A Teachable Point of View

THREE STORIES

Roger Enrico's Guidelines

Roger Enrico, CEO of Pepsico, says six conditions must be in place to develop leaders:

1. You must have a teachable point of view.
2. You must be ready to put in the time.
3. As a role model and coach you must be vulnerable. You can't lead knowing all the answers.
4. You have to learn using real-life projects.
5. You have to "blend the soft with the hard" -- the brass tacks of business with the human side of things.
6. You have to be able to energize people as they learn

 

 

 

 

Order The Leadership Engine from Amazon.com by clicking on the title.

The Leadership Engine: How Winning Companies Build Leaders at Every Level
by Noel Tichy and Eli Cohen
List Price: $26.00
Our Price: $18.20
You Save: $7.80 (30%)

Availability: This title usually ships within 24 hours.

What lies at the heart of leadership? A human heart, says Noel Tichy. Authentic leadership occurs when people within an organization see the story of the leader, and the story of the organization, and their own stories converge into a single story. When leaders know who they are, they are able to articulate visions in a believable way.

This doesn't mean a leader has to be likeable. Tichy notes that opinions on him range from "Jack Welch is the greatest CEO GE ever had," to "Jack Welch is an asshole."

The two views are eminently compatible. Leadership requires being an asshole sometimes, Tichy said. All the great ones, including Martin Luther King, Jr. and Gandhi, could be assholes at the drop of a hat.

Popularity and leadership may occasionally crisscross; authenticity and leadership must roll on the same track.

The foremost role of a leader is therefore to be a teacher. And the mark of a great teacher is having a "teachable point of view."

There are three components to this teachable point of view: ideas, values, and a category Tichy calls E³ -- for emotional energy and "edge."

u

Leadership isn't an unmeasurable concept. You can gauge the success of a leader by the market capitalization of the company he or she leads. John Akers, who was thought of as a fine leader during his reign at IBM, presided over a decline in market cap from $98 billion to $38 billion.

Fortunes faded at IBM, as they did at other "dinosaur" companies -- Sears, General Motors, Kodak, and Digital. Why? Because these organizations lacked the ability to generate leadership that could identify problems, communicate the reality to constituents, and formulate a plan to reverse their fortunes that workers and investors believed.

This is why GE, which by all logic should have been a fading dinosaur, instead thrived and grew. Unlike the imperial Akers, a lifelong IBMer who believed that success was inevitable because the company was just so darn smart, Welch had an entrepreneurial, underdog's cast of mind. He lived in the real world, he knew who he was, and he was able to communicate ideas in simple, engaging ways.

IDEAS

Winning organizations are built on clear ideas.

Leaders make sure they ideas are current and appropriate.

Ideas are the framework for action at all levels.

He told about Bob Knowling, an inner city boy who had 13 brothers and sisters, who learned the hard way, from a beating in the school principal's office, that being black meant he would always have to prove himself -- and he did, going on to a sensational career as an executive with Ameritech, USWest, and now as CEO of his own high-tech startup.

Tichy told of his own entrepreneurial origins, as the child owner of  a poultry business. Lesson: don't slaughter your chickens until you have customers. Lessons can happen anywhere. An assignment to a hospital in Appalachia was supposed to be a back burner. But it became the experience of a lifetime when the coal miners' union shut down all its hospitals, and Noel Tichy reached inside himself to respond to the crisis.

Your story is something no one can give you, and no one can say but you. Jack Welch has no speechwriter, and he uses no scripts, yet he has made teaching at GE's training center a paramount priority of his leadership. It is why he takes the best and brightest people in his company and makes them train everyone else.

Your vision needn't be a mindbender to be a sensational success:

Peter Drucker, the greatest of all business teachers, asks that you be a teacher, too. "Keep yourself growing and challenged and excited," he said. "Force yourself to be a teacher, to get up in front of subordinates or other group, and project that this is what you have learned."

VALUES

Tichy doesn't mean Ten Commandments-type values (though they're good, too). He means the operational values that undergird a plan for success. When Compaq switches from being a "boxmaker" to a service-and-solutions company, that's a shift in values. When GE crosses over from being a slow bureaucracy to an entrepreneurial speedster, that's a shift in values.

EMOTIONAL ENERGY

What was workout, but Jack Welch's way of signaling to his company that the old pace of doing things at GE would no longer be tolerated?

Never cry fire in a movie house that isn't on fire. But if it is on fire, start hollering. But have a plan, too, to guide people to the exits and to safety.

EDGE

Tichy thought he had the magic formula with Ideas, Values, and Emotional Energy. It was jack Welch who insisted that there was another ingredient critical to leadership success: edge, guts, the kind of unflinching, sometimes brutal honesty that is necessary to get from point to point -- the eggs you break to make an omelet.

Welch himself provided a perfect example of edge: across-the-board cuts during times of cutback. Though it seems merciful to take an equal amount from every worker, it goes against everything managers must be able to do -- encourage winners and discipline losers.

"But it makes me angry when I see some people's energy going down. They're blockers. They smell like losers. I say, if you want to be on a Wheaties box, you belong in Ameritech. If you belong on a milk carton, go somewhere else."