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Accenture, the giant consulting firm, has made a science of trying to assess whether candidates have this quality. William D. Green, the CEO of Accenture, said the company considers screening job candidates a core competency, and has developed a system called “critical behavior interviewing” to find the right people. Accenture gets roughly two million résumés a year, and hires between 40,000 and 60,000 people. If it hires well, that gives it a huge competitive advantage. Here’s Green explaining Accenture’s critical behavior interviewing pro cess:
“It’s based on the premise that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. Essentially what we’re looking for is, have you faced any adversity and what did you do about it? We also know the profile of successful Accenture people, and how do we learn from the people we have who have stayed, learned, grown, and become great leaders, and how do we push that back into the recruiting pro cess to find the best matches for Accenture?
“If you get down to it, it’s what have you learned, what have you demonstrated, what behaviors do you have? Have you shown intuition? Have you shown the ability to synthesize and act? Have you shown the ability to step up and make a choice? How have you dealt with the hand in front of you, played it out?”
Green told a story of how one job candidate stood out from the crowd for him.
“I was recruiting at Babson College,” he said. “This was in 1991. The last recruit of the day – I get this résumé. I get the blue sheet attached to it, which is the form I’m supposed to fill out with all this stuff. His résumé is very light – no clubs, no sports, no nothing. Babson, 3.2. Studied finance. Work experience: Sam’s Diner, references on request. It’s the last one of the day, and I’ve seen all these people come through strutting their stuff and they’ve got their portfolios and semester studying abroad. Here comes this guy. He sits. His name is Sam, and I say: ‘Sam, let me just ask you. What else were you doing while you were here?’ He says: ‘Well, Sam’s Diner. That’s our family business, and I leave on Friday after classes, and I go and work till closing. I work all day Saturday till closing, and then I work Sunday until I close, and then I drive back to Babson.’ I wrote, ‘Hire him,’ on the blue sheet. He’s still with us, because he had character. He faced a set of challenges. He figured out how to do both. It’s work ethic. You could see the guy had charted a path for himself to make it work with the situation he had. He didn’t ask for any help. He wasn’t victimized by the thing. He just said, ‘That’s my dad’s business, and I work there.’ Confident. Proud.
“What critical behavior interviewing does,” said Green, “is get at people’s character, and you get to see where work fits in their value system, where pride fits in their value system, where making hard decisions or sacrificing fits in their value system. I mean, you sacrifice and you’re a victim, or you sacrifice because it’s the right thing to do and you have pride in it. Huge difference. Simple thing. Huge difference.”
People don’t have to climb Mount Everest or run the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon through Death Valley to develop battle-hardened confidence. Nor do they need to wish that they had faced more challenges growing up. Battle-hardened confidence starts with the right attitude. And attitude is the one thing that anyone can control, even if it seems like everything else is outside of their control. If you tackle challenges, building a track record of success, then battle-hardened confidence will follow.
A first step, though, requires developing a healthy relationship with failure. Many CEOs recognize that failure is part of success – particularly for people pursuing an ambitious goal – and they embrace failure and value it and learn from it. It can be a hard lesson to learn, particularly for teenagers shifting from high school, where they perhaps grew accustomed to acing exams, to college, and then into their careers.
John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, said he learned from a mentor how to be more accepting of failure.
“A really valuable piece of advice early in my career was from a guy named Kent Thiry, who was another of my early bosses and is now CEO at DaVita,” Donahoe said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from a real fear of failure. Kent said, ‘You know, John, your challenge is you’re trying to bat.900.’ And he said, ‘When you were in college, you got a lot of A’s. You could get 90, 95 percent right. When you took your first job as an analyst, you were really successful and felt like you were batting.900.’
“But he said, and this is probably five years into my career, ‘Now you’ve moved from the minor leagues. You’re playing in the major leagues, and if you expect to bat.900, either you come up at bat and freeze because you’re so afraid of swinging and missing, or you’re a little afraid to step into the batter’s box. The best hitters in Major League Baseball, world class, they can strike out six times out of ten and still be the greatest hitters of all time.’ That’s my philosophy – the key is to get up in that batter’s box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional home run out of every ten at-bats, and you’re going to be the best hitter or the best business leader around. You can’t play in the major leagues without having a lot of failures.”
Video games have been criticized in some quarters for creating slothful kids. But Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia said they taught him a valuable lesson about failure.
“I’ve never beaten myself up about mistakes,” he said. “When I try something and it doesn’t turn out, I go back and try it again, and maybe it’s because I grew up in the video-game era. Most of the time when you’re playing a game you’re losing. You lose and lose and lose until you beat it. That’s kind of how the game works, right? It’s feedback. And then eventually you beat it. As it turns out, the most fun parts of that game are when you’re losing. When you finally beat it there’s a moment of euphoria, but then it’s over. Maybe it’s because I grew up in that generation and I have the ability to take chances, which leads to the ability to innovate and try new things. Those are important life lessons that came along.”
Learning from failure, and recognizing failure quickly, is part of the culture at Nvidia, Huang said.
“This ability to celebrate failure needs to be an important part of any company that’s in a rapidly changing world,” he said. “And the second part of our core value is what we characterize as intellectual honesty – the ability to call a spade a spade, to recognize as quickly as possible that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve gone the wrong way, and that we learn from it and quickly adjust. Now it came about because when Nvidia was first founded, we were the first company of our kind, but we rapidly almost went out of business. We built the technology and then it just didn’t work. And so we did everything differently.
“It was during that time that I learned that it was okay for a CEO to say that the strategy didn’t work, that the technology didn’t work, that the product didn’t work, but we’re still going to be great and let me tell you why. I think that’s what’s thrilling about leadership. When you’re holding on to literally the worst possible hand on the planet and you know you’re still going to win. How are you still going to win? Because that’s when the character of the company really comes out. And it was during that time that we really cultivated and developed what I consider to be our core values today. I don’t think you can create culture and develop core values during great times. I think it’s when the company faces adversity of extraordinary proportions, when there’s no reason for the company to survive, when you’re looking at incredible odds – that’s when culture is developed; character is developed.
“And I think ‘culture’ is a big word for corporate character. It’s the personality of the company, and now the personality of our company simply says this: If we think something is really worthwhile to be done and we have a great idea, and it’s never been done before but we believe in it, it’s okay to take a chance. If it doesn’t work, learn from it, adjust, and keep failing forward. But every single time you’re making it better and better and better. Before you know it, you’re a great company.”
John T. Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, said that the adversity he faced both as a child and as a CEO were among the most important leadership lessons he had learned.
“People think of us as a product of our successes,” Chambers said. “I’d actually argue that we’re a product of the challenges we faced in life. And how we handled those challenges probably has more to do with what we accomplish in life. I had an issue with dyslexia before they understood what dyslexia was. One of my teachers, Mrs. Anderson, taught me to look at it like a curveball. The ball breaks the same way every time. Once you get used to it, you can handle it pretty well. So I went from almost being embarrassed reading in front of a class – you lose your place, and I read right to left – to the point where I knew I could overcome challenges. I think it also taught me sensitivity toward others.
“I learned another lesson from Jack Welch,” he continued. “It was in 1998, and at that time we were one of the most valuable companies in the world. I said, ‘Jack, what does it take to have a great company?’ And he said, ‘It takes major setbacks and overcoming those.’ I hesitated for a minute, and I said, ‘Well, we did that in ’93 and then we did it again in ’97 with the Asian financial crisis.’ And he said, ‘No, John. I mean a near-death experience.’ I didn’t understand exactly what he meant. Then, in 2001, we had a near-death experience. We went from the most valuable company in the world to a company where they questioned the leadership. And in 2003 he called me up and said, ‘John, you now have a great company.’ I said, ‘Jack, it doesn’t feel like it.’ But he was right. While it was something I would have given anything to have avoided, it did make us a much better company, a much stronger company, a company that at times doesn’t take itself too seriously but also a company that doesn’t have fear. We have a lot of healthy paranoia about what can go wrong. So that’s a nice way of saying that it’s how you lead through tough scenarios that often determines where you go.”
Quintin E. Primo III, the co-founder and CEO of Capri Capital, said his experience of surviving a near-death experience also taught him a lot about leadership.
“Leadership, in my opinion, is best learned, or honed, through adversity,” he said. “And it’s in times of adversity that one must step up to the plate, and do something. You have to do this, or do that, but you just can’t stand still. You have to take action in adversity. And for me, probably the most poignant moment in my career as a leader was when my first business failed miserably. We were crushed by the real estate markets of the early ’90s. Back then we were a very young, emerging organization with no real business. We entered into a death spiral, roughly two years after I started the firm in ’88. And managing down, as the Titanic is sinking, you’re not even worried about the deck chairs.
“It taught me a lot about who I was. It taught me a great deal about the folks I had selected to work with me on this sinking ship. It was a very frightening period for me, but what I’ve learned is that one must have faith, faith in something larger than yourself, or you truly will be sunk. Whether that faith is faith in the common good of man, whether it’s in universal rhythm or karma, or whether it is simply in God, there has to be something larger than you.
“In that period of adversity for me, I discovered that my employees, as such, were really part of my family. And you will sacrifice, you will do extraordinary things to protect your family, and feed them, and clothe them. You will sacrifice greatly. And so, in this period of adversity, I had to move outside of me. It no longer was all about me, but about making sure that the hardship on those who worked with me was as modest, as low, as possible. It just shifted priorities. After graduating from Harvard Business School, and having success for eight golden years in real estate, I thought I was the next great thing since sliced bread. In abundance, it’s very easy to lose focus. But in adversity, one must have extreme focus.”
Anyone with a blemish on his résumé or academic record may be tempted to paper over it, or wish it away. That may not be necessary. Many CEOs, and others who have achieved a measure of success in their lives and are in hiring roles, have probably had some rough patches themselves. If candidates can explain what they’ve learned from those experiences, and how they dealt with them, they may find their résumé goes to the top of the pile.
Meridee A. Moore, the founder of Watershed Asset Management, a hedge fund, said that when she’s hiring she considers it a plus when she sees that candidates have suffered a dip in their academic performance at some point, then persevered to improve.
“If you’ve ever had a setback and come back from it, I think it helps you make better decisions,” she said. “There’s nothing better for sharpening your ability to predict outcomes than living through some period when things went wrong. You learn that events aren’t in your control and no matter how smart you are, and how hard you work, you have to anticipate things that can go against you.”
Understand what you can control. Don’t be a victim. Figure out a way to get things done. It’s a way of perceiving the world that will help you avoid the disappointment of failure, and stay in the right frame of mind for plowing through adversity. Challenges become learning experiences rather than disappointments. It’s often just a matter of attitude that makes people stand out. They earn the confidence of their managers that they will take on, and own, any assignment thrown their way.
For bosses, a dream employee will eagerly accept a challenge, and say those words that are music to a manager’s ears: “Got it. I’m on it.” People who want more responsibility, with a confidence born of a track record of facing down challenges, will move up.
Chapter 3
TEAM SMARTS
At some point, the notion of being a team player became devalued in corporate life. Perhaps it was all the rah-rah team-building exercises, the jerseys, the T-shirts, the buttons. They may be good for bonding, but improving teamwork on the job? That takes more work than trust-building exercises like falling backwards into a colleague’s arms. The notion of being a team player has been reduced to a truism – I work on a team, therefore I am a team player. It’s a point captured in a cartoon, by Mike Baldwin, in which an interviewer says to a job candidate, “We need a dedicated team player. How are you at toiling in obscurity?”
The most effective executives are more than team players. They understand how teams work, the different roles of individual players, and how to get the most out of the group. They know how to create a sense of mission and how to make people feel like every-one’s getting credit. They know how to build a sense of commitment in the group. Just as some people have street smarts – they are savvy and know their way around a neighborhood, and they understand the unwritten rules for getting things done – others have team smarts.
In a world in which work is increasingly done through collaboration, team smarts is an essential skill.
“With most of the important things I learned about leadership, it was usually because we weren’t hitting our numbers,” said Teresa A. Taylor, the chief operating officer of Qwest Communications. “When things are going well, you think, ‘Oh good, everything we’re doing is right.’ When things aren’t going so great, that’s when you reflect and you say, ‘What am I doing that isn’t working, or what do I need to change?’ It’s very much on instinct and experience. Even the instinct is driven by watching people’s body language, watching how they’re presenting. I mean you can just ask an open-ended question, and if three people wiggle and one person doesn’t, you can figure, okay, they’re not working together. So I do spend a lot of time reading the room.”
It starts with an understanding that teamwork is built on a foundation of one-to-one interactions between people, an unwritten contract that has nothing to do with business cards, organization charts, or titles. A big part of being team smart is appreciating that teamwork is developed by conveying a sense that you are looking out for a colleague, that you’ve got her back. It’s these small exchanges – a favor here, an extra mile of effort there – that become the connective tissue between two people. And that’s where team-work starts: with two people.
Greg Brenneman, the chairman of the private equity firm CCMP Capital, said that one of the most memorable lessons he learned about leadership was from the future Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, with whom Brenneman worked at Bain, the consulting firm, long before Romney went into politics.
“He said, ‘Greg, in any interaction, you either gain share or lose share. So treat every interaction as kind of a precious moment in time,’ ” Brenneman recalled. “And I’ve always remembered that, because I think it’s really true. So what I’ve tried to do is have more conversations where I’m gaining share than losing share, to try to add value to everything.”
Gary E. McCullough, the CEO of Career Education Corporation, shared a story that helps bring Brenneman’s rule to life. It involved a woman named Rosemary, whom he came to know when he was working at Procter & Gamble. She operated the coffee cart that came around each morning, but McCullough came to appreciate her keen sense of people, and her insights about whether they understood the basics of teamwork.
“Rosemary had an uncanny ability to discern who was going to make it and who wasn’t going to make it,” McCullough said. “And I remember, when I was probably almost a year into the organization, she told me I was going to be okay. But she also told me some of my classmates who were with the company weren’t going to make it. And she was more accurate than the HR organization was. When I talked to her, I said, ‘How’d you know?’ She could tell just by the way they treated people. In her mind, everybody was going to drop the ball at some point. And then she said, ‘You know you’re going to drop the ball, and I see that you’re good with people and people like you and you treat them right. They’re going to pick up the ball for you, and they’re going to run and they’re going to score a touchdown for you. But if they don’t like you, they’re going to let that ball lie there and you’re going to get in trouble.’ Again, I think it’s those intangible things.”
Being team smart begins with the foundation of learning to work with another person. The next step is to understand team dynamics, and the role that individuals play on each team. Many CEOs have learned these lessons through sports.
Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, the online gaming company, said his experience playing soccer on his school team was a formative leadership lesson.
“We were on the same team together, most of us, for eight or nine years, and we were at a really little school in Chicago that had no chance of really fielding any great athletes,” he said. “But we ended up doing really well as a team, and we made it to the state quarterfinals, and it was all because of teamwork. And the one thing I learned from that was that I actually could tell what someone would be like in business, based on how they played on the soccer field. So even today when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire.”
He explained the qualities he looked for on the soccer field:
“One is reliability, the sense that they’re not going to let the team down, that they’re going to hold up their end of the bargain. And in soccer, especially if you play seven on seven, it’s more about whether you have seven guys or women who can pull their own weight rather than whether you have any stars. So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than they are, or what ever. They’re just reliable.
“And are you a playmaker? There are people who don’t want to screw up, and so they just pass the ball right away. Then there are the ones who have this kind of intelligence, and they can make these great plays. These people seem to have high emotional intelligence. It’s not that they’re star players, but they have decent skills, and they will get you the ball and then be where you’d expect to put it back to them. It’s like their heads are really in the game.”
Andrew Cosslett of InterContinental Hotels Group also learned about team dynamics from sports – in his case, rugby.
“Everyone’s different, so you have to know people,” Cosslett said. “I think having a sense of self-awareness is very important, like how you impact each of the people you’re with differently. The whole thing about staying alive on a rugby field is about reliance on the guys around you. Each one of those people on a rugby team responds differently because it’s physically dangerous as a game. It has a tension in the changing room before you go out to play that’s not like any other sport, and I’ve played lots, because it is almost like going into battle. There’s a chance you’re going to break your neck or have a very bad injury.
“You need to jell with them as a team, but each one responds individually. So it’s about seeing the world on their terms and then dealing with them on their terms, not yours. I think you’re born with some of this as well. I’m very sensitive to how people are thinking and feeling at any given moment. That’s really helpful in business, because you pick things up very fast.”
Part of team building is understanding the roles that different personalities play in a group. For example, Will Wright, the video-game developer behind best-sellers like Spore and The Sims, sees people either as potential “glue” or “solvent” in a team setting when he is considering hiring someone.
“There is the matter of how good is this person, times their teamwork factor,” Wright said. “You can have a great person who doesn’t really work well on the team, and they’re a net loss. You can have somebody who is not that great, but they are really very good glue, so that could be a net gain. A lot of team members I consider glue within the team in that they disseminate things effectively, they motivate and improve the morale of people around them. They basically bring the team tighter and tighter. Others are solvents, and it’s their kind of personal nature that they might be disagreeable. They rub people the wrong way. They’re always caught in conflicts. For the most part, that is at least as important as their competence in their roles.”
Team smarts is about having good peripheral vision for sensing how people react to one another, not just how they act. George S. Barrett, the CEO of Cardinal Health, described an example of how he assessed different managers when he moved into a new role.
“I was running a company that was acquired by a bigger firm,” he said. “I stayed with them after the acquisition, and then I got a call from the chairman and he said, ‘We’re having some issues with our flagship company. Would you be willing to come in and run it?’ I was thirty-four years old, and I said to myself, ‘Well, it’s already struggling. How badly could I mess it up?’ So I went there. Everyone on the management team was in their fifties, so the first day I was introduced to them, I thought they were going to collapse. You could sort of see them thinking, ‘That kid?’
“I realized I was going to have to win these guys over pretty quickly. I also knew that there were some folks in that group who were probably not going to come along for the ride. It was a turnaround, so I knew that I was going to have to move quickly to fix some things. I was very clear and direct about what I thought we were facing and what we needed to do about it, without blame. I had to create an environment in which people knew it was their job to tell me things that we needed to do because we were going to run out of time. I tend to be very direct. I expect people to be that way with me.
“I concluded fairly quickly that not many of them would be staying. There were some very capable people there, but I just think the employees had lost confidence in them. That’s very hard to recover, because so much of leadership is about trust and belief. People have to believe in you. And when they stop believing in you, you can say all the things in the world, but it’s very, very hard to mobilize an organization when they’ve lost that belief.”
Barrett said that watching the managers, and watching the or ganization respond to them, helped him figure out who was going to remain on the team.
“I’ll give you an example,” he said. “We’re sitting with a large group of folks, about forty to fifty managers, and people are standing up to raise certain issues. And I watched this one executive. People were watching and riveted to him, really listening and engaged. And then this other executive spoke, and I watched him address the group, and I watched everyone’s eyes. And their eyes went back down to their tables. They couldn’t even meet eyes with him. It was a clear signal that said, ‘You’ve lost us.’ So sometimes you don’t know what the messages are that you’re going to get, but you have to look for them. They come from your peripheral vision. And that was one of those cases where I just knew it the second it happened.”
How do CEOs build a sense of teamwork, and not just team spirit? Mark Pincus of Zynga used an unusual strategy at one company to encourage each employee to understand his or her individual role better, and to take responsibility for it. He decided to take a more dramatic step after he grew frustrated that too many of his employees were coming to him for answers.
“I’d turn people into CEOs,” he said. “One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, ‘By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re CEO of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.’ And that way, everyone knows who’s CEO of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.
“We had this really motivated, smart receptionist. She was young. We kept outgrowing our phone systems, and she kept coming back and saying, ‘Mark, we’ve got to buy a whole new phone system.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. Just buy it. Go figure it out.’ She spent a week or two meeting every vendor and figuring it out. She was so motivated by that. I think that was a big lesson for me because what I realized was that if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster. She ended up running our whole office.”
Nell Minow of The Corporate Library said her best lesson for building a sense of teamwork is to organize a group around a simple word: we.
“The first time I ever really thought of myself as a leader was when I had a series of experiences in college, over a period of about eighteen months, working on four different group projects,” Minow said. “What I learned from that is if you can get everyone to agree what the goal is, and to identify themselves with the successful achievement of that goal, then you’re pretty much there. One thing that helped move my thinking forward was that I noticed in my first job that there was something very definitional in who was included in somebody’s ‘we’ and who was included in somebody’s ‘them.’ I found generally that the more expansive the assumptions were within somebody’s idea of who ‘we’ is – the larger the group you include in that ‘we’—the better off everybody was. I started to really do my best to make sure that my notion of ‘we’ was very expansive and to promote that idea among other people.”
Another key strategy for building a sense of teamwork is learning to share credit.
“I was a mechanic in the Navy,” said Gordon Bethune, the former CEO of Continental Airlines. “And mechanics in the Navy are like mechanics in airlines. You may have more stripes than I do, but you don’t know how to fix the airplane. You want me to fix it? You know how much faster I could fix the airplane when I wanted to, than when I didn’t want to? So I’ve always felt that if you treat me with respect, I’ll do more for you. As I went up the ladder in the Navy, I never forgot what it’s like to be down the ladder, and that being good at your job is predicated pretty much on how the people working for you feel. Here’s my theory: Let’s say we’re all mid-level managers, and one VP slot is going to open up. I’ve got ten guys working for me, and for the last five years, every time I got any recognition, I said, ‘Bring them on the stage with me.’ Who do you think is going to get the job? I’m going to get the job.”
Teamwork can be built by being explicit about the roles people play, and insisting on rules and routines. Jilly Stephens, the executive director of City Harvest, a nonprofit organization that helps feed the hungry in New York, learned this lesson when she had a leadership position in her twenties at Orbis International, where she had responsibility for coordinating the medical teams aboard a “hospital with wings”—a plane that flew around to developing countries to perform eye surgeries.
“It was a lot of responsibility, and I guess it was a sort of sink-or-swim moment,” she said. “I had to lead that group, and it was complicated by the fact that it was multinational, so at its peak I think I was dealing with eleven or twelve nationalities. We were probably about thirty to thirty-five people. It was constantly focusing on teamwork. The way we did it was just being really rigorous about routine and, in some ways, not that flexible, so people really knew what the ground rules were. One example – and it seems so matronly now that I look back on it – was that the team had to be in the lobby at the hotel, ready to go to work, at whatever the designated time was. If they weren’t there, the bus leaves. You get to the airport yourself. If we were in Tunisia, that meant finding a bike and cycling across the desert to get to the airport. When I first got to the field, you would have the nurses, engineers, whoever, waiting, and you would maybe have one who just couldn’t drag himself out of bed and everybody’s waiting. We saw behaviors change fairly rapidly. So we had a fairly tight routine, and we made announcements every morning. It was just important to let everybody know what was coming.”
Sharon Napier, the CEO of the advertising agency Partners + Napier, played basketball in high school and college, and she uses sports analogies constantly with her staff to drive home messages, including the notion that people have roles to play, that the team’s success is what matters most.
“I went from playing high school basketball to college basketball,” she said. “You can be a star in high school, and you can be the ninth player in college. It’s just the way it is. So I always talk about understanding the bench strength. First of all, every player has a role. Know what it is. If you’re the seventh player who’s supposed to go in and get five rebounds because we need them, that’s your role. So I talk about that a lot – we don’t have the starting team and the not-starting team. We have a bench, and everybody has to be strong. They come in and they bring different things to the table. And you learn that by playing. You learn that if you’re not worried about your own success, and you’re worried about the success of the team, you go a lot further.”
Perhaps one of the simplest ways to think about teamwork is to forget or organization al charts and titles. Companies increasingly operate through ad hoc teams, formed and disbanded to accomplish various tasks. Team smarts refers to this ability to recognize the type of players the team needs, and how to bring them together around a common goal. Susan Lyne, the CEO of Gilt Groupe, said the ultimate test of team smarts today is being able to bring together a group of people, including those who don’t report directly to you. Lyne described how she grew to appreciate team players, and what they can and should bring to the table.
“I think that now I have a very strong antenna for someone who is going to be poison within a company,” she said. “I think that early on, I was wowed by talent, and I was willing to set aside the idea that this person might not be a team player. Now, somebody needs to be able to work with people – that’s number one on the list. I need people who are going to be able to build a team, manage a team, recruit well, and work well with their peers. And that’s another thing you learn over time. Somebody may be a great manager of a team, but incapable of working across the company to get things done because they’re competitive, or because of any number of reasons. Can they manage down? Can they work across the company and get people to want to work with them and to help them succeed? And are they going to keep you well informed of everything that’s going on?”
Lyne said this skill is so crucial today that business schools should be teaching it in more courses.
“There are a lot of great courses on managing or developing a strategic agenda, but there is very little about how to work with your peers where you need to get X done, and you need these other three departments to give you X amount of time in order to succeed at that. The people who truly succeed in business are the ones who actually have figured out how to mobilize people who are not their direct reports. Everyone can get their direct reports to work for them, but getting people who do not have to give you their time to engage and to support you and to want you to succeed is something that is sorely missing from B-school courses.”
Chapter 4
A SIMPLE MINDSET
Here’s a hypothetical test that can speed the process of identifying who has what it takes to move up in an organization.
Imagine giving one hundred vice presidents the same task: take a month to search out a new business opportunity for their company, and then present the idea to a group of senior executives during a weekend off-site meeting. The month passes, they have their ideas, and the day arrives to start their presentations.
The ideas are all pretty good, but the presentations vary enormously in length. One by one, the young vice presidents come in. Some want to take forty-five minutes, using a thirty-slide Power-Point deck to pitch their idea. Other presentations are shorter, with only ten slides. Still others have three slides or even two, and they’re done in five minutes or less. One person doesn’t use Power-Point at all. She simply talks, giving a short pitch for her idea, backed up with three key facts.
The executives are impressed by how concise she was, the simplicity of the idea, and that she respected their time. Later, she gets a call. The executives want to sign her up for the company’s leadership development program for high-potential employees.
There is a stubborn disconnect in many companies. By all accounts, CEOs – and most senior executives – want the same thing from people who present to them: be concise, be brief, get to the point, make it simple. Business is not always as complicated as it sometimes appears to be, nor should it be.
“I’ve tried to do less of the things that make business more complex,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, a vice chairman at Wal-Mart Stores. “I really like simplicity. At the end of the day, retailing – though you could apply this to many other businesses – is not as complicated as we would like to make it. It is pretty logical and simple, if you think about the way that you yourself would act, or do act, as a customer.”
Yet few people can deliver the simplicity that many bosses want. Instead, they mistakenly assume the bosses will be impressed by a long PowerPoint presentation that shows how diligently they researched a topic, or that they will win over their superiors by talking more, not less.
Few things seem to get CEOs riled up more than lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It’s not the software they dislike – it’s just a tool, after all. What irks them is the unfocused thinking that leads to an overlong slide presentation. There is wide agreement it’s a problem—“Death by PowerPoint” has become a cliché.
If so many executives in positions of authority are clear about what they want, why can’t they get the people who report to them to lose the “Power” part of their presentations and simply get to the “Point”?
There are a few likely explanations. The first is that a lot of people have trouble being concise. Next time you’re in a meeting, ask somebody to give you the ten-word summary of his or her idea. Some people can do a quick bit of mental jujitsu, and they’ll summarize an idea with a “Here’s what’s important. ” or “The bottom line is. ” Even if they take twenty-five words, they at least understand what’s being asked of them.
Others will pause for a moment and then launch into a lengthy discussion of the idea, because they have trouble identifying the core point. Granted, it’s not easy – a point that’s been captured in many sayings through the ages. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” said Leonardo da Vinci. And in words attributed to Mark Twain (and many others), “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”
Another possible explanation is that a lag exists in the business world. There was a time when simply having certain information was a competitive advantage. Now, in the Internet era, with oceans of data available to all with just a few clicks of a mouse and keyboard, others can get easy access to the same information. That puts a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways, and to ask the simple, smart question that leads to an untapped opportunity.
“I’d love to teach a course called ‘The Idea,’ ” said Dany Levy, the founder of DailyCandy.com. “Which is basically, so you want to start a company, how’s it going to work? Let’s figure it out – just a very practical plan, but not a business plan, because I feel like business plans now feel weighty and outdated. It seems, back in the day, that the longer your business plan was, the more promising it was going to be. And now, the shorter your business plan is, the more succinct and to the point it is, the better. You want people to get why your business is going to work pretty quickly.”
“Schools could do a better job teaching the value of brevity,” said Guy Kawasaki, the co-founder of Alltop, a news aggregation site, and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures.
“What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world,” he said. “In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach twenty pages or have so many slides or what ever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, ‘I have to have a minimum of twenty pages and fifty slides.’ They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with ten-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off. No one wants to read War and Peace e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with sixty PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting.”
Steven A. Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, said he understands the impulse to share all the underlying research that led to a conclusion. But he changed the way he runs meetings to get to the conclusion first.
“The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion. That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill Gates used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: ‘What about this? Have you thought about this?’ So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.
“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”
Some CEOs put strict limits on PowerPoint slides. The rule, of course, is a way to force people to put in the time and energy to sort out what’s truly important and what’s extraneous. Sometimes this work is most effectively done away from a computer. A blank piece of paper. A pencil. These are the only tools that really matter for what is often the most difficult step: thinking.
“I say, ‘Three slides, three points,’ ” said James Schiro of Zurich Financial Ser vices. “You really can’t manage more than three or four things at the most, but I like to see it in three slides. I hate Power-Point presentations. If you’re working in an area, and you are running a business, you ought to be able to stand up there and tell me about your business without referring to a big slide deck. When you are speaking, people should focus on you and focus on the message. They can’t walk away remembering a whole bunch of different things, so you have to have three or four really key messages that you take them through, and you remind them of what’s important.”
Simplifying the complex is the CEO’s job, and CEOs do it all day long. They are paid to create order out of chaos, to identify the three or five things employees need to focus on rather than twenty things that will send people off in different directions. They want to avoid the corporate equivalent of that expression frequently heard on the golf course – paralysis by analysis.
“Even before I go into a company,” said Greg Brenneman of CCMP Capital, “or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, ‘What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?’ Then I take that and put it into a one-page plan. If I can’t simply put what needs to be done on one page, I probably haven’t thought it through very well. I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company – and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies – that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, ‘What are the two or three things that really matter?’ And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back. When one of our guys is presenting an investment, you always kind of know they have it if they can explain it very quickly. And if it takes a really long time and you’re into the square root of the price of oil in Uzbekistan, you probably know that it’s gotten too complicated, and that’s when I start asking questions – when people start having trouble simply saying, ‘Here’s the idea.’ ”
William Green of Accenture offers a telling example of the art of simplification. He shared the story of how he once sat through a three-day training session for new managers. He said he counted sixty-eight things that the managers were told they needed to do to be successful—“everything from how you coach and mentor to your annual reviews, filling out these forms, all this stuff.
“And I got up to close the session, and I’m thinking about how it isn’t possible for these people to remember all this. So I said there are three things that matter. The first is competence – just being good at what you do, what ever it is, and focusing on the job you have, not on the job you think you want to have. The second one is confidence. People want to know what you think. So you have to have enough desirable self-confidence to articulate a point of view. The third thing is caring. Nothing today is about one individual. This is all about the team, and in the end, this is about giving a damn about your customers, your company, the people around you, and recognizing that the people around you are the ones who make you look good. When young people are looking for clarity – this is a huge, complex global company, and they wonder how to navigate their way through it – I just tell them that.”
Tachi Yamada, the president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, said that this ability to spot the key levers in any project or plan is vital for executives as they get further away from doing the work itself, and more into a management role where they must delegate. Yamada advocates for an alternative approach to micromanagement: what he calls “micro-interest.” A prerequisite for that is being able to quickly figure out the two or three things that matter in any project.
“I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation,” he said. “What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without your doing it? If you’re a true micromanager and you basically stand over everybody and guide their hands to do everything, you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the whole team needs to do.
