Leadership Without Excuses: How to Create Accountability and High-Performance (Instead of Just Talking About It) (MGMT & LEADERSHIP) - Hardcover

GRIMSHAW

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0071600043 ISBN 13: 9780071600040

Publisher: McGraw Hill, 2010

Synopsis

IT’S TIME FOR YOU TO INCREASEEMPLOYEE ACCOUNTABILITY―NO EXCUSES!

“Very engaging! Grimshaw and Baron provide practical coaching pointson how to translate leadership intentions into results.”
DAVE HILFMAN, SENIOR VICE PRESIDENT, CONTINENTAL AIRLINES

“A timely collection of valuable lessons on how toprevent excuses before they happen.”
MICHAEL PIETRUNTI, PRESIDENT & CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER,KYOCERA MITA AMERICA, INC.

“Jam-packed with authentic examples and insights, this book encourages allleaders to actively look in the mirror and pay keen attention to the eff ectiveexecution of their most important responsibilities.”
JEFF IRMER, VP OF SALES, THE AMERICAS,HONEYWELL AUTOMATION AND CONTROL SOLUTIONS

“It’s never been more important for leaders to take responsibility anddrive accountability. Unfortunately, in too many organizations thoseare just words. Grimshaw and Baron provide practical guidanceon how to translate these ideas into authentic actions.”
JEFFREY A. HIRSCH, REGIONAL PRESIDENT, RESIDENTIAL SERVICES,NEW YORK CITY REGION, TIME WARNER CABLE

About the Book

There are three kinds of employees: Some areSaints; they’re always accountable. Some areSinners; they’re never accountable. But mostare Save-ables; sometimes they make goodchoices, sometimes they don’t. What makesthe diff erence? Leadership without Excuses hasthe answers.

Jeff Grimshaw and Gregg Baron help youput an end to the Save-ables’ poor choicesand excuse-making―and convert them intoSaints. The secret is to communicate clear andcredible expectations, create compelling consequences,and lead conversations groundedin reality.

In order to save the Save-ables, you need to:

• BOOST THE CLARITY AND CREDIBILITYOF YOUR HIGH EXPECTATIONS
• REWARD WHAT YOU WANT TO SEEMORE OF―AND STOP TOLERATINGWHAT YOU DON’T
• PROMOTE PERSONAL OWNERSHIP WHILESTRETCHING YOUR PEOPLE
• TAP INTO HIDDEN SOURCES OF MOTIVATION
• USE YOUR AUTHORITY EFFECTIVELY―BUT WISELY
• TREAT MISTAKES AS INTELLECTUAL CAPITAL
• PREVENT EXCUSES BEFORE THEY HAPPEN

There’s no excuse for putting up with excuses.Leadership without Excuses is for anyone whoactually wants to do something about it. It’sthe definitive guide to taking excuses outof the system and creating an environmentwhere accountability and performance areconsistently high. With this game-changingguide, you’ll stop the excuses in their tracksand put your team on the path to success. Find out more at www.takeawayexcuses.com

About this title

About the Author

Jeff Grimshaw, a partner in the firm MGStrategy, is an expert on accelerating accountability and alignment. Over two decades, he’s helped hundreds of leaders deliver the results on which they’ve staked their reputations. Grimshaw serves as senior advisor, Leadership Solutions, at stickK.com, helping leaders apply powerful insights from behavioral economics to improve performance. With POW/MIA activist Paul Pinkerton, he cofounded Paul’s Kids Vietnam Children’s Charity. Visit Jeff at mgstrat.com.
Gregg Baron is president of Success Sciences, a research-based performance improvement firm that focuses on the points of customer contact (sales, service, collections, and technical service quality). As a certified management consultant, Gregg has more than two decades of experience helping senior leaders enhance their practices for leading change. Gregg is also a founding principal in The Institute for Organizational Effectiveness. Visit Gregg at success-sciences.com.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

LEADERSHIP WITHOUT EXCUSES

HOW TO CREATE ACCOUNTABILITY AND HIGH PERFORMANCE (INSTEAD OF JUST TALKING ABOUT IT)By JEFF GRIMSHAW GREGG BARON

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Copyright © 2010 Jeff Grimshaw and Gregg Baron
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-07-160004-0

Contents

Chapter One

EQUIP YOUR PEOPLE FOR MOMENTS OF TRUTH AND TRADEOFF

In a famous study conducted some years ago at Princeton Theological Seminary, researchers recruited a group of young seminarians and prepared them to give a talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, you may recall, a traveler on the road to Jericho is robbed and beaten by thieves who leave him half-dead. A priest comes, sees the beaten traveler, and passes by. And then an assistant priest does the same. Finally, a Samaritan arrives on the scene, bandages the man's wounds, brings him to an inn, and takes care of him.

After the researchers prepared the seminarians to give a talk on the story and its implications, they sent students off, one by one, to fulfill their assignment. Some were directed to move very quickly and told, "You're a few minutes late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago." Members of the second, "medium hurry" group were told, "The assistant is ready. Please go right over." But there was no rush for the members of third group, who were told, "It will be a few minutes before they need you, but you might as well head on over."

On the way to their assignment, each seminarian encountered a man on the sidewalk, slumped over, coughing and moaning. Unbeknownst to the seminarians, this man was a confederate—an actor who was part of the experiment.

Of the seminarians instructed to rush to their assignment to talk about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, only 10 percent stopped to help the man. The others walked past him—or over him. The seminarians in the second group, who'd been told merely to "go right over," fared better: Nearly half of them stopped to help the man—but the other half did not. Meanwhile, a majority of the seminarians in the third group, who weren't in any rush, stopped on their way to speaking about the Good Samaritan to act like one.

What's true of many of the seminarians in this study is also true of many employees in the organizations where we've worked. They know what it means to do the right thing. In fact, like the seminarians, they know it well enough that they can explain it to others, at least in theory. But when they encounter high-pressure "moments of truth and tradeoff" where "doing the right thing" and completing an assigned task (or otherwise "getting results" or pursuing other selfinterests) seem to them mutually exclusive options, they often make the wrong choice. Part of the challenge is that most organizations do a lousy job of preparing their employees for these moments.

Some years ago the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief operations officer (COO) of one of the most admired companies in the United States sat down to make a video the company planned to distribute to all employees. The idea was to convey four values that the leaders said should govern everything that happened in the organization. The four values? Respect, communication, excellence, and integrity. In the video, the CEO was especially emphatic about that last value:

[We are] a company that deals with everyone with absolute integrity. We play by all the rules; we stand by our word. We mean what we say; we say what we mean. We want people to leave a transaction with [us] thinking that they've been dealt with in the highest possible way as far as integrity and truthfulness, and really doing our business right.

As you might have guessed, the CEO and COO were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, and the company was Enron. This example underscores the timelessness of the observation that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr made over 70 years ago when he spoke of the human tendency to express our values "most pretentiously ... most convincingly ... at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun."

Now, we're not suggesting that when you communicate one-word values such as respect and excellence to your team or organization that you're as cynical or duplicitous as Lay and Skilling. However, if your organization is like most, its stated values (and the posters and plaques on which they're emblazoned) are equally worthless.

The problem starts at the source: Pronouncements of "Our values" often emerge from an executive retreat where a facilitator has led the senior team through the narcissistic ritual of identifying the concepts with which they'd like to imagine themselves associated ("commitment," "fun," "teamwork," etc.). In moments of truth and tradeoff, however, these lists do little to help employees who need to distill a set of acceptable options and make a wise selection from among the alternatives. This is why employees hate it when you come down from the mountaintop to share the contents of those self-indulgent lists; it compels them to pretend for a time that you've actually given them something useful and something instructive. You haven't.

If you're serious about equipping employees for moments of truth and tradeoff, we know three things that work:

• Clear boundaries—enforced consistently

• Practical rules of thumb

• Realistic scenarios

Bright Lines and Well-Defined Boundaries—Enforced Consistently

Perhaps we're too hard on Enron. After all, Lay and Skilling really did believe in their four stated values—respect, communication, excellence, and integrity—as long as none of those things ever got in the way of making money hand over fist. Of course, making money and delivering results are important in any organization. If that's not happening, you're not going to stay in business. The real question is: Are there any caveats or constraints? Like Enron, you can create an environment where the de facto value is "anything goes ... whatever it takes ... as long as you are delivering results." Or you can communicate what Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling calls "bright lines" and "well- defined boundaries" so that in their pursuit of results and (individual or organizational) self- interests, your employees clearly understand "the things you can never, ever do." The stuff that's off the table.

To deliver the "out of bounds" message with maximum credibility and impact, you can't delegate the responsibility to the human resources (HR) or compliance departments. The medium is the message, which means that employees need to hear it from their leadership.

Nobody does this better than Vanguard, one of the world's largest investment management companies. If you're one of Vanguard's 12,500 employees, you've very clear about what's out of bounds—the stuff you can never do. You learned it in your first week of work, possibly in a face-to-face setting from the CEO himself. Before he stepped down as CEO in 2008, Jack Brennan (who remains the firm's chairman) frequently showed up at "new crew orientation" to deliver a message.

"We make mistakes all the time," he'd tell them. "You can make mistakes at Vanguard. But you can never make an ethical mistake, period. You violate our sense of the right thing, and I am personally going to run you over in the parking lot. If that makes you uncomfortable, there is a break coming up, and you should leave then. But you can't say you didn't hear it." And then, with their full attention, he recited a list of boundaries: "Violate client confidentiality, and you're out. Accept a gift from a vendor, and you're out. There is no redemption. You send an offensive e-mail, you don't work here anymore."

"Of course," Jack told us, "the 'run you over' bit is hyperbole. And the HR guys hate that I say it," he admitted. "But I do it for a reason. Because it's effective. People get it. I have people saying 10 years later, 'I remember you told me that you'd run me over in the parking lot if I ever did anything ethically wrong.'"

Some CEOs might want to be remembered for something else, but we got the feeling that Jack is perfectly happy with this kind of legacy. "It's important never to give ground," he said. "And you hate to see somebody's career end because they sent some stupid e-mail. But if we give ground, we create gray areas. There is no gray area."

And therein lies the payoff for employees—and for Vanguard: No gray areas means that employees waste little or no time and energy wondering and second-guessing what's really expected, what's really rewarded, and what's really out of bounds. As Jack explains, "This isn't an easy place to work. But our uncompromising approach on ethical mistakes is part of what makes this an easy place to come to work. Because we are never going to put you in a compromising position." Over the past decade, how many other firms in the finance industry offered the same perk? How many wish they had?

Of course, your out-of-bounds list is credible and instructive only if you consistently enforce it, even when the offenders are top performers—even if it's someone you've previously designated a saint. Otherwise, all you have is a "list of stuff you can never do—unless we really don't want to fire you," which is guidance your employees will find very difficult to interpret and apply. When you make exceptions, your out-of-bounds list loses its value as a practical, reliable tool to help employees make decisions.

Lots of leaders get this in theory, but when the need to act arises, they make excuses why they can't or shouldn't. Not Terry Mullen. As president of Lincoln Financial Distributors, a subsidiary of the Lincoln Financial Group, Terry knows that keeping boundaries meaningful requires continuous, vigilant reinforcement. A few years ago, at a national sales conference, one of Terry's top people made an inappropriate, off-color remark at the podium. "So we fired him," Terry recalls. "He was shocked. He thought, 'I'm the top guy. They can't fire me.' But we did." Shortly after that, another top performer was caught cheating on his expenses. "And he was gone," Terry says. "If you just say, 'Don't say inappropriate things' and 'Don't cheat' but don't do anything about it, no one will listen. The trick is, you have to follow through."

Practical Rules of Thumb

A rule of thumb is defined as "a principle with broad application that is ... easily learned and easily applied ... for making some determination." We've found that they can be much more useful than a laundry list of esoteric concepts to employees who are trying to decide what to do when they don't know what to do. Here are three examples:

"At Goldman Sachs, We're Long-Term Greedy."

When politicians and pundits cite greed as the cause of the financial meltdown that began in 2008, we wish they'd be more precise. After all, greedy is a subjective term, a disparaging descriptor of someone else's pursuit of his or her own self- interest. And self-interest is the basis of capitalism—the "invisible hand" that drives our economic engine—imperfectly, to be sure—but more reliably than, say, the ham-fisted central planners in the kind of system that Marx devised. Although this is currently unfashionable to say, Gordon Gekko, the Michael Douglas character in the movie Wall Street, was right when he said, "Greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right; greed works."

Unless it's short-term greed. Short-term greed leads smart individuals to do collectively stupid things. And that's what got us into the current mess. Through their actions and inactions, Wall Street CEOs, politicians, and regulators fostered a system that handsomely rewarded short-term risk taking while putting in jeopardy the long-term health of the economy. Short-term greed isn't good, it isn't right, and it doesn't work for long—because it's not sustainable. And everybody pays.

This is why you won't be surprised when we reveal to you our all-time favorite declaration of corporate values. In the 1970s, Gus Levy, then managing partner at Goldman Sachs, was asked what made his firm so special. "At Goldman Sachs," Levy responded, "we're greedy, but we're long-term greedy."

And he meant it. Stories that demonstrated the "longterm greedy" ethos in action became part of the firm's folklore. For example, after the stock market crashed in 1987, Goldman Sachs faced a $100 million loss—at the time, 20 percent of the firm's earnings—on an underwriting deal to partially privatize British Petroleum. When some of the underwriters began looking for legal technicalities that would reduce their exposure, Goldman Sachs' managing partner at the time, John Weinburg, pushed back:

"Gentlemen, Goldman Sachs is going to do this [deal]. It is expensive and painful, but we are going to do it. Because ... those of you who decide not to do it ... won't be underwriting a goat house. Not even an outhouse." And when the resulting loss chased other large firms out of the privatization business in Europe, Goldman Sachs picked up the slack. Long-term greedy paid off. During that same era, Goldman Sachs left short-term money on the table when it refused to represent any company undertaking a hostile bid for another company. Threatened companies, in turn, took their business to Goldman Sachs. Another win for longterm greedy. As the firm grew and grew, this folklore helped untold numbers of employees navigate sticky situations: "We should do the right thing even if it hurts in the short term because at Goldman Sachs we're long-term greedy."

Now you might be thinking, in light of recent events: How can Goldman Sachs still lay claim to long-term greedy? Why are you glorifying them? They took government bailout money! We'll return to this topic in Chapter 6.

"Our Values, in Order of Importance."

Nguyen Toan runs the PetroVietnam unit that builds refineries and other technical installations. In recent years, the unit has successfully completed 26 projects, with no failures. Ask Toan the secret of his success, and he'll tell you how he relentlessly communicates with his employees about values. "Our top three priorities," he says, "are safety, quality, and productivity." Of course, building refineries is a dangerous, tricky business, and there is constant tension among these three values. So Toan's list of priorities wouldn't offer much practical guidance to employees facing tough day-to-day choices—except that he has made clear the order of importance.

"We make sure that everyone understands that safety is the most important," he says. And it seems to be working. In the past seven years, Toan's team has logged nearly 10 million person-hours and had only one accident—a broken leg. This is an impressive statistic in any industry, let alone in the refinery-building business.

"Then we have quality," Toan says. "At first, our quality was not very good, and after construction, we'd have a lot of repairs and welding to go back and do. We'd spend a lot of time and money doing repairs afterward, delaying schedules. But we started providing incentives for better quality, and we're seeing higher-quality work emerge. But back to safety: If someone is hurt in the process, the quality doesn't matter."

And the third value? "Once we ensure that safety and quality are achieved, we value productivity," Toan says. "We don't push it too hard, though. Because the faster people work, the less safety and less quality there will be."

If your team or organization has a list of stated values, and in their practical application there are tensions among them, you can take the easy way out: List them on a nice poster with seagulls and a windsurfer in the background, hang it up all over the office, and pretend you've done something meaningful. Or you can do what Toan did: List those values in order of importance, equipping your people with a tool that actually helps them to evaluate tradeoffs from situation to situation and to make more confident decisions about which alternative represents "the right thing to do."

"Play Aggressively without Fouling Out."

Lots of leaders say they want employees to innovate and try new things, but then those same leaders punish any risky behavior that doesn't work out. Thus employees learn quickly that the real message is, "Smile and nod your head, but don't really take any chances." But if you're a leader who really does want employees to take risks, how do you encourage them to do it responsibly?

Carlos Nieva, director of services and operations for Alcatel-Lucent in Spain, has earned a reputation for encouraging and holding his people accountable for responsible risk taking. "I use basketball metaphors because I am a basketball fanatic," he told us. "What I say to my people is: 'I expect that when you are on my team you are going to make some mistakes ... or, in the language of basketball, commit some fouls. When you commit a foul, you raise your hand—admit the mistake—and keep playing. If you never commit any fouls, never make any mistakes, you're probably not playing aggressively enough or with enough competitiveness or intensity. On the other hand, if you get into foul trouble—if you commit too many mistakes—then you're out of the game. And if you're out of the game, you're not helping the team.'"

He adds: "The other thing is: Sometimes basketball players commit fouls because they are playing aggressively, but other fouls are just obvious mistakes. You don't want to keep a player in the game who commits flagrant fouls. We're going to pull those players off the court." Even if they are not as passionate about basketball as Nieva, his employees find that this metaphor offers practical guidance in moments of truth and tradeoff, helping them appropriately balance the need to innovate with the need to manage risks.

(Continues...)

Excerpted from LEADERSHIP WITHOUT EXCUSESby JEFF GRIMSHAW GREGG BARON Copyright © 2010 by Jeff Grimshaw and Gregg Baron. Excerpted by permission of The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

Edition details

• Publisher: McGraw Hill
• Publication date: 2010
• ISBN 10: 0071600043
• ISBN 13: 9780071600040
• Binding: Hardcover
• Language: English
• Number of pages: 304