to recognize the leaders working throughout their organization and, as a result, they will never achieve the levels of success that they should.
One company I consulted with had drastically reduced headcount to save money. They had fired 50,000 people and had 40,000 left. In one meeting, my big question to the executives was, “What are you going to do for the people who are left? You've obviously fired a lot of leadership people and a lot of good folks and the people who are still here are going to have a tough time.”
One corporate vice president stood up and said, “If we keep them busy, they won't complain.”
I thought it was the saddest comment I'd heard in ages from a corporate executive. My thoughts were that more than half the staff is gone, at least 10,000 of the people left behind are going to miss their friends and former colleagues, and their performance will go down because they won't feel as happy or engaged. Another 10,000 to 20,000 of the remaining staff will wonder if they're going to be next, and their performance will go down because they will try to be invisible. In fact, I was on a flight with a management person from that company, and she described exactly how the recent layoffs were affecting her work.
I recognized the letterhead she was using, so I asked her if she worked for the company. She said that she was the regional marketing manager.
I asked, “What do you do?”
“Nothing,” she said. “Haven't you read the papers? I'm laying low because I don't want them to see me or I may be next.”
Now, my first thought was she's supposed to be leading this marketing division, but she's not performing because she's paranoid about losing her job. Her fear filters down to all the people who are working for her, and they stop performing. Her department probably wasn't the only one where things had ground to a halt, so the company was setting itself up for collapse, at least that was my perception.
Instead of doing something to make the transition easier for the people they kept on staff, the company hired an outside firm to create a slogan for the people who were left. They printed it on T-shirts and caps and buttons. The slogan was: I'm a Survivor. I had never heard anything so ridiculous in my life. I went to the corporate president and said, “You know, if you want to win and you want to be a strong company, why would you label 40,000 people as survivors?”
“Well, they still have jobs.”
I said, “That's not the important thing. Anybody can have a job. You need to give them some self-worth by telling them they're winners. They're the people that you think will take this organization to the next level.”
Eventually performance dropped so far that the company was forced to merge with another company. I've never forgotten that example, and it happens in too many companies.
Another company I worked with was struggling with a different kind of transition. They brought in a new person to be CEO and chairman. He was from a very productive corporate environment, one of the top companies in the world, and what happened was very interesting. The company was a service-oriented company, a one-stop shop where you could get almost anything. In their brick-and-mortar stores, you could always find somebody to help you who also had tremendous knowledge of the type of equipment you needed. As a result, the customer service was tremendous.
The first thing the new CEO did was fire those experienced people and hire more part-time and younger workers who knew nothing about the products. Customer service went downhill drastically and the company's main competitor absolutely exploded on the scene. It wasn't until that CEO was removed and replaced that the company was saved. Otherwise they would have gone out of business.
Now the company's doing well again. Why? Because they have a CEO who understands that their leadership is in the individual stores. Their leadership consists of the people who work up and down the aisles. Their leadership, which makes the company much more profitable, is the people who have a range of experience that they bring to the environment, and they let the players play.
The professional baseball team I was with for many years, which was very successful, set a record for the number of consecutive division titles. I worshiped the manager, but I've often said the manager was not the leader. The manager was so important because he let the players lead.
While I was working with that team, a well-known motivational speaker came to a game one day and he asked the manager, “How do you motivate your players?”
The manager said, “I put their names on the lineup card and I let them play.”
“There has to be more to it than that.”
“No. I just put their names on the lineup card and I let them play.”
And he never, in 16 years when I was around him, never made one comment about any player in the press. All of his conversations were private, held with players directly. He put their names on the lineup card and he let them play. We were fortunate enough to have two or three leadership-type people on the team and the manager let them lead. He never called them leaders, and he never gave them a label. He just let them lead, and he let them play.
And I think that's what we're looking for when we talk about leadership. What are the things that really enable you to lead if you decide you want to? Some people may decide they don't want to lead – they may be great followers. I like to think it's about balance. Leaders are not only the people who want to be out front in a visible leadership position all the time. Leaders need to know when to follow; when to let colleagues spread their wings and fly.
I think leadership is an interesting topic because everybody throws the word around. It's a label like “coach.” People seem to think that's the hottest and greatest label around these days. But even as everybody tosses these terms around, I don't think they really understand what leadership is.
I gave a lunchtime speech for a major pharmaceutical company. They had a three-hour meeting before the lunch, and invited me to sit in because they were talking about coaching and thought I'd be interested. I took them up on their offer and it really influenced the talk I gave at lunchtime. My first comment when I got up to speak was, “I sat here for three hours in a ‘coaching meeting,’ and I never heard one thing that dealt with coaching. I heard a lot about training, but not coaching.”
Coaching is a very popular term. People like it. People want to be coached and they want to be coaches, so they use that term, even if what they're really doing is training. Training is teaching people basic skills to perform a given task. Coaching is tweaking those skills once a person knows how to play. Coaching is the next level. And it's definitely not the same as leadership.
Unlike coaching, leadership is something that's very fluid. Some people work three, four, or five years before they're respected as leaders. Other people come in and, because of the way they carry themselves, their personality traits, or their ability to communicate, they are seen as leaders from their first day. In many cases that is unfair, but it happens.
Sometimes a label or an old offhand comment about a person overpowers what they actually say and do. For example, one team I worked with had a great young pitcher who was 24 years old. He threw 96 miles an hour. An average fastball is about 89, so he had a lot of talent. But his body language was so negative and aggressive that his teammates didn't like to play behind him in a defensive role. He'd prance around the mound or stare down a guy if he missed a ball. He just wasn't a fun person to be around, so after a period of time we traded him to another team.
That led to an interesting development. The next year we were playing that pitcher's new team in our stadium and I was out by the batting cage. The manager of the other team came over and said, “Dr. Jack, I have a serious question. We've got this pitcher who throws 96, is an amazing talent, but he's driving me nuts. His body language is bad. Players don't like him. He's a disruption in the dressing room, and I don't know what to do about it. I notice that you guys had him last year. What did you do?”
“We traded him to you.”
We had a good laugh and that team kept him one more month before trading him to a third team. They kept him one month and then he was released. His career was over at 26 years old because of his body language; not because of his lack of knowledge, not because of his lack