Читать книгу 10 Truths About Leadership - Peter A. Luongo - Страница 10

When any organization is operating at its best, it’s not because of technological superiority, competitive strategies, or product differentiation. Certainly those factors are important, but an organization achieves maximum efficiency through people, relationships, and love—love for ourselves, love for each other, and love for what we do every day.

“Love” is not a word lightly tossed around corporate America. In fact, I would suggest it’s the most underutilized and most misunderstood word in business.

As you’ll soon see, when I brought love into my business vocabulary, it had a dramatic impact on my life. We will use this word many times throughout the book, so let’s examine a few of love’s distinctions.

The first is defining love in a business context. Love of the self at the professional level is simply about faith in who we are and confidence as we approach our life each and every day. Next, love for others is about trust and mutual respect for one another. Love at the professional level is a love for what we do every day and is simply about our passion.

The second distinction is that it’s not an unconditional love without responsibility. It must be conditional love with consequences attached—this is called tough love. It’s a paradox. This is an enormous challenge for everyone involved. Unconditional love is at the core of our marriage vows. It’s also the bond between parent and child.

This same tacit agreement requires honest feedback. Without honest feedback, there are serious limitations on our ability as leaders, coaches, parents, and friends. For without this level of truth, we don’t allow our employees, our athletes, our children, and our friends to develop to their full potential. Far too often, we justify our lack of candor as an excuse for not wanting to cause anger, pain, and resentment, but in reality we are doing more damage than good.

On more than one occasion, I found myself in the emotionally challenging position of telling employees at The Berry Company, “I love you, but you just don’t get to work here anymore.” As difficult as that message was to deliver, they were better off working elsewhere because they were in circumstances where they just weren’t going to prosper.

The third, and last, distinction is that blending strength of character and love for your fellow man does not weaken your manhood or womanhood. Blending character and love is a fundamental quality for leaders, one that I underline with audiences because it’s so important. I have seen far too many leaders who are afraid to show the side that makes them special.

Dr. Robert Quinn, from the University of Michigan, and one of the thought leaders who has spoken at the Center for Leadership & Executive Development, spotlights the best leaders as “transformative” and defines them as “those who are enormously demanding and enormously caring.” I’ve worked with countless business leaders, and very few have a problem with the demand side of the model… that’s easy! It’s the caring side of the model that causes most leaders to struggle.

Caring defines our uniqueness not only as leaders but as human beings. Daniel Goleman’s book Emotional Intelligence was a major breakthrough and much has been written to support his belief that to be effective in getting the most from people around you, they’ve got to know you care. Very few of us are comfortable enough with ourselves to reach that breakthrough in relationships. Paradoxically, far too often we are guilty of over-managing the relationship which takes away the responsibility of people managing themselves. The most effective leaders, as Quinn noted, learn to master both sides.

As we prepared to roll out “The Leadership Pledge” as the company’s operating philosophy, we spent a great deal of time uncovering the defining moments in our lives and what they really felt like. Think back to a euphoric experience when you stretched yourself beyond your capacity or you dared to dream big, either individually or as an organization.

I describe that feeling as “arriving at the destination.” Others call it winning, or getting to the top of the mountain. While winning has to be the ultimate objective for any individual or organization because it’s how we are measured, there is a vast distinction between outcome goals (the final destination) and process goals (the journey to get there).

Outcome goals are those milestones that we tend to affix a number—a sales goal, a revenue target, or the ten pounds we want to lose. If I’ve learned nothing else over forty years of coaching, leading and advising, I realize it is paramount to prevent these outcome goals from shaping how we feel about ourselves.

Process goals are those objectives we put in place to reach our outcome goals. These must be seen as links in the chain, and in many ways, are the ultimate reason for success or failure.

First and foremost, we must have big dreams if we are going to get the most from our lives. Far too many people underestimate themselves. Only when we truly dare to stretch ourselves beyond our capacity, to dream big, can we get a glimpse of how far we can go. Once we see our goal in our mind’s eye, it becomes real, attainable, and reachable.

So the question is… where do we get the daily shot of “I can do this”? I believe we get it from the pursuit of those big dreams. That’s the source of our self-esteem. We can’t base our sense of self-worth solely on outcomes, and it’s not other people’s responsibility to make us feel good about ourselves. If we behave in the way we know will yield positive results, our self-esteem is reinforced, and our actions echo our intentions.

I’m almost left speechless when I hear that often-used comment following the passing of a family member or friend, “It makes you think about your priorities.” My response is always the same: “Since no one leaves this earth alive, why does it take someone’s passing to re-evaluate our priorities?”

It’s quite simple: Yesterday is history, tomorrow is a mystery, and today is a gift. For me, it’s always been about the hunt, not the kill. Vince Lombardi invoked the same when he talked about his ’68 Packers. He said, “We’re going to chase the hell out of perfection, and hopefully we’ll catch some excellence along the way.” In the end, our lives are about the journey we all take!

There are two friends who accompany everyone on the journey to achieving success and becoming a leader: change and choice. There are two things we know about change. First, change is constant in our lives—you can’t get away from it, yet folks struggle mightily to stop it. Second, change never leaves us like it found us!

As it relates to the journey, I want to draw the distinction between incremental change and “deep change” as Dr. Robert E. Quinn describes in his book of the same name. He says, “Incremental change usually does not disrupt past patterns… [and] is an extension of the past. Deep change differs from incremental change in that it requires new ways of thinking and behaving. It represents a change that is major in scope, discontinuous with the past and generally irreversible. Deep change means surrendering control.”

So you need to make choices when confronted with inevitable change. Quinn goes on to say, “There is an important link between deep change at the personal level and deep change at the organizational level. To make deep personal change is to develop a new paradigm, one that is more effective with today’s realities.”

Every day our lives are different due to internal change or change that is externally imposed on us. For instance, externally, our lives have been forever altered since 9/11. Internally, I’ve watched too many friends stricken with cancer and have marveled at the choices they made in how to confront it. Most of what happens to us in our lives depends on how we choose to respond and what choices we make when confronted with change.

It was in Buffalo, New York, in July of 1981 that I, along with several colleagues at The Berry Company, made the choice to find a better way… and our lives, personally and professionally, were forever changed for the better. This is the journey I want to share with you.

In the yellow page industry, we manage our business by annual schedules and deadlines called campaigns. All customers had to be contacted and all agreements signed. Advertising had to be designed and ready for the printer in accordance with schedules and deadlines. The New York division, which I managed, had just completed the Buffalo campaign. This unit had been in a downward spiral, and as the campaign ended, we hit rock bottom. There were lots of contributing factors. The economy in Buffalo was devastated as the steel industry collapsed. Unemployment reached staggering numbers and we had serious competition from the White Directory Company, which meant that for the first time, advertisers had a choice for how they spent their advertising dollars.

Internally, we were struggling as well. We had lost a number of our salespeople and managers to our competitor, and the usual morale issues that afflict an organization in disarray were mounting. The company we worked for, New York Telephone, was terribly insensitive to the plight of the advertiser as well as our ability to meet unreasonable goals.

Only many years later can I look back on this life-altering experience and realize it’s never the economy nor the competition that brings an organization down, but rather the inability to respond. That response has to start with the leader.

As division manager I was focused on three things back then: winning (which was important to me then and still is, by the way), getting ahead (or maybe a better description, climbing that corporate ladder), and pleasing my boss (preserving our culture). While all of those elements are necessary to success, I was missing the key element. What I didn’t understand, realize, or appreciate was that I was imposing my value system on a hundred and seven employees with little regard for what they believed was important to them.

So when they looked to me for leadership, what they got instead was a leader facing failure for the first time in his business career and behaving accordingly. I wasn’t winning. I was losing… and in a big way. I got my first life lesson about leadership:

The only time we realize our dreams is when we help others realize theirs.

One of the many things that makes The Berry Company an extraordinary place to work is the commitment to dialogue between senior management and all of our employees. At about the time the division was unraveling in Buffalo, the company was conducting our annual employee survey. As you can imagine, given these circumstances, when the scores got to human resources at headquarters in Dayton, red lights went off and the sirens blared. There was a crisis in Buffalo! As you might expect, human resources responded like the Kemper Calvary, and the feedback sessions were quite ugly.

On the heels of the report, I got the dreaded call to come to the home office. I made the trip fearing the worst. Would it be a transfer, a demotion, or the pink slip? Much to my surprise, it was none of the above. Enter life lesson number two: The people who care about us the most are those who stand shoulder to shoulder with us during our most difficult times.

At the time, I worked for Tom Murphy, the regional manager in Rochester, and John Berry Jr., the vice president of the east region and the grandson of the company’s founder.

They were both consistent in their opinion that while I was relentless in pursuit of results, I had created an environment in which our employees felt under-appreciated and disrespected. In short, I was hurting the people I cared about the most!

This devastated me. The good news was both John and Tom offered their support and confidence and they allowed me to be the one who fixed the problem. I went back to Buffalo, humbled but determined to earn back the trust and loyalty of my colleagues.

Upon return, I did something I had never done before. I stood in front of all one hundred and seven people, with a deep sense of contrition, and said I was sorry. There were a lot of tears in that room, mostly mine. I promised them that while we were still expected to make sales quotas and meet New York Telephone’s expectations, it would never be at the expense of each other’s dignity.

Solving life’s problems is a two-part process. First, you must realize you’ve got a problem. Second, you’ve got to figure out how to correct it. While the problem was obvious, the solution was not.

Bill Tripp, our vice president of HR and a mentor to me, suggested that I spend some time at the Center for Values Research in Dallas. The Berry Company had employed CVR as consultants to administer our attitude surveys and consult on other HR issues.

Central to my journey were Vince Flowers and Charley Hughes, partners at the Center. Both of them were heavily influenced in their practice by Dr. Clare Graves, a renowned psychologist who had done extensive research in the 1950s, ’60s, and ’70s on value systems.

So I spent a week with them in Dallas. The short version of what they said to me was

I needed to go back to Buffalo and create a behavior-driven organization rather than a sales-driven one.

When I arrived back in Buffalo, I gathered all my managers in my office on a Sunday night and told them I’ve been to the mountain and found the solution. That is how our leadership journey began in earnest.