The Real-Life MBA: The no-nonsense guide to winning the game, building a team and growing your career. Suzy Welch

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СКАЧАТЬ 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, СКАЧАТЬ