoints take place any time two or more people get together to deal with an issue and get something done. TouchPoints can be planned or spontaneous — in hallways, on factory floors, in conference rooms, on the phone and via email. Some deal with straightforward issues; others involve complex challenges.

These TouchPoints are the real work. They are the moments to bring your strategies and priorities to life, the interactions that translate your ideas into new and better behaviors.

Your touch is where the three strands (head, heart and hands) come together in the art of the moment, enabling you to make clear judgments in the TouchPoint. When you have the touch, you can have a dozen balls in the air and juggle them all with ease. You may stand in the midst of escalating tensions and naturally diffuse them. You can make split- second decisions in a way that seems effortless to others. The way you do that is by blocking out noise, stripping away everything extraneous, and being fully present to the possibilities of the moment.

1. Use your head. To begin with, you need a clear approach to leadership. As a leader, you must be prepared to parse through countless data points, detect the patterns, and frame what is going on in the TouchPoint. To do so quickly, intelligently and consistently, you need to create a personal leadership model that works for you in your unique situation.

2. Use your heart. Next, you need to become incredibly clear about your intentions so that you can develop a healthy and dynamic core. Think about the core of a golfer, the axis around which the rest of the body rotates when he or she takes a swing. Having a strong core allows the golfer to wind up the body's inherent energy and release it in a natural and controlled way until the rotation is completed. To achieve such grace and power in the moment, you need to be very clear about who you are and why you choose to lead. You need to have the heart for leadership.

3. Use your hands. Finally, you need to become clearly competent so that you can engage with confidence and extend that confidence to others. You need to be able to draw on a variety of skills so that regardless of what is thrown at you, you can handle it. You may need to diffuse tension with humor, push people by asking tough questions, or tell stories that stick. Whatever is needed, you want to do it skillfully.

When you don't have a clear approach to leadership, people don't understand why you make the calls you do. Why was that project given to another department? Why don't they get that report anymore? Why were the targets adjusted again? People search for the underlying logic, but it doesn't seem to be there. Then they pass that confusion on to others, creating an exponentially muddled effect.

Why does this happen? It may be because you have many great ideas but haven't yet developed the mental discipline to set priorities. Perhaps the complexities of your new position are enormous, and you haven't yet built the mental muscle to figure things out, or you need to respond to conditions that keep changing. It could be that your thinking is very clear, but you don't take the time to explain it, believing that the others ought to figure it out by themselves.

If you don't have the heart for leadership, don't do it. If you do love the work but don't know how to show it, figure out what's holding you back. Maybe you feel awkward talking about your passion and purpose, seeing them as something private. Such sensibilities are fine for an individual contributor, but things change when you become a leader.

When you gain positional authority, you also gain the power to promote or demote people, so their future is partly in your hands. Thus, they are constantly on the alert for signals, trying to figure out what matters most to you.

Care About Others

Jack Welch joined General Electric (GE) at age 24, worked his way up through many divisions, and was named its CEO in 1981. In his 21 years as CEO, Jack transformed GE into the world's most admired and successful company with his innovative management techniques. In Winning, he points out that leadership is not just about you and suggests ways to be a leader.

Before you are a leader, success is all about growing yourself. When you become a leader, success is all about growing others. Without question, there are a variety of ways to be a leader. Here are Welch's eight leadership "rules."

1. Leaders relentlessly upgrade their team, using every encounter as an opportunity to evaluate, coach and build self-confidence. You need to invest the vast majority of your time and energy as a leader in three activities: evaluating, coaching and building the team's self-confidence. Too often, managers think that people development occurs once a year in performance reviews.

2. Leaders make sure people not only see the vision — they live and breathe it. As a leader, you have to make the vision come alive. Goals cannot sound noble yet be vague. One of the most common problems in organizations is that leaders communicate the vision to their closest colleagues, and its implications never filter down to people in frontline positions.

3. Leaders get into everyone's skin, exuding positive energy and optimism. An upbeat manager ends up running a team or organization filled with upbeat people. A pessimist somehow ends up with an unhappy tribe all his own.

4. Leaders establish trust with candor, transparency and credit. Trust happens when leaders are transparent, candid and keep their word.

5. Leaders have the courage to make unpopular decisions and gut calls. Some people long to be loved by everyone. Those behaviors can get you in the soup if you are a leader because there are times you have to make hard decisions — let people go, cut funding to a project, or close a plant. A lot has been written about the mystery of gut, but it's really just pattern recognition. Leaders are faced with gut calls all the time, and sometimes the hardest gut calls involve hiring people. However, if you're left with that uh-oh feeling in your stomach, don't hire the guy.

6. Leaders probe and push with a curiosity that borders on skepticism, making sure their questions are answered with action. When you're a leader, your job is to have all the questions. You have to be incredibly comfortable looking like the dumbest person in the room.

7. Leaders inspire risk-taking and learning by setting the example. Winning companies embrace risk-taking and learning. But in reality, these two concepts often get little else than lip service. If you want your people to experiment and expand their minds, set the example yourself. Consider risk-taking.

8. Leaders celebrate. There is not enough celebrating at work — anywhere. Celebrating makes people feel like winners and creates an atmosphere of recognition and positive energy.

Leadership is challenging — all those balancing acts, all the responsibility, all that pressure. And yet, good leadership happens. There are quiet leaders and bombastic ones. There are analytical leaders and more impulsive ones. Some are tough with their teams, others more nurturing.

On the surface, you would be hard-pressed to say what qualities these leaders share. Underneath, you would surely see that the best leaders care passionately about their people — about their growth and success. You would see that they are comfortable in their own skins. They're real, filled with candor, integrity, optimism and humanity.

Welch is often asked if leaders are born or made. His answer is of course both. Some characteristics, like IQ and energy, seem to come with the package. On the other hand, you learn some leadership skills, like self-confidence, at your mother's knee and at school in academics and sports. And you learn others at work through iterative experience — trying something, getting it wrong and learning from it, or getting it right and gaining the self-confidence to do it again, only better.

For most of us, leadership happens one day when you become a boss, and the rules change.

Opt for Simplicity and Perfection

Steve Jobs was co-founder, chairman and CEO of Apple Inc., co-founder and CEO of Pixar, and founder and CEO of NeXT Inc. In The Steve Jobs Way, authors Jay Elliot and William L. Simon recount Jobs' quest for simplicity.

Jobs understood something that a lot of companies try to do but are rarely successful at. The more he advanced, the simpler his products became. In some instances, it's less about the product and more about the user.

For Jobs, nothing was wasted; nothing was unnecessary. It doesn't happen by cramming in more, it happens through creativity and innovation, with a relentless pursuit of perfection. It means thinking through everything with the laser-focused goal of making it intuitive to the user. The irony is that this takes more work and more detail-oriented planning.

You probably know people who consider themselves "detail-oriented." Maybe you'd even put yourself in that category. Jobs' level of focus on details was one of the most crucial aspects of his success and the success of his products.

When Jobs had his best engineers working on the top-secret project to develop the iPhone, he had to wage a battle. Trying to create a cell phone product was a monumental effort for a company with no background in the field.

One of his big reasons for taking on this unlikely challenge was that every cell phone he had ever seen was, in his view, far too complicated to use: a perfect challenge for a man so dedicated to detail and to its companion quality, simplicity.

So Jobs had decided early on that the cell phone being developed at Apple would have only a single button.

His engineers kept telling him over and over in their once- or twice-a-week review meetings that it was not possible for a cell phone to have only one button. You could not turn it on and off, control the volume, switch between functions, go to the Internet, and use all the other features the phone was to have if you had only a single control button.

Jobs was deaf to their complaints. He kept demanding in effect, "The phone will have only one button. Figure it out."

Though he had been, through the years, an incredible solver of problems and originator of clever ideas on all the products developed under him, he didn't know how the phone could be designed so that it would need only one button. But as the ultimate consumer, he knew that's what he wanted. He kept sending the engineers back with the demand that they figure out the necessary solutions.

You know the end of the story: The original iPhone had only one control button.

Jobs took advantage of the artist sensibility in his engineers. Always in hyper-mode about having new products ready to show, he whipped the troops into shape like a lion tamer with lines like, "Real artists ship on time."

Andy Hertzfeld, a key member of the original Mac design team, put it this way: "The Mac team had a complicated set of motivations, but the most unique ingredient was a strong dose of artistic values. The goal was never to beat the competition or to make a lot of money; it was to do the greatest thing possible, or even a little greater."

Think and Act Like an Owner

Warren Buffet is chairman and CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. In The Real Warren Buffett, author James O'Loughlin discusses Buffett's prevailing philosophy that investors should act and think like owners.

In the early 1960s (after spending nearly 20 years as a successful stock picker), Warren Buffett developed a vision of his future role: In the management of the enterprise, he would act as its owner.

To accomplish this vision, Buffett recognized that he would have to redefine the role of a manager as one who would choose from the mass of opportunities that lay within his core competence the application of capital that would both earn its highest return and incorporate the least risk — just as shareholders would if the money were in their hands. If he could not achieve a return in excess of what they could earn on it elsewhere, he would return it to them. He called this role the allocator of capital. Those who work for him must fall in with this philosophy.

At Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett is both owner and manager, which means that his interests as one are perfectly aligned with his interests as the other. He treats even the smallest of Berkshire's shareholders as an equal partner in the enterprise so that he manages the company on their behalf as much as his. This runs counter to the typical misalignment of corporation and customer and was initially a problem for Buffett the manager — until he discovered a negative force he termed the "institutional imperative."

Buffett described the workings of the institutional imperative as follows:

1. As if governed by Newton's First Law of Motion, an institution will resist any change in its current direction.

2. Just as work expands to fill available time, corporate projects or acquisitions will materialize to soak up additional funds.

3. Any business craving of the leader, however foolish, will be quickly supported by detailed rates of return and strategic studies prepared by his troops.

4. The behavior of peer companies, whether they are expanding, acquiring, setting executive compensation, etc., will be mindlessly imitated.

He added, "In business school I was given no hint of the imperative's existence, and I did not intuitively understand it when I entered the business world. I thought then that decent, intelligent and experienced managers would automatically make rational business decisions. But I learned over time that it isn't so. Instead rationality frequently wilts when the institutional imperative comes into play."

Executive Edge is a publication of Concentrated Knowledge Corporation, 500 Old Forge Lane, Suite 501, Kennett Square, PA 19348.

Rebecca S. Clement, Publisher
Sarah T. Dayton, Editor

Contents of this issue have been drawn from, or inspired by, book summaries created with the permission of the publishers by Soundview Executive Book Summaries®

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