Chapter 1 : Finding the Leader in You
Charles Schwab was paid a salary of a million dollars a year in the steel business, and he told me that he was paid this huge salary largely because of his ability to handle people. Imagine that! A million dollars a year because he was able to handle people! One day at noontime, Schwab was walking through one of his steel mills when he came across a group of men smoking directly under a sign that said No Smoking.
Do you suppose that Charles Schwab pointed at the sign and said, “Can’t you read?”
Absolutely not, not that master of human relations.
Mr. Schwab chatted with the men in a friendly way and never said a word about the fact that they were smoking under a No Smoking sign.
Finally he handed them some cigars and said with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d appreciate it, boys, if you’d smoke these outside.”
That is all he said. Those men knew that he knew that they had broken a rule, and they admired him because he hadn’t called them down. He had been such a good sport with them that they in turn wanted to be good sports with him.
Dale Carnegie
Fred Wilpon is the president of the New York Mets baseball team. One afternoon Wilpon was leading a group of school children on a tour of Shea Stadium. He let them stand behind home plate. He took them into the team dugouts. He walked them through the private passage to the clubhouse. As the final stop on his tour, Wilpon wanted to take the students into the stadium bull pen, where the pitchers warm up.
But right outside the bull pen gate, the group was stopped by a uni... See more
Chapter 1 : Finding the Leader in You
Charles Schwab was paid a salary of a million dollars a year in the steel business, and he told me that he was paid this huge salary largely because of his ability to handle people. Imagine that! A million dollars a year because he was able to handle people! One day at noontime, Schwab was walking through one of his steel mills when he came across a group of men smoking directly under a sign that said No Smoking.
Do you suppose that Charles Schwab pointed at the sign and said, “Can’t you read?”
Absolutely not, not that master of human relations.
Mr. Schwab chatted with the men in a friendly way and never said a word about the fact that they were smoking under a No Smoking sign.
Finally he handed them some cigars and said with a twinkle in his eye, “I’d appreciate it, boys, if you’d smoke these outside.”
That is all he said. Those men knew that he knew that they had broken a rule, and they admired him because he hadn’t called them down. He had been such a good sport with them that they in turn wanted to be good sports with him.
Dale Carnegie
Fred Wilpon is the president of the New York Mets baseball team. One afternoon Wilpon was leading a group of school children on a tour of Shea Stadium. He let them stand behind home plate. He took them into the team dugouts. He walked them through the private passage to the clubhouse. As the final stop on his tour, Wilpon wanted to take the students into the stadium bull pen, where the pitchers warm up.
But right outside the bull pen gate, the group was stopped by a uniformed security guard.
“The bull pen isn’t open to the public,” the guard told Wilpon, obviously unaware of whom he was. “I’m sorry, but you can’t go out there.”
Now, Fred Wilpon certainly had the power to get what he wanted right then and there. He could have berated the poor security guard for falling to recognize such an important person as himself. With a dramatic flourish, Wilpon could have whipped out his top-level security pass and shown the wide-eyed children how much weight he carried at Shea.
Wilpon did none of that. He led the students to the far side of the stadium and took them into the bull pen through another gate.
Why did he bother to do that? Wilpon didn’t want to embarrass the security guard. The man, after all, was doing his job and doing it well. Later that afternoon Wilpon even sent off a handwritten note, thanking the guard for showing such concern.
Had Wilpon chose instead to yell or cause a scene, the guard might well have ended up feeling resentful, and no doubt his work would have suffered as a result. Wilson’s gentle approach made infinitely more sense. The guard felt great about the compliment. And you can bet he’ll recognize Wilpon the next time the two of them happen to meet.
Fred Wilpon is a leader and not just because of the title he holds or the salary he earns. What makes him a leader of men and women is how he has learned to interact.
In the past people in the business world didn’t give much thought to the true meaning of leadership. The boss was the boss, and he was in charge. Period. End of discussion.
Well-run companies-no one ever spoke about “Well-led companies”-were the ones that operated in almost military style. Orders were delivered from above and passed down through the ranks.
Remember Mr. Dithers from the Blondie comic strip? “BUMSTEAD!” he would scream, and young Dagwood would come rushing into the boss’s office like a frightened puppy. Lots, of real-life companies operated that way for years. The companies that weren’t run like army platoons were barely run at all. They just puttered along as they always had, secure in some little niche of a market that hadn’t been challenged for years. The message from above was always, “If it ain’t broke, why fix it?”
The people who had responsibility sat in their offices and managed what they could. That’s what they were expected to do—to “manage.” Maybe they steered the organizations few degrees to the left or a few degrees to the right. Usually they tried to deal with whatever obvious problems presented themselves, and then they called it a day.
Back when the world was a simpler place, management like this was fine. Rarely visionary, but fine, as life rolled predictably along.
But mere management simply isn’t enough anymore. The world is too unpredictable, too volatile, to fast-moving for such an uninspired approach. What’s needed now is something much deeper than old-fashioned business management. What’s needed is leadership, to help people achieve what they are capable of, to establish a vision for the future, to encourage, to coach and to mentor, and to establish and maintain successful relationships.
“Back when business operated in a more stable, environment, management skills were sumcient,” says Harvard business school professor John Quelch. “But when the business environment becomes volatile, when the waters are uncharted, when your missions requires greater flexibility than you ever imagined it would-that’s when leadership skills become critical.”
“The change is already taking place, and I’m not sure all organizations are ready for it,” says Bill Makahilahila, Director of Human Resources at SG 0S-Thomson Microelectronics, Inc., a leading semiconductor manufacturer. “The position called ‘manager’ may ommunicating well is not terribly complicated—not in theory, anyway. Communicating, aft not exist too much longer, and the concept of ‘leadership’ will be redefined. Companies today are going through that struggle. They are realizing, as they begin to downsize their operations and reach for greater productivity, that facilitative skills are going to be primary. Good communication, interpersonal skills, the ability to coach, model, and build teams-all of that requires more and better leaders.
“You can’t do it by directive anymore. It has to be by influence. It takes real ‘people skills.’”
Many people still have a narrow understanding of what leadership really is. You say, “leader” and they think general, president, prime minister, or chairman of the board. Obviously, people in those exalted positions are expected to lead, an expectations they meet with varying levels of success. But the fact of the matter is that leadership does not begin and end at the very top. It is every bit as important, perhaps more important, in the places most of us live and work.
Organizing a small work team, energizing an office support staff, keeping things happy at home-those are the front lines of leadership. Leadership is never easy. But thankfully, something else is also true: Every one of us has the potential to be a leader every day.
The an team facilitator, the middle manager, the account executive, the customer-service operators, the person who works in the mail room—just about anyone who ever comes in contact with others has good reason to learn how to lead.
To enormous degree their leadership skills will determine how much success they achieve and how happy they will be. Not just at work, either. Families, charity groups, sports teams, civic associations, social clubs, you name it-every one of those organizations has a tremendous need for dynamic leadership.
Steven Jobs and Steven Wozniak were a couple of blue-jeans-wearing kids from California, ages twenty-one and twenty-six. They weren’t rich, they had absolutely no business training, and they were hoping to get started in an industry that barely existed at the time.
The year was 1976, before most people ever thought about buying computers for their homes. In those days the entire home-computer business added up to just a few brainy hobbyists, the original “computer nerds.” So when Jobs and Wozniak scraped together thirteen hundred dollars by selling a van and two calculators and opened Apple Computer, Inc., in Job’s garage, the odds against their smashing success seemed awfully long.
But these two young entrepreneurs had a vision, a clear idea of what they believed they could achieve. “Computers aren’t just for nerds anymore,” they announced. “Computers are going to be the bicycle of the mind. Low-cost computers are for everyone.”
From day one the Apple founders kept their vision intact, and they communicated it at every turn. They hired people who understood the vision and let them share in its rewards. They lived and breathed and talked the vision. Even when the company got stalled—when the retailers said no thank you, when the manufacturing people said no way, when the bankers said no more-Apple’s visionary leaders never backed down.
Eventually the world came around. Six years after Apple’s founding, the company was selling 650,000 personal computers a year. Wozniak and Jobs dynamic personal leaders, years ahead of their time.
It’s not just new organizations, however, that need visionary leadership. In the early 1980s, Corning, Incorporated, was caught in a terrible squeeze. The Corning name still meant something in kitchenware, but that name was being seriously undermined. The company’s manufacturing technology was outmoded. Its market share was down. Corning customers were defecting by the thousands to foreign firms. And the company’s stodgy management didn’t seem to have a clue.
That’s when Chairman James R. Houghton concluded that Corning needed a whole new vision, and he proposed one. Recalls Houghton: “We had an outside consultant who was working with me and my new team as our resident shrink. He was really a facilitator, a wonderful guy who kept hammering on the quality issue as something we had to get into.
“We were in one of those terrible group meetings, and everybody was very depressed. I got up and announced that we were going to spend about ten million bucks that we didn’t have. We were going to set up our own quality institute. We were going to get going on this.
“There were a lot of different things that put me over the top. But I am fast to admit, I just had a gut feeling that it was right. I had no idea of the implications, none, and how, important it would be.”
Houghton knew that Corning had to improve the quality of its manufacturing and had to speed up delivery time. What the chairman did was take a risk. He sought advice from the best experts in the world– his own employees. Not just the manager and the company engineers. Houghton brought in the line employees too. He put a representative team together and told them to redesign Coming’s entire manufacturing process—if that’s what it took to bring the company around.
The answer, the team decided after six months of work, was to redesign certain plants to reduce defects on the assembly line and make the machines faster to retool. The teams also reorganized the way Corning kept its inventories to get faster turnaround. The results were astounding. When Houghton launched these changes, irregularities in a new fiber-optics coating process were running eight hundred parts per million. Four years later that measure fell to zero. In two more years delivery time was cut from weeks to days, and in the space of four years coming’s return on equity nearly doubled. Houghton’s vision had literally turned the company around.
Business theorists Warren Bennis and Burt Nanus have studied hundreds of successful organizations, large and small, focusing on the way in which they are led. “A leader,” the two men write, “must first have developed a mental image of a possible and desirable future state of the organization. This image, which we call a vision, may be as vague as a dream or as precise as a goal or a mission statement.” The critical point, Bennis and Nanus explain, “Is that a vision articulates a view of a realistic, credible, attractive future for the organization, a condition that is better in some important ways than what now exists.”
Leaders ask: Where is this work team heading? What does this division stand for? Who are trying to serve? How can we improve the quality of our work? The specific answers will be as different as the people being led, as different as the leaders themselves. What’s most important is that the questions are asked.
There is no one correct way to lead, and talented leaders come in many personality types. They are loud or quiet, funny or severe, tough or gentle, boisterous or shy. They come from all ages, any race, both sexes, and every kind of group there is.
The idea isn’t just to identify the most successful leader you can find and then slavishly model yourself after him or her. That strategy is doomed from the start. You are unlikely ever to rise above a poor imitation of the person you are pretending to be. The leadership techniques that will work best for you are the ones you nurture inside.
Fred Ebb is a Tony Award-winning composer whose hit Broadway shows include Cabaret, kiss of the spider Woman, Chicago, and Zorba. Frequently, young songwriters come to Ebb for professional guidance. “I always tell them to follow the advice that Irving Berlin had for George Gershwin,” Ebb says.
It seems that when Berlin and Gershwin first met, Berlin was already famous and Gershwin was just a struggling young composer working on Tin Pan Alley for thirty-five dollars a week. Impressed by Gershwin’s obvious talent, Berlin offered the young man a job as his musical secretary at almost triple what Gershwin was earning writing songs.
“But don’t take the job,” Berlin advised. “If you do, you may develop into a second-rate Berlin. But if you insist on being yourself, someday you will become a first-rate Gershwin.”
Gershwin stuck with Gershwin, of course, and American popular music reached new heights. “Don’t try to imitate others,” Ebb tells his proteges. “Never stop being yourself.”
Often what this requires is figuring out who you really are and putting that insight thoughtfully to work. This is so important it’s worth a bit of quiet reflection. Ask yourself the question in a straightforward way: What personal qualities do I possess that can be turned into the qualities of leadership?
For Robert L. Crandall, one of those qualities is a keen ability to anticipate change. Crandall, the chairman of AMR Corporation, piloted American Airlines through an extremely turbulent era in the air-travel business.
Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton got a big boost from her natural enthusiasm. She leapt out of a small town in West Virginia and landed in the hearts of people everywhere.
In the case of Hugh Downs, The veteran ABC newsman, one of these leadership qualities was his down-to-earth humility. Downs managed to build a huge career for himself in the highly competitive of broadcasting and still remain a gentleman.
Whatever those qualities are for you—a dogged persistence, a steel-trap mind, a great imagination, a positive attitude, a strong sense of values—let them blossom into leadership. And remember that actions are far more powerful than words.
Arthur Ashe was a world-class tennis player and a world-class father—a true leader in those and other realms. He too believed in leading by example.
“My wife and I talk about this with our six-year-old daughter,” Ashe said in an interview just before his death. “Children are much more impressed by what they see you do than by what you say,” he said. “Children at that age certainly keep you honest. If you have been preaching one thing all along and all of a sudden you don’t do it, they’re going to bring it right up in your face.
“I tell her it’s not polite to eat with your elbows on the table. Then after dinner I’m putting my elbows up. She says, ‘Daddy, your elbows are on the table.’ You have to be man enough, or woman enough, to say, ‘You’re right,’ and take your elbows down. In fact, that’s an even stronger learning experience than her hearing it. It means that she did listen in the past. She understands it. And she recognizes it when she sees it. But it takes actions rather than mere words, to accomplish that.”
A leader establishes standards and then sticks to them. Douglas A. Warner III, for instance, has always insisted on what he calls “full transparency.”
“What you come in to make a proposal to me,” says Warner, president of J. P. Morgan & Co., Incorporated, “Assume that everything that you just told me appears tomorrow on the front page of the wall Street Journal. Are you going to be proud to have handled this transaction or handled this situation in the way you just recommended, assuming full transparency?
If the answer to that is no, then we’re going to stop right there and examine what the problem is.” That is a mark of leadership.
Well-focused, self-confident leadership like that is what turns a vision into reality. Just ask Mother Teresa. She was a young Catholic nun, teaching high school in an upper-middle-class section of Calcutta. But she kept looking out the window and seeing the lepers on the street. “I saw fear in their eyes,” she said “The fear they would never be loved, the fear they would never get adequate medical attention.”
She could not shake that fear out of her mind. She knew she had to leave the security of the convent, go out into the streets, and set up homes of peace for the lepers of India. Over the years to come, Mother Teresa and her Missionaries of Charity have cared for 149,000 people with leprosy, dispensing medical attentions and unconditional love.
One December day, after addressing the United Nations, Mother Teresa went to visit a maximum-security prison upstate New York. While inside she spoke with four inmates who had AIDS. She knew at once that these were the lepers of today.
She got back to New York City on the Monday before Christmas, and she went straight to City Hall to see Mayor Edward Koch. She asked the mayor if he would telephone the governor, Mario Cuomo. “Governor,” she said, after Koch handed her the phone “I’m just back from Sing, and four prisoners there have AIDS. I’d like to open up an AIDS center. Would you mind releasing those four prisoners to me? I’d like them to be the first four in the AIDS center.”
“Well, Mother,” Cuomo said, “we have forty-three cases of AIDS in the state prison system. I’ll release all forty-three to you.”
“Okay,” she said. “I’d like to start with just the four. Now let me tell you about the building I have in mind. Would you like to pay for it?”
“Okay,” Cuomo agreed, bowled over by this woman’s intensity.
Then Mother Teresa turned to Mayor Koch, and she said to him, “Today is Monday. I’d like to open this on Wednesday. We’re going to need some permits cleared. Could you please arrange those?”
Koch just looked at this tiny woman standing in his office and shook his head back and forth. “As long as you don’t make me wash the floors,” the office said.
The first step toward success is identifying your own leadership strengths.
Chapter 2 : Starting to Communicate
Theodore Roosevelt’s children adored him, and they had good reason to. An old friend came to Roosevelt one day in distress. His young son had left home and gone to live with his aunt. The boy was wild. He was this and he was that. And the father claimed that no one cloud get along with him.
Roosevelt said, “Nonsense. I don’t believe there’s a thing wrong with the boy. But if a boy with spirit can’t get the right sort of treatment at home, he’ll go someplace else to get it.”
Several days later Roosevelt saw the boy and said, “What’s all this I hear about your leaving home?”
“Well, Colonel,” said the boy, “every time I go to Dad he explodes. He’s never given me a chance to tell my story. I’m always wrong. I’m always to blame.”
“You know, son,” said Roosevelt, “you may not believe it now, but your father is your best friend. You are more to him than all the rest of the world.”
“That may be, Colonel Roosevelt,” the boy said, “but I do wish he’d take some other way of showing it.”
Then Roosevelt sent for the father, and he began to tell the father a few shocking truths. The father exploded just the way the boy described. “See here,” said Roosevelt. “If you talk to your boy the way you’ve just been talking to me, I don’t wonder he left home. I only marvel that he didn’t do it before. Now you go and get acquainted with him. Meet him halfway.”
Dale Carnegie
Nothing could be easier than failing to communicate. Condescending, contradicting, berating, demeaning, treating other people as if “I am the boss, and you just work here”—until recently these were widely accepted forms of human interacting inside some of the largest and best-known companies in the world. “Braking rights” were thoughts to be a natural prerogative of executive positions, along with an office window and a two-hour lunch. Families, schools, and other organizations unfortunately followed suit.
For years loudness was equated with toughness. Stubbornness was equated with superior Knowledge. Argumentativeness was equated with honesty. We should all-supervisor and employee, parent and child, teacher and student-be grateful those days are finally coming to an end.
Jerry Greenwald, former vice chairman of Chrysler Corporation, compares the old corporate method of communication to a trickle-down version of that childhood game, telephone. “If two teenagers live next to each other and they have something to sort out between them, one crosses the lawn, and they talk it out. If they were two people in two departments of a corporation, the teenager would tell his older brother, who would tell his mother, who would tell his father, who would go next door and tell the father of other teenager, who would tell the other teenager’s mother, and finally the other teenager would get the message and say, ‘What was the guy next door trying to tell me?’
“We’re trying to break all that down at Chrysler,” Greenwald explained while he was still at the auto company. “If you are an operator in a plant and you need to tell someone three hundred feet at the other end of the plant to change something so you can do your job better, go over and tell him. Don’t tell your foreman to tell your superintendent to tell his superintendent so that six months from now the other person will still be trying to figure out what you wanted to change.”
More and more people, in business and elsewhere, are beginning to understand how important good communication really is. The ability to communicate well is what lights the fire in people. It’s what turns great ideas into action. It’s what makes all achievements possible.
Communicating well is not terribly complcated—not in theory, anyway. Communicating, after all, is something every one of us does every day in our personal lives. We’ve all been communicating since the early days of childhood. At least we think we have. But true communication, effective communication, is in fact relatively rare in the adult world.
There’s no secret recipe for learning to communicate well, but there are some basic concepts that can be mastered with relative ease. Here are the first steps to successful communication. Follow then and you will be on your way.
Make communication a top priority.
Be open to other people.
Create a receptive environment for communication.
No matter how busy you find yourself during the work day, you absolute must make time to communicate. All the brilliant ideas in the world are worthless if you don’t share them. Communication can be accomplished in many ways—in meetings, in face-to-face sessions with colleagues, just walking down the hall, or stopping at the water cooler, or spending half an hour in the company lunch room. What’s most important is that communicating never stop.
Robert Crandall has a big conference room down the hall from his chairman’s office at AMR Corporation, the parent company of American Airlines. Every Monday he spends much of his day in there, listening and talking to people from all parts of the company, “Yesterday morning,” Crandall said not long ago, “we had the senior officers and eight or ten or twelve other people from three or four levels in the company in there, and we were doing a very complicated analysis.
“We’re trying to understand whether or not this hub-and-spoke system that we constructed has become economically indefensible as a consequence of the way the industry is changing.
When we created this particular pattern of hubs and spokes, the world looked one way, and now it looks a different way. That’s had an effect on how passengers flow across the system. It’s also had an effect on pricing. The consequence is that we are not at all sure that the hub-and-spoke system remains viable. Determining that is very complicated.
“It takes an enormous amount of data. So we spent three and a half hours yesterday, in the course of which there where many different points of view expressed and a lot of talking back and forth and a good deal of intense feeling all around. Anyway we finally sent people away with three or four supplementary assignments, and they’ll come back in a couple of weeks with the additional data. Then we’ll sit down and talk some more. ‘Is what we are doing wrong? And what can we do differently that has the probability of working?’ That’s how we eventually hope to find our way out of these dilemmas.”
The benefits here are twofold: Crandall gets the input of Knowledgeable people and they get to help create the future vision of American Airlines. That’s fundamental to the development of trusting relationships.
Communication doesn’t have to happen in big conference rooms. Some of the best corporate communication occurs in seemingly informal ways. Walter A. Green, the chairman of Harrison Conference Service, Inc., uses a technique he calls his “one-on-ones.”
“Unfortunately,” Green says, “in organizations we have structures. We have presidents, and all these other levels. One-on-ones are a way of overcoming that. These are off-the-record conversations—usually at lunch—where I meet with anyone in the organization I care to meet with. It’s a chance for me to stay in touch in touch with what’s important to them. How do they feel about the company? How do they feel about their jobs? I’d like to learn something about them as individuals. I like to become more human to them, and I like them to ask me questions about the company. All of that is easier one-on-one.” As a result of these conversations, Green’s vision for the company begins to grow.
Douglas Warner, the J.P. Morgan president, has brought this practice of direct communication into that old-line bank. “We literally walk around, walk through the inner floor,” Warner says. “Go down and see some people. Get out of the office, go to other places instead of insisting that everybody come here.”
Several times a week Warner or his top assistant has coffee with thirty or forty of Morgan’s top people. “Eyeball-to-eyeball communication, direct and informal,” in Warner’s words. Even a bank like Morgan has discovered the usefulness of these simple chats. The same theory is applied inside the executive suite. “As part of all that, the managing directors of the firm, three hundred-odd people, would be invited to a large room every day for lunch—the ones who are in New York and the ones who are visiting from overseas. That way there’s a real forum every day.”
David Luther, corporate director of quality at Corning, Incorporated, describes this process at his organization: “I use the term bottom trawling, going to the bottom of the organization and asking, what’s really going on, what are people worried about? What are they saying? What are they up against? What can you do to help?”
The need for effective communication doesn’t stop at the office door. It extends to the home, to the school, to the church, to the halls of science. Any place where people meet with people, communication is Key.
It used to be that research scientists could spend their whole lives in the laboratory, single-mindedly searching for the truths of the natural order. But those days are gone. In today’s competitive world, even scientists need to listen and talk.
“Many scientists don’t know how to effectively communicate what they are doing,” says Dr. Ronald M. Evans, an eminent research professor at the Salk Institute for Biological Studies. “They know what they are doing. They have a pretty good idea of why they’re doing it. But they have difficulty putting that into perspective, transmitting the ideas outside the laboratory. It’s a major limitation at many levels. To obtain funding, you have to convince people that you’re doing something that’s important.”
When Lee Iacocca first went to work at the Ford Motor Company, he discovered the same limitation in many automobile designers and engineers: “I’ve known a lot of engineers with terrific ideas who had trouble explaining them to other people. It’s always a shame when a guy with great talent can’t tell the board or a committee what’s in his head.”
Without mastery of that very basic human skill—the ability to talk and listen to other-members of a company, a school, or a family can’t thrive for long.
Things had gotten frenetic around the Levines’ house. The children were getting older. That meant playdates, birthday parties, Little League games, gymnastics classes, Brownie troops, religious instruction-and more carpool trips for Harriet than anyone could count.
Stuart had a job he loved, but the travel was grueling and it kept him away from the family more than he would have liked. That left Harriet at home with Jesse and Elizabeth, who were terrific kids but were getting more independent by the day.
“Jesse and Elizabeth were watching far too much television,” Harriet recalls, “and they weren’t reading nearly enough. We barely had time to communicate.”
Before things got really out of hand, the Levines all sat down together one night and came up with a plan. They would form a family council, they decided. Every Sunday after dinner they would gather around the kitchen table and talk in a calm way about whatever was on their minds. “The idea was to have a regular forum for family communication, every week, no matter what,” Harriet explains.
The family council began dealing with issues large and small. Are the kids getting in their half hour of reading before television? Is Stuart going to be back in town for the soccer game? When is Harriet going to stop serving that same chicken dish?
At the end of the meeting the children would be given their weekly allowances. “Everyone is supposed to participate, and no one ever gets in trouble-as long as they tell the truth.”
The biggest mistake managers used to make—besides thinking that all wisdom flowed from them-was failing to understand that communication absolutely has to be a two-way street. You have to share your ideas with others and listen to theirs. That’s step number two: Be open to other people—above, below, and beside.
Publilius Syrus, the Roman playwright, recognized this fact of human nature two thousand years, ago. “We are interested in others when they are interested in us,” Syrus wrote.
If you can show your colleagues you are receptive to their ideas, they’re more likely to be receptive to yours—and to keep you honestly informed about the things you need to know. Show that you care about the future of the organization and that you care as much about them. And don’t limit those displays of concern to your coworkers. Communicate the same genuine caring to your customers and your clients too.
At Saunders Karp & Company, merchant banker Thomas A. Saunders III spends his professional life looking for growing companies to invest his clients’ funds in. He’s an expert at spotting business gems. Nothing impresses Saunders more than a company that really knows how to communicate with its customers.
He recently paid a visit to a wholesale jewelry company in Lafayette, Louisiana. He spent a day touring the company’s facilities. But all it really too was five minutes in the telemarketing room for Saunders to recognize a first-string communications success.
“They handled their customers very efficiently on the phone, and the quality of the service was extremely high,” Saunders said. “They didn’t seem to make any mistakes. It was just bing, bing, bing, ‘You want this?... Yes, we have that in stock... You want two of those, fine... You want three of those, fine... Yes, we have them... No, you have to back-order that... May I suggest a substitution?... Yes, well, if you look on page six hundred of our catalog, there’s a mounting...’ Boom. ‘Thank you very much.’ It was over in fifteen seconds. Unbelievable.”
The average call took fifteen seconds, and the average customers went away thrilled. Who wouldn’t put money in a company like that?
It’s easy to become isolated from customers and colleagues, especially for those people who rise in an organization. But no matter how high you get, communication still has to run in all directions, talking and listening, up, down, and around the chain of command.
Ronald Reagan wasn’t called the Great Communicator for nothing. Throughout his long political career he made it a point to listen and talk to the people he served. Even when he was president, Reagan continued to read constituent mail. He would have his White House secretaries give him a selection of letters each afternoon. At night he would take them up to his Quarters and write out personal replies.
Bill Clinton has put the televised town meeting to much the same use: keeping himself informed about how people are feeling and showing people that he cares about them. Even if he doesn’t have solution for all the problems they bring up, there Clinton is listening, connecting, articulating his own ideas.
There’s nothing new about any of this. Abraham Lincoln took a similar approach more than a century ago. In those days, any citizen could petition the president. Sometimes Lincoln would ask an aide to respond, but frequently he would answer the petitioners personally.
He took some criticism for that. Why bother when there was a war to be fought, a union to be saved? Because Lincoln knew that understanding public opinion was an essential part of being president, and he wanted to hear it firsthand.
Richard L. Fenstermacher, executive director of North American auto operations marketing at Ford Motor Company, is a firm believer in that. “My doors open,” he’s constantly telling his people. “If you’re walking up the hall and you see me in there, even if you just want to say hi, stop in. If you want to bounce an idea off me, do it. Don’t feel you have to go through the managers.”
That kind of easy interaction doesn’t happen by accident That’s where rule number three comes into play: Create a receptive environment for communication.
It’s a basic fact about communicating with people: they won’t say what they think—and won’t listen receptively to what you say—unless a foundation of genuine trust and shared interest has been laid. You can’t be insincere. How you really feel about communication, whether you’re open or not, comes through loud and clear, no matter what you say. “You know right away is somebody is approachable or if they’re not,” Olympic gymnast Mary Lou Retton has said. “When you get that feeling, you can read a person by nonverbal communication and body language. You know when somebody is standing in the corner and saying’ ‘Hey, I don’t want to be talked to.’”
How can you avoid sending that message? Be open, like people, and let, them know you do. Follow Ration’s advice: “Being down-to-earth and humble is extremely important. I just try to put people at ease. Everybody’s the same. I Think everybody is on a certain level, whether you are the CEO of a company or a salesperson. It’s just a different job.” That’s what creating a receptive environment is all about: putting people at ease.
It used to be easier than it is today. Television announcer and former baseball great Joe Garagiola remembers how much one-on-one contact there used to be between the players and the fans: “When we used to come off the field and go to our homes after the games, we would ride the subways with the same fans who were in the stands a few hours earlier.
“It wasn’t uncommon for one of the fans to say, ‘Hey, Joe, why did you swing at that third strike? Why didn’t you let it go?’ Now there isn’t the same personal connection between the fan and the players other than reading about whether or not he’s signing a six-or a seven-million-dollar contract.”
Ray Stata, the chairman of Analog Devices, Inc., a manufacturer of high-performance integrated circuits, learned the importance of taking a personal interest from his friend Red Auerbach, the long-time president of the Boston Celtics.
Stata recalls, “When he would talk about leadership, he often used the phrase, ‘I love people.’ He considered that a real prerequisite to leadership. And they have to know it. So if you have an environment where people genuinely believe that at the end of the day they can trust in your interest and concern about their Well-being, then you have created relationships that have more meaning to them.” Then, and only then, will the ground be appropriately prepared for communication.
Don’t expect this to happen without some work.
Several years ago Coming’s David Luther was trying to convince a union leader to embrace the quality improvement program that the company was trying to start. Luther made his pitch, talking on and on in what he thought was a very convincing way about the importance of quality improvement. This program was going to improve life for both management and labor, Luther promised the union man. But the labor leader clearly wasn’t buying a word of what Luther had to say.
Luther recalls, “He got up and he said, ‘Give me a break, That’s baloney. You guys, that’s a scam. It’s better than most of your scams, but it’s a scam. All you’re trying to do is get more out of the worker here.’”
They kept talking though. “He came around a little,” Luther says, “but I didn’t convince him, and came to the conclusion that I could never talk my way into his trust. I could only demonstrate that I deserved it. So I said, ‘I’m going to be back next year with this, and I’m going to be back the year after that and I’m going to be back the year after that. I’m going to keep coming back with be back the same stuff.’” And Luther kept coming back.
His message took several years to sink in, and first he had to show he could be trusted on some smaller issues. He had to show he was listening to their concerns as well. But in the end Luther had the patience to let the message take hold, and Corning’s unions became real partners in the quality improvement program.
One last thing to remember: Once people do take the risk of telling you what they think, don’t punish them for their openness. Do nothing—absolutely nothing—to discourage them from taking the risk of communicating again.
“If an employee makes a suggestion that I don’t agree with, then I have to be very delicate about the way in which I tell them I don’t agree,” says Fred J. Sievert, chief financial officer of the New York Life Insurance Company. “I want to encourage them to come back to me the next time and make another suggestion. Now, I told some of the people on my staff that I may disagree with them ninety-nine times out of a hundred, but I want them to keep coming to me with their views. That’s what they get paid for. The one time out of a hundred is going to be of value, and I’m not going to view them as any weaker because I disagree with them the other times.”
One in a hundred. That may not sound so impressive, but great fortunes have been made on odds less certain than that. That’s why listening and sharing ideas is so important.
The truth of the matter is that communication is both a skill and an art. It’s a process worth thinking about and practicing more than most people do. It sometimes involves showing personal vulnerability by putting your ideas on the line. You’re sharing with others and asking them to share with you. That’s not always easy. It takes work and time. Techniques have to be acquired and practicing constantly. But take heart. Practice does make perfect, or very nearly so.
Kuo Chi-Zu is the chief prosecutor in Taipei, Taiwan, and a tremendously compelling public speaker. But he wasn’t always so comfortable talking in front of a group. As a rising young prosecutor, Chi-Zu was always being invited to address local organizations. He said no to the Rotary. He said no the Lions. He said no to Junior Achievement. He was so frightened of the prospect of appearing in public-as man; people are-that he turned every invitation down.
“Even if I were just attending a meeting,” he remembers, “I always selected the seat at the far corner. And I almost never said a single word.”
He knew this fear was slowing the progress of his career-not to mention keeping him awake at night in fits of anxiety. He knew he had to get a grip on his communication problem.
Then one day Chi-Zu was invited to speak at his old high school, and he recognized at once that this was his opportunity.
He had, after all, made great effort over the years to maintain a strong relationship with the school and with its students and graduates. If there was audience he could trust—and that would feel open to what he had to say—this was the one.
So he agreed to appear, and he prepared himself as well as he could. He chose a subject he knew a tremendous amount about and cared deeply for: his job as a prosecutor. He built the speech around real-life examples. He didn’t memorize. He didn’t write out the words. He just walked up to the front of the school auditorium and spoke as if he were addressing a room full of friends, which he was.
The speech was a great success. From the podium he could see the eyes in the audience riveted on him. He could hear the people laughing at his jokes. He could feel their warmth and support, and when he was finished speaking, the students rose to their feet for a robust standing ovation.
Chi-Zu learned some valuable lessons about communication that day: how communication takes a certain openness and a trusting environment, what dividends successful communication can pay. Chi-Zu didn’t stop there. He became a favourite on this Taipei lecture circuit and was quickly catapulted into the chief prosecutor’s job.
He was finally learning to communicate.
Communication is built on trusting relationships.
