“Lies and secrets are poison in organizations – people’s energy is devoted to deceiving and hiding and remembering who it is you don’t want to tell what to. When people start telling the truth, you see almost immediate reductions in mistakes and increases in productivity.”
- Dr. Will Schutz, corporate consultant
“I believe that every organization has a cultural conscience that it carries forward year after year. That ethos may be good or bad, productive or unproductive. Some leaders are able to create the former, others the latter. But productive or unproductive, it exists, and it is guiding ongoing personnel and informing new arrivals as they come on board.”
- Bill Walsh
The following is taken from The Score Takes Care of Itself by Bill Walsh.
People matter most – more than equipment, investors, inventions, momentum, or X’s and O’s. People are at the heart of achieving organizational greatness. Too often aggressive leaders forget the human part of the equation – the most important part. Let me suggest nine steps you can take that involve treating people right, for having a healthy heart in your organization:
Afford each person the same respect, support, and fair treatment you would expect if your roles were reversed. Deal with people individually, not as objects who are part of a herd – that’s the critical factor.
Leadership involves many people, each with their own need for role identity within the organization. Find what a person does best, utilize and emphasize it, and steer clear of his or her weaknesses.
Demonstrate a pronounced commitment to employees by providing a work environment that enables them to achieve their maximum potential and productivity.
Acknowledge the uniqueness of each employeeand the need he or she has for a reasonable degree of job security and self-actualization. You don’t own him or her.
The most talented personnel often are very independent minded. This requires that you carefully consider how you relate to and communicate with this type of individual. Creative people usually bring a passion to seeing their ideas put into play as quickly as possible. They must be helped to understand that not every idea is appropriate and that coming up with a new concept is just the state of a process that includes evaluation, comparisons, practicability, and more. But be careful not to quash an idea-friendly environment in your organization.
While at times a divergence may exist between the good of the group and the good of the individual, in a best-case scenario the group’s and the individual’s “good” should be the same. When this is not the case, you are well served to explain the reasons behind the divergence to the person who feels badly treated – for example, when he or she is passed over for promotion. (For me, occasionally a player wanted to play one position when, in fact, he was better suited to another. I attempted to explain this to the individual whose goal was being denied. You may have an individual who similarly needs direction to play to his or her strength within your organization. And you may have to explain how this benefits the goal of the team.)
People are most comfortable with how they are being treated when their duties are laid out in specific detail and their performance can be gauged by specific metrics. The key is to document – clarify – those expectations. In my initial year at San Francisco, our starting quarterback, Steve DeBerg, was outstanding in many areas. The category that he came up short in, however, was critical – throwing interceptions at important junctures. It cost him his job because it was right there on paper, a quantifiable statistic that verified what I already knew. In a very easily seen way, he could be shown where he was underperforming.
It is critical that employee expectation levels be reasonable, attainable, and high. While you should exhibit flexibility in the work environment to accommodate the needs of employees, you should be inflexible with regard to your expectations of their performance.
Establish a protocol for how members of the organization interact with one another. This is essential to preventing compartmentalization and “turf protection.” Let them know their first priority is to do their job; their second priority is to facilitate others in doing their jobs.
While it is critically important to concentrate on the smallest relevant aspects of your job without losing sight of the big picture, it is easy to become so completely overwhelmed by ongoing setbacks that you start focusing on issues completely extraneous to improvement in an attempt to keep from having to look at intractable problems.
A coach who becomes afflicted with the malady of “trivialities” might suddenly and compulsively worry about whether all of the practice uniforms have been laundered correctly (“Can’t you get all of those grass stains out?”); obsess over luncheons with local fan clubs; and take inordinate pride in various award ceremonies or alumni gatherings… All of this is an escape mechanism – a method of distracting yourself from the tough work ahead.
As a leader, when you find yourself with a host of problems that seemingly defy solution and start dwelling on the least relevant or even irrelevant aspects of your job – constantly sitting on the phone with nonessential conversations, doing endless e-mailing, writing memo after memo, fiddling around getting all your pencils sharpened and lined up perfectly, being excessively concerned about hurting feelings and trying to make sure everyone is comfortable, straitening out your desk drawer, getting wrapped up in the details of the annual Christmas party, and a million other kinds of stupid busywork, tell yourself this: “There’ll be plenty of time for pencils, parties, and socializing when I lose my job, because that’s what’s going to happen if I continue to avoid the hard and harsh realities of doing my job.”
Sharpening your pencils in lieu of sharpening your organization’s performance is one way to lose your job. Here are ten additional nails you can pound into your professional coffin:
1. Exhibit patience, paralyzing patience.
2. Engage in delegating – massive delegating – or conversely, engage in too little delegating.
3. Act in a tedious, overly cautious manner.
4. Become best buddies with certain employees.
5. Spend excessive amounts of time socializing with superiors or subordinates.
6. Fail to continue hard-nosed performance evaluations of longtime – “tenured” – staff members, the ones most likely to go on cruise control, to relax.
7. Fail to actively participate in efforts to appraise and acquire new hires.
8. Trust others to carry out your fundamental duties.
9. Find ways to get out from under the responsibilities of your position, to move accountability from yourself to others – the blame game.
10. Promote and organizational environment that is comfortable and laid-back in the misbelief that the workplace should be fun, lighthearted, and free from appropriate levels of tension and urgency.
Taken from The Score Takes Care Of Itself by Bill Walsh.
The following is from Bill Walsh’s book The Score Takes Care Of Itself:
In my view a truly effective leader must be certain things. Here are twelve habits I have identified over the years that will make you be a better leader:
1. Be yourself. I am not Vince Lombardi; Vince Lombardi was not Bill Walsh. My style was my style, and it worked for me. Your style will work for you when you take advantage of your strengths and strive to overcome your weaknesses. You must be the best version of yourself that you can be; stay within the framework of your own personality and be authentic. If you’re faking it, you’ll be found out.
2. Be committed to excellence. I developed my Standard of Performance over three decades in the business of football. It could just as accurately (although more awkwardly) been called “Bill’s Prerequisites for Doing Your Job at the Highest Level of Excellence Vis-à-vis Your Actions and Attitude on Our Team.” My commitment to this “product” – excellence – preceded my commitment to winning football games. At all times, in all ways, your focus must be on doing things at the highest possible level.
3. Be positive. I spent far more time teaching what to do than what not to do; far more time teaching and encouraging individuals than criticizing them; more time building up than tearing down. There is a constructive place for censure and highlighting negative aspects of a situation, but too often it is done simply to vent and creates a barrier between you and others. Maintain an affirmative, constructive, positive environment.
4. Be prepared. (Good luck is a product of good planning.) Work hard to get ready for expected situations – events you know will happen. Equally important, plan and prepare for the unexpected. “What happens when what’s supposed to happen doesn’t happen?” is the question that you must always be asking and solving. No leader can control the outcome of the contest or competition, but you cancontrol how you prepare for it.
5. Be detail-oriented. Organizational excellence evolves from the perfection of details relevant to performance and production. What are they for you? High performance is achieved small step by small step through painstaking dedication to pertinent details. (Caution: Do not make the mistake of burying yourself alive in those details.) Address all aspects of your team’s efforts to prepare mentally, physically, fundamentally, and strategically in as thorough a manner as is humanly possible.
6. Be organized. A symphony will sound like a mess without a musical score that organizes each and every note so that the musicians know precisely what to play and when to play it. Great organization is the trademark of a great organization. You must think clearly with a disciplined mind, especially in regard to the most efficient and productive use of time and resources.
7. Be accountable. Excuse making is contagious. Answerability starts with you. If you make excuses – which is first cousin to “alibiing” – so will those around you. Your organization will soon be filled with finger-pointing individuals whose battle cry is, “It’s his fault, not mine!”
8. Be near-sighted and far-sighted. Keep everything in perspective while simultaneously concentrating fully on the task at hand. All decisions should be made with an eye toward how they affect the organization’s performance – not how they affect you or your feelings. All efforts and plans should be considered not only in terms of short-run effect, but also in terms of how they impact the organization long term. This is very difficult.
9. Be fair. The 49ers treated people right. I believe your value system is as important to success as your expertise. Ethically sound values engender respect from those you lead and give your team strength and resilience. Be clear in your own mind as to what you stand for. And then stand up for it.
10. Be firm. I would not budge one inch on my core values, standards, and principles.
11. Be flexible. I was agile in adapting to changing circumstances. Consistency is crucial, but you must be quick to adjust to new challenges that defy the old solutions.
12. Believe in yourself. To a large degree, a leader must “sell” himself to the team. This is impossible unless you exhibit self-confidence. While I was rarely accused of cockiness, it was apparent to most observers that I had significant belief – self-confidence – in what I was doing. Of course, belief derives from expertise.
13. Be a leader. Whether you are a head coach, CEO, or sales manager, you must know where you’re going and how you intend to get there, keeping in mind that it may be necessary to modify your tactics as circumstances dictate. You must be able to inspire and motivate through teaching people how to execute their jobs at the highest level. You must care about people and help those people care about one another and the team’s goals. And you must never second-guess yourself on decisions you make with integrity, intelligence, and a team-first attitude.
“A leader must be keen and alert to what drives a decision, a plan of action. If it was based on good logic, sound principles, and strong belief, I felt comfortable in being unswerving in moving toward my goal. Any other reason (or reasons) for persisting were examined carefully. Among the most common faulty reasons are (1) trying to prove you are right and (2) trying to prove someone else is wrong. Of course, they amount to about the same thing and often lead to the same place: defeat.” - Bill Walsh