PEOPLE GET IT BACKWARDS. They think step one is doing for yourself, and only later, when you’ve got that mastered, can you try a little of step two, doing for others. Of course, it’s great when the successful give back to the community—I always try to encourage and recognize that kind of community uplift. But my success and the success I hope for you comes from changing people’s minds as you go, doing for others first and succeeding along with your partners and your community. When you work by knowing what makes other people tick, then changing people’s assumptions and benefiting the community are not just the icing on the cake. They can get you the whole cake.
However, I understand that when your mind is set on making a living or fulfilling your personal responsibilities, then “changing their minds” might seem beside the point. “Uplifting the community” might sound like a far-off goal, the sort of charity work that only the rich or the unimaginably selfless have time to take on. Too many people mistake these for goals you can’t achieve until you have more money or more power in your organization, yet what I’ve found is that it works the other way around: it’s by changing people’s minds and uplifting the community that you reach success. The opportunities are right there, all around you—if you can help others to see them. When you do, the organizations you work for will solve more problems, your business will grow more quickly, and your work will become easier and more meaningful to you. Let’s take these three benefits one at a time.
MOST INNOVATIONS AND SOLUTIONS COME FROM BELOW
WHEN A BUSINESS OR other group solves a problem or makes a measurable improvement, there is usually someone with a title who steps forward to thank the people involved. Often it sounds then as if that person—the manager, the team leader, the head of the project, the president—must have been some kind of genius, planning it all out and making it happen. When I was younger, it often sounded that way to me, so it came as a surprise when I discovered that the people in charge in almost any organization rarely bring about positive change on their own. Most of the great new ideas and solutions to problems—big or small—come from below and are made possible by people who have to change a lot of minds (often including the minds of their bosses) before their good ideas can succeed and benefit the community.
I discovered this for myself in my first job out of college. I worked as a department supervisor for General Motors, supervising two enormous warehouses that shipped GM auto parts all over the world. We had a problem: we were falling behind on our shipments. Our customers would place orders through a central computer; it was my department’s job to collect the parts they had ordered (everything from spark plugs to entire hoods), pack them for safe travel, and ship them out to the car dealers and auto parts franchises. The trouble was, we couldn’t handle the volume of orders. We fell two months behind, which meant a lot of unhappy GM customers around the world who couldn’t get their cars repaired because they were waiting on our parts.
I learned a lot, trying to solve this problem. The first thing I learned was that while I might be “department supervisor,” I couldn’t solve the problem myself. Yes, I understood that we needed to rearrange how we stored all the parts in our warehouses, so we could get to what we needed faster and streamline the process of lining everything up and packing it for shipment, but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I assumed that was because I didn’t have an engineering degree.
The next thing I learned was that the people who did have engineering degrees were the ones who had designed the pick-pack-and-ship system we already used—the system that wasn’t fast enough. The engineers and higher-level managers at the company couldn’t explain to me why we were so far behind on our orders, but as far as they were concerned, they had already done their job and the system was fine. They weren’t going to help me change it.
I came to realize that the people who knew the most about the problem were the people who actually worked in the plant, the workers I supervised. Many of them had worked there for twenty or thirty years and they knew exactly the distance you had to go to get a certain part and how best to fill the bins for wrapping and shipping. So could I just use my authority as supervisor and order them to find a more efficient system?
As I discovered, the answer to that was also no. The culture of the union workers at that time was that you did your job, you didn’t think about it. Punch in at 6:30, do what you’re told, punch out at 2:30, and you’re done. In addition, the history of the relationship between management and the union workers in the auto business had always been adversarial and tense, going back to the long, sometimes violent strikes that had forged the union. And on top of that history, there was a further division based on education: the union workers had high-school educations, while supervisor positions like mine now required college degrees. For all of these reasons, as far as most of the people who worked for me were concerned, thinking about larger departmental problems was not in their job description. And while in another organization, I might have been able to offer bonuses to those who helped me, that was not how things were done back then in the auto industry.
In other words, I needed the help of the people who worked for me, but I quickly learned that although my title was “supervisor,” all I had to change their minds was my collection of rules about what makes people tick. So I got back to basics. I spent as much time as I could talking to the workers, getting to know their situations and their concerns. Gradually I found some ambassadors. One was a woman who was married to a supervisor and could see both sides, union and management. Another was a very talkative line leader who had a lot of ideas about how things could run better, but no one who would listen to him. Another was a very grumpy, quiet guy, nicknamed Smiley, whom everyone thought was a loner, but who turned out to want to participate in the life of the shop.
As I got to know them and earned their trust, I found that many of the workers were frustrated with the way their jobs were organized. The current system kept them under constant pressure to speed up their work, which was very stressful. I tried to show them that I shared their frustration and that I didn’t see the situation as union versus management or noncollege versus college. Instead, I felt we were all human beings who could benefit if we could do our jobs without that constant pressure to make up for lost time and late orders.
As they got to know me and my approach, several of my employees were willing to sit down together and make suggestions for rearranging the parts in the warehouses and changing the systems for packing up the bins so we could get them out the door more quickly. None of them had engineering degrees, but they had plenty of practical experience. It took us three weeks to redesign the system and implement the new approach, and then we started to see results. Six weeks later, we actually got ahead of schedule.
From that first job in manufacturing, I learned that improvements don’t usually come from the top down. Often it’s the person who lacks the authority but has the knowledge or creativity who can see the steps to success for the whole community and has to work to change minds to get there. I’ve seen the same truth among my colleagues in the law, though legal work couldn’t be more different from the GM plant. For example, when the recession hit in 2008, many law firms, like businesses of all kinds, found that they could no longer count on the flow of new clients that had always sustained them. In some fields, professionals realized quickly that they would have to market themselves more aggressively, but the law had always been a “gentlemanly” profession, and many were wary of advertising and other forms of self-promotion. There were formal ethical restrictions on what a law firm could say about itself—for example, you couldn’t promise results—but beyond that, there was an established culture that distrusted self-promotion and resisted even internal methods, such as brand studies, that discover and highlight what it is about your company that a customer might value.
This culture of gentlemanly restraint was strongest among the senior partners, who of course had most of the power. The result for a few firms I knew well was that even as business worsened and billable hours declined, the senior partners resisted learning more about ways to work around the rules on how firms could solicit business. Some younger attorneys became so frustrated that they left to start their own small boutique firms, taking additional business away with them. It fell to the younger attorneys left behind to become ambassadors for a new kind of dialogue: to educate their firm about what made their clients tick and how to do business in ways that respected the special nature of the legal profession but also got the firm’s name out.
One new approach was for firms to become more active in their surrounding communities. They began to sponsor social events and camps for kids. They started making firm presentations at seminars. For example, a firm that did construction law joined the green building association, to become part of the movement toward environmentally sound construction. By making a presentation on environmentalism and law at an industry conference, they could benefit the construction community while getting to know potential clients who could use their skills. They offered related information on their Web site and in Web-based seminars.
Another approach was to launch a small public relations campaign by letting reporters and bloggers know about members of a firm who could provide expertise on a subject for stories or blog posts. A third approach was to make use of social media such as Twitter; it turned out that just as on television, the daily drama of certain kinds of lawyers was compelling to many people. Again, none of these new approaches came about by order of those in charge; they came from below, as younger, less-powerful attorneys showed that there were ways to win clients’ attention and interest without appearing to be shameless ambulance-chasers.
I said in chapter 7 that knowing what makes people tick is at heart an approach to leadership. From the moment you first try to see where someone else wants to be and how you can get there together, you are a servant-leader, helping to show them the way. Now I want to add: the essential act of the servant-leader is to change people’s minds in order to uplift them and their community. Every negotiation I’ve described in this book was an attempt to change someone’s mind by helping him or her to see the possibility of a joint benefit—in other words, a way to benefit a larger number of people than just one. Sometimes a community is only a community of two people, but more often than not, that benefit will require a change of thinking in the larger group. That’s why changing people’s minds isn’t a sideline. It’s the main game.
BECOME AN AMBASSADOR FOR A NEW DIALOGUE
WHETHER THE MINDS YOU want to change are few or many, whether the community you want to uplift is big or small, you need to become an ambassador—not an ambassador between two people or two groups, but an ambassador between an idea or approach and the people who could benefit from it if they understood it better. Whether you need to change people’s practical approach or their feelings, the basic steps are the same:
WHEN STRONG FEELINGS ARE THE OBSTACLE
I’VE GIVEN TWO EXAMPLES already of practical business problems that hid assumptions that were holding the community back. Now I want to look at an example that shows the reverse, a situation where strong community feelings hid deeper business opportunities. When I first worked in the music business, I discovered that there were actually two separate businesses in America selling Christian religious music. Although it was not often discussed, religious music was segregated—the term “Christian music” meant Christian religious music by and for whites, and the term “gospel music” meant Christian religious music by and for blacks. Many black artists felt pushed to the margins, their albums confined to special stores that catered to black customers, excluded by the larger, white music industry and unable to succeed financially. While some of this was fading history, some was ongoing—for example, there was a movement to remove the word “gospel” from the name of the Gospel Music Association and replace it with the word “Christian,” on the grounds that the organization didn’t include black gospel music and shouldn’t. This very unchristian separation between the two forms of Christian music was not just very old, it was considered something you couldn’t discuss.
To some, that might have been a discouraging situation, but I didn’t see it that way. Instead, I tried to focus on the opportunity to change minds and uplift the musical community. I started by questioning my own assumptions about why these two groups didn’t communicate. Yes, this division between “gospel” and “Christian” was old, but perhaps its age meant that it was nearly worn out. The two sides didn’t talk, but the fact that people don’t talk doesn’t prove there are irreconcilable differences. Usually, it just means that the people involved don’t want to feel uncomfortable. So if the problem was that no one would talk, then the question was: how to start the conversation? What would draw them out?
As usual, I got back to basics. I said to myself, all right, I’m standing between these two sides that don’t work together and can’t even talk about it. I was the first African-American president of a record label of this kind, but that didn’t give me any special authority or power over the other record companies; they had their own presidents and none of them took orders from me. I realized that I couldn’t take charge, but I could become an ambassador for a new, more comfortable dialogue.
What did the two sides have in common? If nothing else, they were in the record business. They all wanted to sell more music. So my approach to defusing the historical sensitivities, establishing trust, and helping the two sides start appreciating each other was to put aside race and just talk business. I would meet another president of a record label and I would talk about what was on his mind. What kind of return on investment were they seeing for different acts? How much did they spend on variable marketing? Were they having more trouble these days getting their records played on the radio? Well, hey, me too. I helped them to see that despite whatever differences we might have, I had the same goals in terms of meeting my earnings targets, managing my staff, and so forth. One by one, I showed them that even though I was the first African-American in their “club” of company presidents, they could judge me as they judged the rest of their peers—by my performance. That took the awkward feeling out of our conversations. They began to relax around me and we started building relationships of trust. I wasn’t a white executive, but they accepted me as an executive who was different but still belonged in the club.
As I developed these relationships with the other top players in the industry, I had the chance to share with them that my company was selling far more black gospel music than anyone had believed possible. They noticed that we were having success marketing to the African-American community in ways their companies hadn’t tried. They wanted to learn more about our approach. That was the promise of mutual benefit I showed them, and as I did so, a long list of benefits began to result for our community.
For the first time, the people who controlled the purse strings in other companies were willing to put more resources into marketing black gospel music. There was more attendance by other companies at black gospel events and more participation by gospel people on Christian music industry boards. More record company resources were spent on conferences and events geared to primarily African-American audiences. Labels that had never had a presence in the gospel industry began putting out gospel music and hiring African-American executives at the highest levels. That nonsense about changing the name of the Gospel Music Association was put aside, and the entire black gospel industry, from the pastors to the small recording companies to the tastemakers in the African-American media, were all treated with greater respect. These changes led to more new and successful business ventures, and in time even people who didn’t pay attention to music at all came to admire gospel as a viable business.
Some opened their minds for all of what I personally considered the right reasons, some just for the financial opportunity; but as more and more people saw what was in it for them, the cycle of success kept intensifying, not just for me or my company but for the entire industry. We all shared a genuine desire to grow the business and that was enough. Black gospel music grew exponentially and the community thrived.
Only then, after I had gained the trust and involvement of others in the industry, and after the benefits of our business relationships were clear to everyone, did I work to address segregation in the business directly. I founded a task force on race for the music industry, to continue the conversation, but even then the primary emphasis was on business. I wanted to give people in the industry a chance to talk about what the patterns of behavior had been in the past—choices made by white executives, attitudes of black executives—and the consequences of that behavior and those attitudes for the growth of the music business. Now we had a safe place to hold a more challenging discussion.
CHANGING MINDS GROWS THE BUSINESS
SO FAR IN THIS chapter I’ve described ways in which changing people’s assumptions can make it possible to solve a range of problems within and across organizations. But one type of problem is so crucial to every business that it deserves special attention: how to keep a business growing. Every successful business reaches the point where growth slows because the company or the industry has already tapped most of the customers in its original customer base. To keep growing, it must either find new products that existing customers want or reach beyond its established customers to find new ones. What was Martha Stewart doing at Kmart? She had realized that there wasn’t much more room to find new customers for her home goods in the luxury market, so she brought her style to a more general audience. In the same way, beginning in the 1990s, it gradually became clear across all of professional sports that growth among white male fans was slowing; to keep growing the audience, it would be necessary to appeal to a wider range of potential fans, including women, African-Americans, and Latinos.
To do these sorts of things, you have to change minds. You have to take people who have not been fans of Martha Stewart or major league baseball or whatever organization you want to grow, and help them to see that organization differently. You have to convince people within the organization to work to make the newcomers feel welcome. But right away, you run into some old assumptions: “These new customers have never supported us before.” “It can’t be done.” Even people within your organization who might benefit from a new sales approach or an expanded audience or customer base get stuck in a kind of chicken-and-egg paradox: which comes first?
I ran into these kinds of assumptions when I started to make the case that NASCAR, like any other professional sport, could only continue to grow by widening its appeal to a more varied audience. We already had a bigger variety of fans than most people realized—over 40 percent of our audience, for example, was female—but I knew we could go further. Still, I kept hearing from the doubters. Their argument went something like this: “Sure, it might be nice to have more women fans and more fans of color watching the races, but the fans won’t show up until we have drivers who look like them. New drivers can’t show up until we have more sponsors to pay for their cars and crews, and sponsors won’t show until we have more fans to buy their products and services. Which comes first? Frankly, Max, you’ve got no chicken and you’ve got no eggs; you can’t grow NASCAR’s business by diversifying. It’s impossible.”
This talk about why we “couldn’t” succeed took me back to my early days, when Mickey Carter and I were trying to get started as talent agents. As newcomers to our chosen work, we faced the same sort of chicken-and-egg paradox: what would come first? We had no track record, so why should clients trust us? We had no clients, so how could we prove we were qualified to do this kind of work? Maybe the whole thing was impossible. So what did we do? We used what we had to try to jump-start the cycle of success: I called my sister, who got us one meeting, which led to one client who began to tell people about our track record. That got us more clients, which got us more credibility; and in time the cycle of success started rolling. One day we found we had lots of chickens and lots of eggs—and people stopped asking us which came first.
Back in chapter 4, when I described the cycle of success, I was talking about a process by which you could build on individual achievements to grow your career. Now I want to make the point that a similar cycle of success can develop on a much larger scale, between any business and its customers. Just as in an individual career, small successes can build credibility; credibility inspires more people to take a chance; more chances, met with excellence, lead to greater successes; and the cycle feeds on itself. But now, on this larger scale, you’re not working only for yourself, you’re serving—whether in a small or large way—as one of the ambassadors who help your project or business to grow its customer base.
In that role, there are three principles to bear in mind. Let’s take them one at a time.
CHANGING MINDS LETS YOU LIVE YOUR VISION
SO FAR, I’VE TALKED about the reasons your business or group will benefit when you work to change minds and uplift the community. But there is someone else who needs you to learn to change minds and uplift the community—you. Why? This approach allows you to unite your personal vision with the practical demands of your life. In other words, changing people’s minds while uplifting the community is a way to find and to live your purpose, with all the benefits, practical and spiritual, a purposeful life brings.
In the preface of this book I described my first clear moment of vision, how I saw myself dressed in good enough clothes and shoes that people would stop prejudging me based on how I was dressed. That vision guided me to success in some of my early jobs, working as a short-order cook and as a bank teller. Success there allowed me in turn to aspire to new levels of accomplishment, such as a college degree, continuing the cycle of success. But in addition to that practical success, I was also discovering another kind of cycle, one you might call the cycle of spiritual success. I found that my vision could lead me where I needed to go and that I could rely on certain spiritual teachings in my everyday life.
In time, my spiritual vision also became more ambitious. Today, my vision is no longer to see myself in better clothes and shoes. It’s to bring people from all walks of life together to succeed. That’s the goal that drives my work, whether in sports or music, business or law. Of course, you have your own story and your own developing vision. But whatever it may be, you will find that when your work is true not just to your practical obligations but also to your passion, that is the most satisfying, reenergizing work there is.
How do you bring your private passions to work? You have to convince the people you work with that those passions have a place because they will do some good—in other words, you have to change their minds and show how your passions will uplift the community. Will that be easy? Maybe not at first. In the church, we often say that if God has given you a vision, chances are most other people won’t get it, at least not right away. And if you’re not careful, their lack of understanding can dull your own sense of your passion.
What can you do? To begin, I find it helps to set up your own purposeful routines, to strengthen your commitment to bringing your passions into the world and living according to your purpose, even when your day-to-day life may seem not to have any room for it.
We need to keep asking ourselves:
These questions are not self-indulgence. They are not a side interest or a little “extra” charitable something to do when time allows. They are at the heart of a successful life—your means to refresh your feeling for what makes you tick and to see more clearly what makes others tick. By answering these questions, you can find the energy and commitment to give your best and draw others together to work with you to reach your goals—both your practical goals and the goals that serve your higher purpose. Others who join with you may not realize for a while that you are serving a higher purpose, but as you succeed together you will have the chance to share more of what moves you by showing how it is a part of your passion and your practical success.
When you change people’s assumptions in this way, you will discover that we can each live in harmony with our own purpose while uplifting the community we share. That has been my goal throughout my life, and it was my higher purpose in writing this book. I hope it serves you in reaching your goals, as well.