"If you dig into a subject deeply enough, what do you find?"
In one sense this book began with a conversation with Carrie Tolstedt in a hotel lobby in Los Angeles. Carrie is the head of Wells Fargo's regional banking group,a position she has held for the last four years and in which she has been inordinately successful. As with many effective leaders,though,she is by nature self-critical. Despite the fact that she had just delivered a rousing speech to her regional managers, I was not overly surprised to find her standing off by herself looking a little dissatisfied.
"What's up?"I said. "The speech went really well."One always tends to offer reassurance to speakers after a speech,but in this case it was accurate. She had been speaking on the subject of customer service and how,with most banking products being a commodity in the marketplace, Wells Fargo would live or die based on the quality of its service. This message isn't new,either for Wells Fargo or the wider business world, and in the wrong hands it can pretty quickly descend into cliche. But Carrie had managed to keep the message coherent,the stories personal,and the examples vivid and powerful. It was a good speech.
"I don't know,"she replied. "Sometimes I'm not sure how effective these speeches really are. The regional managers will now try to pass the message on to their district managers,and inevitably it will get tweaked in some way, changed somehow. Then it'll get changed again when the district managers pass it on to their store managers,and again when the store supervisors hear it,until,by the time it reaches the people who can really use it-our customer service reps and personal bankers-it will be significantly altered.
"Don't get me wrong,it's good that each level of my organization adds its own spin, but still, I sometimes think that the only way to keep this organization on the same page about customer service is to boil it down to its essence. My message should be so simple and so clear that,across all forty-three thousand employees,everyone comes to know what's at the core."
At the time,I think I mumbled something about being sure that her message would get through to where it mattered most, but on a subliminal level her wish-to see a subject so clearly that she could describe its essence simply,but without oversimplification-must have registered. For weeks thereafter,no matter where I went on my travels, no matter whom I was talking to, I seemed to hear the same wish:"Get me to the heart of the matter."
Sure,the subject in question varied. Some people wanted to know the organizing principle of great management. Others were more interested in the essence of great leadership. Others asked about the driving force behind a successful career. But everywhere the wish was the same:Get me to the core.
Now,I suppose I could have chalked these wishes up to intellectual laziness. Why struggle with complex reality when you can skate by on the PowerPoint version of life instead? But this is a rather uncharitable and,in the end,unhelpful interpretation. We are all attracted to clarified versions of reality not because we are intellectually lazy,but because these versions often wind up being so useful. Take winter, spring, summer, and fall as an example. The four seasons are the PowerPoint version of the weather. Certainly they leave out a great deal of complexity,exception, and local variation, but nonetheless they've helped generations of farmers time their sowing and harvesting.
If there were any charges of intellectual laziness to be leveled,they probably should have been leveled at me. For seventeen years I had the good fortune to work with one of the most respected research organizations in the world,the Gallup Organization. During this time,I was given the opportunity to interview some of the world's best leaders, managers, teachers, salespeople, stockbrokers, lawyers, and all manner of public servants. The fact that I hadn't isolated a few core insights at the heart of great leadership, or managing, or sustained individual success didn't mean that these insights didn't exist. It simply meant I hadn't yet been focused enough to get it done.
Carrie's wish, and the many similar wishes I heard in the months following, pushed me to get focused. Since people wanted to reach down into the heart of the matter,I was,I realized, in a perfect position to help them get there. My research experiences at Gallup mostly consisted of surveying large numbers of people in the hopes of finding broad patterns in the data. Now,in my effort to get to the core,I would use this foundation as the jumping-off point for deeper,more immersive,more individualized research. I wouldn't survey a large number of good performers. Instead I would identify one or two elite players, one or two people who, in their chosen roles and fields, had measurably, consistently, and dramatically outperformed their peers. In the end these individuals covered a wide range, from the executive who transformed a failing drug into the bestselling prescription drug in the world,the president of one of the world's largest retailers, the customer service representative who sold more than fifteen hundred Gillette deodorants in one month,the miner who hadn't suffered a single workplace injury in over fifty years, all the way to the screenwriter who penned such blockbusters as Jurassic Parkand Spider-Man.
And having identified them, I planned to investigate the practical, seemingly banal details of their actions and their choices. Why did the executive turn down repeated promotions before taking on the challenge of turning around that failing drug? Why did the retail president invoke the memories of his working-class upbringing when defining his company's strategy? The deodorant-selling customer service representative works the night shift. Is this relevant to her performance? One of her hobbies is weightlifting. Odd? Yes,but can it in any way explain why she is so successful so consistently? What was each of these special people actually doing that made them so very good at their role?
I have chosen to focus this deep dive on the three roles that are the most critical if you are to achieve something significant in your life and then sustain and expand this achievement, namely the roles of manager, leader, and individual performer. In part 1 of the book we focus on the two roles that underpin sustained organizationalsuccess.
What is the One Thing you need to know about great managing?
To get the best performance from your people, you have to be able to execute a number of different roles very well. You have to be able to select people effectively. You have to set expectations by defining clearly the outcomes you want. You have to motivate people by focusing on their strengths and managing around their weaknesses. And, as they challenge you to help them grow,you have to learn how to steer them toward roles that truly fit them,rather than simply promoting them up the corporate ladder.
Each of these roles involves significant subtlety and complexity. But,without denying this complexity,is there one deep insight that underpins all of these roles and that all great managers keep in the top of their minds? The chapter on great managing supplies the answer.
