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1. Taking the Grind Out of the Game

A few years ago, the two of us took a trip to Las Vegas. Not to play the tables; that’s not our thing. No, we were in Las Vegas to speak to the International Council of Shopping Centers, 60,000 members strong.

It just so happened that the speech was early in the morning, so we arrived the night before, and with an open evening, like good tourists we decided to get tickets to a show. A famous singer was in town, and so off we went, one of us being very enthusiastic, the other being very accommodating.

Cue the 50-piece orchestra and the colored smoke machines. What a production. Big hair, power ballads, backup singers dangling on wires from the ceiling, and an eye-popping procession of costume changes.

Yet, less than an hour in, one of us was fast asleep.

Rattled awake, here’s exactly what he said:

“What’s the score?”

That, in three words, is a person who loves sports—and business.

They’re the same thing, aren’t they? Both are intense and full of fun. They’re hard; they’re fast. They’re a nonstop grapple filled with strategy, teamwork, nuance, and surprise.

And in sports and business alike, the players are in it to win.

A brand manager wallows with his team about how to position a product out of engineering that just might blow sales through the roof. Three friends from college ditch Wall Street to start a microbrewery or launch a new app. A manufacturing manager wakes up one morning with a great idea about how to increase yield at his factory. An HR executive interviews six candidates for a job that should have been filled three weeks ago and, at last, one seems perfect.

People work all day, every day, trying to make their organizations and lives better. Trying to help their families, their employees and colleagues, their customers, and the communities where they operate.

And in working, people give their lives meaning. Not all of its meaning, of course. Life, with its vast depth and richness, certainly exists outside work. But work can give our lives a goodly portion of its purpose.

Whi ch is why it’s such a terrible thing when companies or teams are stuck in work situations that are buzzing with sound, action, and (occasionally) fury, signifying nothing. Nothing, as in no forward motion, no growth, no winning. Not even a decent shot at it.

That’s not competing. That’s not fun. That’s not business.

That’s just a grind.

Such a dynamic is, however, all too common. As we mentioned in the introduction, we’ve spoken to about a million people around the world since 2001, almost exclusively in Q&A sessions. These individuals have worked at companies large and small, old and new, in heavy industry and in gaming, retail, and finance. They’ve been entrepreneurs, senior executives, MBA students, and individual contributors. Across all these varied sessions, several people in the audience usually ask something like, “Why is it so darn hard to get everyone on the same page?” or describe a work scenario where so many people don’t seem to be playing on the same team, with results beginning to show for it. More evidence, too: probably a third of the nearly 1,000 MBA students in our business school, most of whom are in their thirties and forties and working in managerial jobs at good companies, report experiencing some sense of gridlock at work.

What a mess. And yet, this dilemma is not only fixable, it can be prevented.

All it takes is alignment and leadership.

They’re equally important; indeed, we’d assert that neither can really happen without the other.

And there’s no better way to start The Real-Life MBA than by digging into both.

All Alignment, All the Time

Now, we understand that the importance of alignment is not going to be news to most people reading this book. The concept has been out there in the management stratosphere for a long time, lauded by gurus, professors, pundits, and consultants alike.

The problem is that, in reality, at companies of every ilk, the relentless application (and discipline) of alignment can fall by the wayside.

Work—that infernal to-do list—gets in the way.

We get that. Work feels like it should come first, especially in today’s daunting economic environment. A cranky client, an employee who needs coaching, a competitor’s new technology hitting you blindside, a PR disaster erupting on Twitter. All these can happen in a day’s work, and sometimes even on the same day.

But the fact is, if you want to get off the grind, alignment has to come before, during, and after “the work.” It has to be happening all the time. It has to be part of what “the work” is.

All of which begs the question, the alignment of what exactly?

The answer is mission, behaviors, and consequences.

Mission pinpoints an organization’s destination—where you’re going and why, and equally important if a mission is to succeed, what achieving it will mean for the lives of each and every employee.

Behaviors describe, well, behaviors—the ways in which employees need to think, feel, communicate, and act in order to make the mission more than a jargon-laden plaque on the wall gathering dust and spawning cynicism.

Consequences put some teeth into the system. We’re talking promotions and bonuses (or not) based on how much employees embrace and advance the mission and how well they demonstrate the behaviors.

Maybe these elements sounds obvious to you; as we said, this is not a new topic. Or maybe just the opposite. As we also said, true alignment’s a rarity.

Either way, we can assure you of one thing: When alignment happens, there’s no more running in circles. There’s progress; that’s what happens when grind gets out of the game.

Alignment in Action

Without doubt, stories about alignment’s transformative power can be found in every industry, but none offers quite the treasure trove of examples as private equity. Think about it. Any business of interest to a private equity (PE) firm is almost by definition undervalued. It’s suffering from bad leadership or caught up in a changing market; it’s a family business without a succession plan, or a corporate division that’s simply been neglected, orphaned by its successful parent company. In each case, the organization is sputtering.

Now, it does happen that PE firms do get lucky, find a hidden jewel, polish it up, and get out fast with a big gain, or they buy an existing winner from another PE company, which has to sell it to satisfy the financial expectation of its investors. But those cases are in the minority. In the majority of cases, PE firms acquire the struggling business and set about doing the hard work of finding good leaders, and, almost invariably, their first and most important job is getting alignment straightened out.

Take the case of the Dutch conglomerate VNU.

Back in 2006, VNU was closing out a decade of decent, although hardly spectacular, results. In his annual letter, CEO Rob van der Bergh said he was pleased with the company and described VNU, which owned properties such as Hollywood Reporter and the Nielsen ratings company, as “healthy.” Private equity, however, saw untapped opportunity, and a consortium of six firms swooped in and bought it up for $12 billion, hiring veteran business leader Dave Calhoun as CEO.

With a stellar career that had landed him as vice chairman of GE at age 45, Dave had managed many large businesses, but nothing like the morass of brands and products he suddenly found himself running. “When I got there, the mission was, ‘We’re the leader in market intelligence,’ ” Dave recalls. “That sounded good, but what it meant in practice was, do your own thing in your fiefdom. There was no sense of overall meaning.”

Dave and his team immediately set out to change that. They dropped the name VNU, reclaimed the name Nielsen for the entire company, and made it clear that Nielsen—the new Nielsen—existed for one coherent purpose: to measure what consumers watched and bought. Nielsen was going to be the best company in the world at knowing everything about consumer viewing and buying habits all over the world.

Exciting, right?

The best missions are like that: aspirational, inspirational, and practical.

Aspirational as in, “Wow, sounds amazing—I love the idea of trying to get there.”

Inspirational as in, “Great—I know we can do that if we stretch and try.”

Practical as in, “OK, sounds reasonable—I’m going to work with my team to get it done.”

And here’s the kicker. Remember how we said well-wrought missions let each and every employee know what’s in it for them? Nielsen’s nails that challenge. It promises growth—product growth, services growth, global growth—and all the career opportunities that come with it.

Another quick but illuminating mission-making example from PE is Nalco, the diversified industrial company that was bought out in 2007. In 2008, its new owners hired CEO Erik Fyrwald, who inherited 12,000 employees, $4 billion in revenues, strong cash flow, negligible growth, and a mission that could have been paraphrased as, “We’re in the water business, that’s nice.”

Erik spent his first 90 days traveling to Nalco business units and its customers, seeking the company’s killer app, if you will, a way in which to spark change and build a competitive advantage.

To his surprise and delight, he found it in a product that Nalco had developed six years previously, a water usage quality optimization system called 3D TRASAR. About 4,000 units were already being commercially leased, and Erik soon discovered that their customers loved them, passionately describing to him how the Nalco product saved water and helped prevent EPA fines like no other product.

Erik brought the news back to his leadership team, and, invigorated by the 3D TRASAR’s promise, they decided to set a goal of 20,000 leased units within two years. That ambitious target, in turn, galvanized the entire organization. R&D turned its focus to improving the product’s features, creating 26 patents to meet customer needs and slow any copycat competitor moves. The sales team introduced new training, goals, and incentives. At the same time, a new 3D TRASAR service center was built in India, staffed by 40 “water doctors,” engineers assigned to monitor units around the world, spotting and resolving problems before customers even noticed them.

And so the company’s new mission was born: “We deliver clean water to Nalco’s customers in a way that makes our customers more economically successful and the world more environmentally sustainable.”

Did that mission rouse Nalco to hit its goal of 20,000 units within two years? It did indeed.

“People suddenly knew why they were coming to work,” as Erik puts it. “They were excited about helping our customers succeed in a way that helps save the world. They saw a future for themselves. You cannot believe the great ideas that started popping.”

That’s the beauty of a good mission. It gets everyone focused and fired up.

And that’s when behaviors start to matter.

Matter a lot.

If a mission is a company’s destination, behaviors are its transportation, the means of getting there.

We all know what this connection doesn’t look like, right? A company spouts a mission that talks about customer focus, for instance, but in real life, its frontline employees hate customers. OK, maybe they don’t hate-hate them, they just disdain them for getting in the way of what they’d rather be doing, like getting home by five. Or a company has a mission that crows about speed to market, but its managers have, let’s say, a high tolerance for bureaucracy. Or a company has a mission all about delivering innovation, but the people who run things demote or fire anyone who takes a risk and fails.

Not good.

Good is when the alignment between mission and behaviors is seamless. In a company with a mission about customer focus, employees ooze empathy. They hand out their cell phone numbers so they can be reached after hours. They take complaints about poor service personally. If they had their druthers, they’d go home with every product and try it themselves to make sure it was working perfectly.

Maybe we exaggerate a bit, but you get what we mean. Mission and behaviors have to be two links in the same chain.

Now, if you’ve ever read our books or columns, you may be wondering at this point why we keep using the word “behaviors” instead of “values.” After all, for about a decade, we’ve invoked the word “values” in the same context. “Values” was, you might even have thought, our favorite word.

It was. But we’ve found “values” can be a confusing word. It’s too abstract. Too often, people hear “values” and they think you’re talking politics or culture, as in “family values.”

No.

Plain and simple, we’re talking about how people behave at work and how their behaviors bring the company’s mission to life. So “behaviors” it is.

And, to return to the topic at hand, the only reason to talk about behaviors at work is that leaders need be very public, very clear, and very consistent about what kind of behaviors are needed in order to achieve the company’s mission.

Back to the Nielsen story. Right after Dave Calhoun announced Nielsen’s new mission, he also announced the three behaviors that would make it come to life. The first was open-mindedness.

That was a change, to put it mildly. “People thought we were a market research company,” Dave explains, “and what kind of people succeed at a market research company? Really smart people who perfect their algorithms and don’t want anyone to see those algorithms because they could steal them.

“But if we were going to dominate the space of knowing everything about the consumer, we needed people who were open to data from every source and willing to work with everybody, not just the people who understood their algorithm.”

The second behavior was a passion for integration. Nielsen’s growth lay, Dave believed, in its people loving—not liking, loving—the process of mixing, matching, and synthesizing market research coming at them from every angle, largely thanks to the explosion of big data.

Growth also lay in Nielsen’s capacity to make sense of all this information for their clients, and so the third behavior identified to drive Nielsen’s success was simplicity.

“The digital world is getting overwhelming; all the data out there can just about drown you,” Dave explains. In such situations, people often find a way to argue two sides of a case. That just muddies the waters for everyone. “If we can make a recommendation to a client in a simple, understandable way, and with conviction, we will always win.” (And win they certainly did. Over Calhoun’s six years as CEO, the company’s market capitalization tripled.)

Erik Fyrwald and his team at Nalco similarly established the key behaviors necessary to drive the company’s new mission. The first was a crusading passion for saving water. Not an “Oh, that’s kind of cool” kind of passion, a “Can I tell you what I do at work? I save the world by conserving water” kind of passion. “We wanted people who got really excited every morning when they turned on their computers and saw their meters,” Erik explains. And by that he means the meters all over Nalco’s intranet that constantly showed how much water the company was saving cumulatively and per customer.

The second behavior was a hunger for growth. Not single-digit growth, either. Nalco’s mission, Erik determined, called for growth junkies, people who saw opportunity with customers previously considered out of reach and in markets that scared everyone else away. In 2009, when most companies in Nalco’s space were backpedaling in China for fear of its economic deceleration, the company brought in a strong, proven growth leader to run Asia. He moved the company’s headquarters from cozy Singapore and built a new building in Shanghai, complete with a customer and employee training center, a technology hub, and sales and marketing facilities. Employment jumped from 200 to 800, with Nalco’s increased commitment enabling them to recruit outstanding candidates, Chinese engineers who wanted to improve the environment through water treatment and productivity in the heavy manufacturing industries.

Around the same time, Nalco also unleashed its oil and gas unit to aggressively pursue global growth in water-related chemistry applications. (To get a barrel of oil, you also need to deal with four barrels of water to be separated, cleaned, and safely returned to the environment.) The company was quickly able to expand its business with customers doing deepwater drilling in the Gulf of Mexico, but it also moved to successfully forge new and productive relationships with customers farther afield, in locations including western Siberia, Kazakhstan, Azerbaijan, Nigeria, Angola, and Malaysia. “Our oil and gas leader was an incredible role model of entrepreneurship and pursuit of growth,” Erik notes, “and he got his team to feel the same.”

Clearly, his example, and that of many other believers within the organization, took hold. By 2010, Nalco’s revenues and earnings were both growing in the double digits.

Making It Real with Consequences

With mission and behaviors in place, all that’s left for alignment is the piece of the system we’re calling “consequences.” Maybe that sounds punitive, but it isn’t. Sure, consequences can be negative, as in demotions or removals. But far more often, consequences can be positive, as in raises and bonuses. Either way, though, our point is the same. You can huff and puff and holler all you want about mission and behaviors, but if there aren’t organizational mechanisms to reinforce them, you’re like the proverbial tree falling in the forest.

No one hears you.

Now, the loudest negative consequences mechanism, obviously, is letting people go. Most leaders hate using this tool, and they should if they’re normal human beings, but sometimes when there’s an obvious mission or behaviors disconnect, it’s necessary and best for both parties.

Dave Calhoun, for instance, had to let go of a very popular member of the VNU old guard who didn’t think the company should or could integrate. Did he enjoy it? Of course not, but he did the right thing by making the manager’s exit a teachable moment. Instead of saying, “So-and-so retired to spend more time with his family,” he publicly addressed the decision at Nielsen’s annual meeting. “I had to make it clear which behaviors were unacceptable and which were rewarded,” he says.

Similarly, as he drove home the mission-behaviors linkage at Nalco, Erik Fyrwald had to deal with an army of resisters. “That’s been tried here before, and it doesn’t work at Nalco,” was a common refrain. Here again, many top leaders had to be asked to move on—more than half of the top 100, their replacements drawn from internal and external candidates. Like Dave Calhoun, this was hardly Erik’s favorite part of the turnaround, but a coach can’t be pleading for buy-in from entrenched naysayers in the middle of the game.

The point is, when it comes to whether (and which) behaviors matter: a personnel move speaks louder than a hundred speeches.

Of course, personnel moves can also be an entirely positive form of consequence in the alignment process. The promotion of people who demonstrate the mission and behaviors is a huge message, and a great source of encouraging reinforcement through the organization. The same is true of outsized bonuses. Money talks; does it ever.

Most often, however, the consequences part of alignment is simply a matter of having a good performance appraisal and reward system in place.

Such a system does not have to be complicated or expensive. It just needs to touch—it must touch—every employee as often as possible, and at least twice a year, in conversations in which their manager tells them, in candid terms, where they stand.

Here’s how you’re helping us achieve the mission, and here’s what you could do better.

Here’s how you’re demonstrating the behaviors we need, and here’s what you could do better.

And finally: Here’s how your salary and bonus and your future here reflect what I’ve just said.

That’s it. That’s the consequences part of alignment. How hard does that sound?

Not very, and yet, you already know how often it happens in real life. We’re lucky if between 10 and 20 percent of our audiences raise their hands when we ask, “How many of you know where you stand in your organizations?” Some of our own grown children and their twenty-something friends, working in respected companies, have never received a single performance review. One of them got a nice raise in her paycheck and actually had to ask her boss why. “Merit,” she was informed, period.

It makes us want to scream. (It made her want to scream too, for the record.)

So much lost opportunity, just sitting there waiting to be seized and turned into success. Clarify the mission, name the behaviors, and then measure and reward people on how well they demonstrate both.

These few tasks aren’t easy. We’d never say that. But, look, alignment isn’t brain surgery, either. Too darn bad that too many leaders avoid it like it is. You’ll never have a healthy organization without it.

Tactics, Starting Today

So now let’s turn to meet alignment’s maker, leadership.

As we noted earlier, leadership is critical for galvanizing the kind of alignment that takes the grind out of work. You can have your car’s tires all straightened out, but what good is it if there’s no one to drive the car home, right? The facts are, in the vast majority of cases, fresh leadership is absolutely inseparable from the creation and installation of a stalled organization’s mission, values, and consequences. They go together because they must.

Later in this book, we will spend an entire chapter on leadership. In fact, in it we will present a new, holistic model we’ve developed from the entirety of our experience and observation, one that defines leadership as the relentless pursuit of truth and ceaseless creation of trust.

But for now, in the context of taking the grind out of the game, let’s talk about some key truth-and-trust tactics. Specifically, let’s talk five immediate action steps. Because if your organization at any level is languishing, spinning, or otherwise not unleashing its full potential, you’ve got to start fixing that problem not next week or even tomorrow.

You’ve got to start today. Here’s how.

First, Get into People’s Skin

Is there anything worse than a pompous, self-important manager, marching around like a little general, barking at his assistant, acting like his only job is presiding over meetings with his subordinates or preparing for the same with his superiors? This officious, corner-office snob type was profligate back in the old days—like when Madison Avenue and Detroit were the center of the universe. These guys were a legion then, and the only time they left the comfort of their offices was to get lunch—together. You’d think they’d all be gone by now, wouldn’t you? Sadly, not by a long shot. We’ve seen them aplenty over the last ten years, same as always, except with the added trick of hiding behind their technology.

Count also in this awful lot the milquetoast manager, so blah and blasé toward the work and the people you wonder why he or she bothers to show up every day.

It’s crazy. If you want to light fire to all the good stuff happening because you’re aligned, you need to get off your duff and get out there, truly getting to know and care about your people as individuals. In fact, really good leaders are like coaches who stand on the sidelines jumping up and down because they can’t contain their excitement about how everyone’s doing, who hug their players when they come off the court, never mind the sweat, and who know what makes each one of their people tick.

Let’s even take this one step further. The best leaders actually care more about their people than themselves. This concept reminds us of a wonderful interview with Don Knauss, the then CEO of Clorox, which appeared in the New York Times not long ago. In his twenties, Don relates, he had been a lieutenant in the Marine Corps, stationed in Hawaii. One day, he says, “I had been up since five in the morning, and I was pretty hungry. I started walking to get in the front of the line (for lunch), and this gunnery sergeant grabbed my shoulder and turned me around. He said: ‘Lieutenant, in the field, the men always eat first. You can have some if there’s any left.’ And I said, ‘OK. I get it.’ . . . It’s all about your people, it’s not about you.”

What a great story! Great leaders build trust and credibility with words and deeds that prove, over and over again, in ways large and small, that they respect and honor their people.

Can that feel draining? At times, yes, especially when it’s real, as it should be. But if you want your team to win, that should sound OK to you. It should sound like what you do all the time.

Second, Think of Yourself as the Chief Meaning Officer

How often do you think Dave Calhoun and Erik Fyrwald talked about mission and behaviors during their first 18 months at the helm? Every day? Try in every conversation, up and down the organization. That kind of overcommunication is essential, and not just as you’re launching a change process. It’s essential forever.

Leaders exist, in large part, to give purpose to their teams; to relentlessly, passionately explain, “Here’s where we’re going. Here’s why. Here’s how we’re going to get there. Here’s how you fit in. And here’s what’s in it for you.”

Oh, and just as a reminder, once you’re done explaining all that, you need to do it again.

Remember, your people spend more than 40 hours of every week working. If you’re not helping them make meaning of that investment, you’re wasting their time and their lives. Not to be scolds. But this part of leadership is daunting, we know that. Who likes to repeat things to the point of gagging? Exactly no one. But it’s an essential part of engaging your people and caring for them, just as you would in any true relationship.

And one more thing. It’s not just the top person who needs to be a Chief Meaning Officer. No matter what the size of company, it’s every manager’s job, right down to the team leader level, to create context and purpose. Think of how powerful that can be. Think of the alignment it creates.

Third, Remove Blockages from Your People’s Way

Have you ever seen the Olympic sport called curling? With all due respect to the athletes who have dedicated their lives to it, it’s somewhat curious, you have to admit. One player pushes a granite stone down the ice toward the goal, while three others precede him, frantically sweeping the surface with cornhusk brooms. Those players, the ones smoothing the way for the stone’s speedy and accurate approach to its destination, do what good leaders do. They aggressively scrub out anything and everything that stands in the way of the stone reaching its target.

Like what? Well, like the bureaucratic nonsense that’s endemic in most organizations. The rules and regulations that often exist just to make work for the people who enforce rules and regulations. We’re not talking about the kind of guidelines you have to follow for reasons of the law or safety. We’re talking about petty stuff that gums up progress. The CFO who says everyone gets a 2 percent across-the-board increase because it’s been a tough year, performance be damned. The IT manager who’s more interested in process than innovation, or in data collection more than analysis. The corporate lawyer who has a reason why almost anything can’t be done.

A leader’s job is to sweep away that kind of junk.

And while we’re at it, to sweep away those kinds of people in every group—the action blockers, the change resisters, the process obsessives. “That’s not how we do it around here.” “It didn’t use to be that way.” Sometimes it’s OK to tolerate a couple of these individuals—sometimes. They contribute institutional memory, or they counteract a strong culture of acquiescence, which is never to be desired. But most of the time, these people are nothing more than self-appointed, self-righteous scolds who drain energy and waste time. Good leaders know the difference, and effectively use their brooms to prove it.

Fourth, Joyfully Demonstrate the “Generosity Gene”

A scientist would have to tell you if there really is a DNA marker for generosity or whether it’s more of a learned behavior, but it doesn’t make any difference to us. We just know that the best, most effective, most awe-inspiring leaders share one pronounced trait: They love to give raises. They’re thrilled to see their employees grow and get promoted. They celebrate their people in every way they can—with money, more responsibility, and public praise. And it turns them on to do it. We know of a manager, for instance, who was working closely for weeks with one of her employees on a project. It wasn’t going well; even after hours of coaching, the employee couldn’t deliver what the manager was expecting. Then one morning, the employee came to work dragging. “I was up all night,” she told her boss; “check your email.” The boss did, and there, in an attachment, was the project completed to perfection. The boss burst out of her office, calling out, “You did it, you did it!” for everyone to hear. That kind of drop-the-barriers, authentic generosity of spirit from leaders unleashes people to feel great about themselves and do great things for the team and for customers.

Sometimes people ask us about the prevalence of the generosity gene. That’s a hard one. Personally, we’ve seen it, but then again, we’ve worked in and with some excellent companies, which tend to attract, enable, and reward this leadership behavior. In the big picture, we’d say it’s probably less common. Too many leaders like to hold back on raises and promotions; they’re cheapskates by nature or nurture, both financially and emotionally. They often hide their best employees to better the impression of their own performance. We have a friend, for instance, who quit a big media company out of frustration with her pace of advancement. It was only at her exit interview with HR that she learned her boss considered her a “superlative high-potential.”

This manager wasn’t critical of our friend, but he wasn’t expressive, either. “I don’t think he ever said one nice word to me,” she told us. “And when I got my annual raise, it was without explanation. I didn’t even know that it was the biggest in the company until HR told me on my way out the door.”

It could be our friend’s experience is the norm. We hope not, because nothing unleashes performance and commitment like unleashing the generosity in a good leader’s heart—as well as their wallet.

And Fifth, Make Sure Work Is Fun

Can we be completely exasperated for a moment and ask, “What is wrong with people when it comes to fun at work? Really, what?” That is, why do so many—too many—assume that work is only work when it’s hard, grim, dull, or otherwise unpleasant?

It kills us.

Work is not something you do while you’re waiting to live. Work is life. Maybe not all of it, as we said earlier, but a lot of it. And that’s why, if you’re a leader, permitting a workplace to be a bastion of “quiet desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau so famously put it, is awful. Forget about how detrimental it is to productivity and results (which it is).

Hello, fun is great. It’s healthy and energizing—for organizations and individuals alike. We bet 99.9 percent of all managers would agree with that, too—in the abstract. But then, some number of them—again, too many—get to the office and suck the fun out of the place. Some do it with their negativity or lack of candor or politicking. Some do it because they think fun isn’t serious, and work needs to be serious. Some do it simply because they don’t realize that fun is their responsibility.

It is. Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.

How? The options are numerous and many are wonderfully easy. Celebrate milestones and small successes. Embrace humor and candor. Let people be themselves. Smite bureaucratic behaviors every time they creep in. Banish jerks. Do stuff together outside the office. Whoever said bosses and employees shouldn’t be friends was crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to be friends with the people you spend all your time with?

Look, we know work has its moments of difficulty and stress; of course it does. But a leader cannot let that be the status quo. Even in the hard times, work has to be a place where people want to be. Making it so is part of what leaders do.

At the beginning of this chapter, we made the point that private equity provides a storehouse of examples about how companies can escape no-man’s-land through the combined power of alignment and leadership.

But let’s be clear: these same tools exist to transform floundering companies or divisions in every variety of business, from a family-owned restaurant to a global tech giant. Stagnation is all too common because people are all too human, and their organizations will pay the price.

We’re not going to claim that taking the grind out of work is a layup. It’s not. But it’s certainly achievable, and probably more quickly than you think.

Alignment and leadership: put them together, and it’s game on.