THE PEOPLE ARE THE PLAN
My client, CEO of a $20 billion company, looked at me with one of those expressions that smart people get sometimes when something extra smart goes off in their heads, the kind of thought that captures even their own attention. Head tilted and eyes squinted, he said something profound: “You know what is weird?”
“Everybody out there is always trying to figure out the right plan. They meet, they argue, they worry and they put all of their energy into trying to come up with the ‘right’ plan. But the truth is that there are five right plans. There are a lot of ways to get there. The real problem is getting the people to do what it takes to make the plan work. That is where you win or lose. It’s always about the people.”
He was right. Ultimately, leadership is about turning a vision into reality; it’s about producing real results in the real world. And that is only done through people doing what it takes to make it happen. So, as a leader, how do you get that to happen? What are the things that you have to do to ensure they will do what will make it work—with a team, a direct report, or an entire organization? That is the focus of this book.
This book is about what leaders need to do in order for people to accomplish a vision.
WHEN THE “PEOPLE” SIDE OF THINGS DOESN’T WORK
This particular CEO had come to me for help with his team. They had become disconnected from one another, and their divide had begun to manifest itself in the rest of the organization. At the root of the problem was a breach between the leader of operations in the home office and the leader of the sales force out in the field. Communication had broken down, and results were slowing down too—all for no good reason, other than that the “people” side of things wasn’t working. Even though the “plan” was good, the team was not functioning like a good team, with shared objectives and healthy relationships that would help make the plan work. Similarly, the culture was at risk, with negativity creeping in where positive energy should have been. The dilemma for the CEO was that even though he had a good “plan,” as he said, and he had “really great people,” they were just not working together.
As I meet with leaders and their companies, I find that more often than not, they have smart plans. They know their business, or they would not be where they are. They are strategic, talented, gifted, and experienced. Their “business” expertise got them to where they are, but as they rise to more significant positions of leadership, they need other skills in addition to what their business smarts can provide. They need to be able to lead people to get results.
What usually got them there was being good at the business, devising and executing “the plan.” But now, as leaders, they also have to be good at something else: getting people to do what it takes to make the plan work. It is about leading the “right people,” empowering them to find and do the “right things” in the “right ways” at the “right times.” That is what will bring a plan to real results.
As one leader told me, “I wanted this position because I love the hunt, the strategy, the winning. I love focusing on how to make it work and getting there. But the longer I am at it, the more and more of my time is spent on the people leadership issues, and less on the work. I have great people, but getting them all on the same page and working together takes more time and energy than it seems like it should. Some days I feel more like a psychologist than a business leader.”
How much time and energy it “should” take is debatable, but the key takeaway is this: the time and energy that you do invest in people issues should produce better results and create teams and a culture where momentum and energy thrive. And the work of building a great team should feel personally rewarding instead of draining. Put simply: the people side of it should not be what he was experiencing. It should be an investment with a high rate of return for you and for the business, not a constant drain on your personal and organizational resources. It should produce positive, not negative, energy.
As a leader, you probably spend a lot of time on the “people” side of business already—even more time when results are poor. You are always building teams and culture, leading direct reports, driving initiatives and change through your organization, and pushing for innovation, adaptation, and agility. And what you want is for all of that effort to produce results, and for people to be positively energized as they help drive the vision forward.
GREAT PLAN, GOOD PEOPLE, BUT POOR RESULTS
Sometimes even with all of that energy spent, results are negatively affected by the ways that different people function both in teams and as individuals. Too often such “soft” issues become ingrained patterns that determine how the business itself looks and functions. When added up, individual weaknesses and poor interpersonal dynamics can overshadow the strengths. All the smarts and skills of individual team members just don’t produce the results you are looking for. Opportunities are lost, even as you spend more time and more energy trying to get people moving forward together in the right direction. Such a great plan, such good people, and still not getting the results you want.
See if you can identify with any of these issues:
• Results are less than the combined talent should be producing.
• Negative thinking and negative outlooks take root, and people sound like “victims” of the economy, the market, or someone else’s actions.
• One or two people have too much power on a team or in a department, which allows dysfunction to seep into the rest of the team.
• Speed is absent as plans and decisions lag in a sea of desired but difficult-to-nail-down “consensus.”
• The culture tolerates mediocrity or even poor performance.
• People and teams are not focused on what truly drives results.
• Pettiness and blame games replace healthy problem solving.
• Communication in teams and departments happens in “the meeting after the meeting,” instead of face-to-face with all stakeholders present.
• Even though people have bosses and “performance reviews,” accountability is not truly being exercised.
• Execution is not swift, and being “late” in launches or with other deliverables has become the norm.
• Celebration of “wins” is not as regular as it was, or as it should be.
• Morale is not where you need it to be.
• The business feels scattered and not on a focused, upward trajectory.
• Competing agendas abound and never quite come together.
• Some leaders and bosses in the organization build great teams and develop great people, but others don’t, creating an organization that looks like a crazy quilt of inconsistency and uneven results.
Do any of these sound familiar? Don’t worry: you are not alone. The frustrations described here happen frequently, even to very talented people and even in high-performance organizations. “People” issues tend to sneak up on even the best leaders, sometimes derailing even the best talent and the best-laid plans.
CHRIS: A GREAT PLAN HITS THE WALL
Consider the experience of one such leader: Chris founded his company by building on his success as a rainmaker. He had worked for a technology company and had consistently closed more sales than everyone around him. Like many successful people, Chris decided to do on his own what he had done for others. So, with some investors, he launched a new venture. “Why sell this stuff for someone else when I can do it for myself?” he reasoned. He was soon to find out the answer.
Things went well early on. Chris landed a few big accounts and built a company around those early successes. The new company grew quickly, landing more big accounts with global companies who wanted to use its equipment. Adding more and more employees, Chris’s company soon became a substantial entity, with revenue growing every year until it became a true market leader in its competitive space. The future looked good. Chris could see a public offering in the near future.
But within a few years things began to be not so good inside the walls of the company. Key employees who had joined Chris because of his high energy and can-do spirit began feeling overworked and increasingly stressed out because of what they called the “chaos.” The company seemed to lack its original direction and momentum. For a time, success seemed to go hand in hand with the chaos, but slowly at first and then more rapidly, the chaos began to overshadow all that was good. That is when Chris’s board, comprised of key investors, called me.
The board’s concern came from what they were hearing directly from some members of Chris’s executive team. The team told the board that they had reached the breaking point, that they couldn’t take the chaos and dysfunction anymore, and that if the board did not do something soon, they were going to leave. That amount of talent threatening a mass exodus certainly got the board’s attention.
In trying to get to the bottom of the problem, my first step was to set up interviews with all of the members of the executive team. I wanted to get a feel for what was happening. What struck me first was their love for Chris. They really admired him, the energy that he created, his passion for what they were doing, and his creativity about the technology they had developed. They wanted to be on his team and make what they had created succeed and grow. Even more important, they wanted to give their talents to the company, and they all wanted to be part of the endeavor for the long term.
But they had gotten to a bad place. When I interviewed them they were as dismayed and as frustrated as they had been motivated and inspired at the beginning of the company’s journey. They reported feeling like they were running around in a thousand different directions. They would be headed down one path, only to suddenly get an e-mail from Chris about another new deal that required everyone to marshal all of their resources around this latest, exciting opportunity—never mind last week’s latest, exciting opportunity. Obviously this near-constant rejiggering of priorities created confusion and disruptions, leaving the rank and file unsure about whether what they were working on yesterday was still what they were supposed to be worrying about tomorrow morning. Or was the new emphasis the “main thing now”?
Even worse, Chris would send e-mails to his executive team’s employees, putting those people into a state of confusion as to whom they were supposed to be answering to—the CEO or their own boss? employees felt torn between two bosses and two agendas, and their own workloads. No matter how informal the work environment or how loose the chain of command, it is very difficult for most employees to tell a CEO, “I can’t do that. I am busy.” When employees went to their own bosses in frustration, their bosses would get upset and call Chris and say something along the lines of “We can’t do this project ‘all of a sudden’ . . . and also do what we were already working on at the same time. And you have to go through us to get to our people. It’s killing us.”
Chris would not respond well, alternating between scolding them for not being “adaptive” enough and accusing them of stifling growth through negativity or by usurping his authority. Depending on individual personalities—some being confrontational and others preferring to avoid conflict—the executive team ended up either getting into nasty arguments with Chris or slinking back to their desks to complain behind his back. Watercooler meetings and rumors were rampant even though, on the surface, it appeared that everyone had fallen into line with Chris’s latest pronouncements. In reality, there wasn’t even one clear line to follow—more like three or four or more all headed in different directions.
On top of this, Chris had a bad habit of not being involved enough and failing to really lead his team and his people for good stretches of time, only to then swoop back in with what his team came to call intermittent “micro-downbursts.” When the mood struck him, Chris would drop in uninvited on one of his executive’s turf “just to help,” but he would end up upsetting team members and demotivating the team’s leader. Too often the team was already struggling with its own cohesion and thus wasn’t able to block Chris’s interference in a constructive manner. Everyone, it seemed, had begun to feel powerless to deal with Chris’s leadership; they couldn’t figure out how to get him to lead differently. And he was such a nice guy, to top it off.
In all of this, what struck me in my first interview with Chris was the extent to which Chris felt and sounded a bit like a victim. He was “busting his butt,” as he put it, “for everyone” and feeling extremely unappreciated by the troops. “I am creating all of this opportunity for them and what do I get? Whining and complaining.” What he couldn’t seem to understand was that they were feeling what they were feeling for good reasons. He just didn’t get it. But what also struck me was that there were no “bad guys” anywhere in the mix—only good and talented people, all trying to do the best they could.
The board’s concerns about Chris’s leadership skills had reached a critical moment. It had gotten to the point where the board of directors started talking with Chris about the possibility of a buyout that would send him packing. One board member confided to me: “I don’t have a lot of hope for your being able to fix this. The only answers are to bring in a new CEO, or sell it.” But without Chris’s drive and skills at generating revenue, how would the board replace him without taking a big hit? at the same time, if a new CEO were brought in to assume the helm, then it was hard to imagine Chris, the founder of the company, wanting to stay. How could he possibly let go of his “baby”? at forty-four, it seemed like his entire life and his future were bound up in the company’s success.
Both outcomes seemed completely unattractive, so . . . what to do? Obviously you could treat the symptoms—such as trying to get Chris to behave and stop doing more deals than they could deliver, or getting the rest of his team to communicate better. Or you could bring someone in to be a real leader and take charge of the operations in ways that Chris was not doing. Certainly all of those things would be really good ideas, but from my perspective the problem was deeper. If the company was ever going to realize its vision and make its revenue targets for the next year and beyond, a new path was needed.
What was the real issue?
THE NEED FOR BOUNDARIES
The issue was that Chris and his team had failed to establish the boundaries that would positively drive organizational health and the boundaries that would immunize them against sickness. The only solution was for the board to find a way to help Chris achieve his potential and for Chris to find a way to be the kind of leader his company needed. Over the course of the next eighteen months, I was able to work with Chris and his team, and they began to lead the company in a way that made it possible to leverage its many strengths . . . through the concepts that we will cover in this book.
The good news is that the issues Chris and his team faced—the issues that many of you face in your own organizations—are fixable. When leaders lead in ways that people’s brains can follow, good results follow as well. No matter where you see yourself in this story, I want you to remember that when leaders begin to behave differently, most of the issues that hamper results and harm company culture are truly fixable. You can get the results you desire, if you lead in ways that people can actually follow.
You might be like Chris, a great performer, a master in working the “business and the plan,” But now you find yourself hitting some hard realities about how to lead others to the same level of performance that you have achieved.
You might be like Chris’s board of directors, the boss of someone whose performance you really need, even as you must find a way to help him transform his dysfunctional leadership style in a way that can bring results and make people thrive.
You might be on an executive team led by a dysfunctional leader who often makes it difficult for you and your team to succeed.
You might be further down in the organization, feeling the effects of dysfunctional leadership issues above you, and have a desire to make things better but don’t know how to do that from your level.
Or you might be a spouse, family member, or a friend of someone for whom this scenario is all too familiar. You want to help them figure out what they could do to feel better about work and about themselves.
Wherever you might find yourself, remember that there are good reasons for the results you are not getting. And there are answers that work. But to get to the answers, you will have to get to a very important realization first.