The Corner Office

Team smarts is about having good peripheral vision for sensing how people react to one another, not just how they act. George S. Barrett, the CEO of Cardinal Health, described an example of how he assessed different managers when he moved into a new role.

“I was running a company that was acquired by a bigger firm,” he said. “I stayed with them after the acquisition, and then I got a call from the chairman and he said, ‘We’re having some issues with our flagship company. Would you be willing to come in and run it?’ I was thirty-four years old, and I said to myself, ‘Well, it’s already struggling. How badly could I mess it up?’ So I went there. Everyone on the management team was in their fifties, so the first day I was introduced to them, I thought they were going to collapse. You could sort of see them thinking, ‘That kid?’

“I realized I was going to have to win these guys over pretty quickly. I also knew that there were some folks in that group who were probably not going to come along for the ride. It was a turnaround, so I knew that I was going to have to move quickly to fix some things. I was very clear and direct about what I thought we were facing and what we needed to do about it, without blame. I had to create an environment in which people knew it was their job to tell me things that we needed to do because we were going to run out of time. I tend to be very direct. I expect people to be that way with me.

“I concluded fairly quickly that not many of them would be staying. There were some very capable people there, but I just think the employees had lost confidence in them. That’s very hard to recover, because so much of leadership is about trust and belief. People have to believe in you. And when they stop believing in you, you can say all the things in the world, but it’s very, very hard to mobilize an organization when they’ve lost that belief.”

Barrett said that watching the managers, and watching the or ganization respond to them, helped him figure out who was going to remain on the team.

“I’ll give you an example,” he said. “We’re sitting with a large group of folks, about forty to fifty managers, and people are standing up to raise certain issues. And I watched this one executive. People were watching and riveted to him, really listening and engaged. And then this other executive spoke, and I watched him address the group, and I watched everyone’s eyes. And their eyes went back down to their tables. They couldn’t even meet eyes with him. It was a clear signal that said, ‘You’ve lost us.’ So sometimes you don’t know what the messages are that you’re going to get, but you have to look for them. They come from your peripheral vision. And that was one of those cases where I just knew it the second it happened.”

How do CEOs build a sense of teamwork, and not just team spirit? Mark Pincus of Zynga used an unusual strategy at one company to encourage each employee to understand his or her individual role better, and to take responsibility for it. He decided to take a more dramatic step after he grew frustrated that too many of his employees were coming to him for answers.

“I’d turn people into CEOs,” he said. “One thing I did at my second company was to put white sticky sheets on the wall, and I put everyone’s name on one of the sheets, and I said, ‘By the end of the week, everybody needs to write what you’re CEO of, and it needs to be something really meaningful.’ And that way, everyone knows who’s CEO of what and they know whom to ask instead of me. And it was really effective. People liked it. And there was nowhere to hide.

“We had this really motivated, smart receptionist. She was young. We kept outgrowing our phone systems, and she kept coming back and saying, ‘Mark, we’ve got to buy a whole new phone system.’ And I said, ‘I don’t want to hear about it. Just buy it. Go figure it out.’ She spent a week or two meeting every vendor and figuring it out. She was so motivated by that. I think that was a big lesson for me because what I realized was that if you give people really big jobs to the point that they’re scared, they have way more fun and they improve their game much faster. She ended up running our whole office.”

Nell Minow of The Corporate Library said her best lesson for building a sense of teamwork is to organize a group around a simple word: we.

“The first time I ever really thought of myself as a leader was when I had a series of experiences in college, over a period of about eighteen months, working on four different group projects,” Minow said. “What I learned from that is if you can get everyone to agree what the goal is, and to identify themselves with the successful achievement of that goal, then you’re pretty much there. One thing that helped move my thinking forward was that I noticed in my first job that there was something very definitional in who was included in somebody’s ‘we’ and who was included in somebody’s ‘them.’ I found generally that the more expansive the assumptions were within somebody’s idea of who ‘we’ is – the larger the group you include in that ‘we’—the better off everybody was. I started to really do my best to make sure that my notion of ‘we’ was very expansive and to promote that idea among other people.”

Another key strategy for building a sense of teamwork is learning to share credit.

“I was a mechanic in the Navy,” said Gordon Bethune, the former CEO of Continental Airlines. “And mechanics in the Navy are like mechanics in airlines. You may have more stripes than I do, but you don’t know how to fix the airplane. You want me to fix it? You know how much faster I could fix the airplane when I wanted to, than when I didn’t want to? So I’ve always felt that if you treat me with respect, I’ll do more for you. As I went up the ladder in the Navy, I never forgot what it’s like to be down the ladder, and that being good at your job is predicated pretty much on how the people working for you feel. Here’s my theory: Let’s say we’re all mid-level managers, and one VP slot is going to open up. I’ve got ten guys working for me, and for the last five years, every time I got any recognition, I said, ‘Bring them on the stage with me.’ Who do you think is going to get the job? I’m going to get the job.”

Teamwork can be built by being explicit about the roles people play, and insisting on rules and routines. Jilly Stephens, the executive director of City Harvest, a nonprofit organization that helps feed the hungry in New York, learned this lesson when she had a leadership position in her twenties at Orbis International, where she had responsibility for coordinating the medical teams aboard a “hospital with wings”—a plane that flew around to developing countries to perform eye surgeries.

“It was a lot of responsibility, and I guess it was a sort of sink-or-swim moment,” she said. “I had to lead that group, and it was complicated by the fact that it was multinational, so at its peak I think I was dealing with eleven or twelve nationalities. We were probably about thirty to thirty-five people. It was constantly focusing on teamwork. The way we did it was just being really rigorous about routine and, in some ways, not that flexible, so people really knew what the ground rules were. One example – and it seems so matronly now that I look back on it – was that the team had to be in the lobby at the hotel, ready to go to work, at whatever the designated time was. If they weren’t there, the bus leaves. You get to the airport yourself. If we were in Tunisia, that meant finding a bike and cycling across the desert to get to the airport. When I first got to the field, you would have the nurses, engineers, whoever, waiting, and you would maybe have one who just couldn’t drag himself out of bed and everybody’s waiting. We saw behaviors change fairly rapidly. So we had a fairly tight routine, and we made announcements every morning. It was just important to let everybody know what was coming.”

Sharon Napier, the CEO of the advertising agency Partners + Napier, played basketball in high school and college, and she uses sports analogies constantly with her staff to drive home messages, including the notion that people have roles to play, that the team’s success is what matters most.

“I went from playing high school basketball to college basketball,” she said. “You can be a star in high school, and you can be the ninth player in college. It’s just the way it is. So I always talk about understanding the bench strength. First of all, every player has a role. Know what it is. If you’re the seventh player who’s supposed to go in and get five rebounds because we need them, that’s your role. So I talk about that a lot – we don’t have the starting team and the not-starting team. We have a bench, and everybody has to be strong. They come in and they bring different things to the table. And you learn that by playing. You learn that if you’re not worried about your own success, and you’re worried about the success of the team, you go a lot further.”

Perhaps one of the simplest ways to think about teamwork is to forget or organization al charts and titles. Companies increasingly operate through ad hoc teams, formed and disbanded to accomplish various tasks. Team smarts refers to this ability to recognize the type of players the team needs, and how to bring them together around a common goal. Susan Lyne, the CEO of Gilt Groupe, said the ultimate test of team smarts today is being able to bring together a group of people, including those who don’t report directly to you. Lyne described how she grew to appreciate team players, and what they can and should bring to the table.

“I think that now I have a very strong antenna for someone who is going to be poison within a company,” she said. “I think that early on, I was wowed by talent, and I was willing to set aside the idea that this person might not be a team player. Now, somebody needs to be able to work with people – that’s number one on the list. I need people who are going to be able to build a team, manage a team, recruit well, and work well with their peers. And that’s another thing you learn over time. Somebody may be a great manager of a team, but incapable of working across the company to get things done because they’re competitive, or because of any number of reasons. Can they manage down? Can they work across the company and get people to want to work with them and to help them succeed? And are they going to keep you well informed of everything that’s going on?”

Lyne said this skill is so crucial today that business schools should be teaching it in more courses.

“There are a lot of great courses on managing or developing a strategic agenda, but there is very little about how to work with your peers where you need to get X done, and you need these other three departments to give you X amount of time in order to succeed at that. The people who truly succeed in business are the ones who actually have figured out how to mobilize people who are not their direct reports. Everyone can get their direct reports to work for them, but getting people who do not have to give you their time to engage and to support you and to want you to succeed is something that is sorely missing from B-school courses.”

Chapter 4

A SIMPLE MINDSET

Here’s a hypothetical test that can speed the process of identifying who has what it takes to move up in an organization.

Imagine giving one hundred vice presidents the same task: take a month to search out a new business opportunity for their company, and then present the idea to a group of senior executives during a weekend off-site meeting. The month passes, they have their ideas, and the day arrives to start their presentations.

The ideas are all pretty good, but the presentations vary enormously in length. One by one, the young vice presidents come in. Some want to take forty-five minutes, using a thirty-slide Power-Point deck to pitch their idea. Other presentations are shorter, with only ten slides. Still others have three slides or even two, and they’re done in five minutes or less. One person doesn’t use Power-Point at all. She simply talks, giving a short pitch for her idea, backed up with three key facts.

The executives are impressed by how concise she was, the simplicity of the idea, and that she respected their time. Later, she gets a call. The executives want to sign her up for the company’s leadership development program for high-potential employees.

There is a stubborn disconnect in many companies. By all accounts, CEOs – and most senior executives – want the same thing from people who present to them: be concise, be brief, get to the point, make it simple. Business is not always as complicated as it sometimes appears to be, nor should it be.

“I’ve tried to do less of the things that make business more complex,” said Eduardo Castro-Wright, a vice chairman at Wal-Mart Stores. “I really like simplicity. At the end of the day, retailing – though you could apply this to many other businesses – is not as complicated as we would like to make it. It is pretty logical and simple, if you think about the way that you yourself would act, or do act, as a customer.”

Yet few people can deliver the simplicity that many bosses want. Instead, they mistakenly assume the bosses will be impressed by a long PowerPoint presentation that shows how diligently they researched a topic, or that they will win over their superiors by talking more, not less.

Few things seem to get CEOs riled up more than lengthy PowerPoint presentations. It’s not the software they dislike – it’s just a tool, after all. What irks them is the unfocused thinking that leads to an overlong slide presentation. There is wide agreement it’s a problem—“Death by PowerPoint” has become a cliché.

If so many executives in positions of authority are clear about what they want, why can’t they get the people who report to them to lose the “Power” part of their presentations and simply get to the “Point”?

There are a few likely explanations. The first is that a lot of people have trouble being concise. Next time you’re in a meeting, ask somebody to give you the ten-word summary of his or her idea. Some people can do a quick bit of mental jujitsu, and they’ll summarize an idea with a “Here’s what’s important. ” or “The bottom line is. ” Even if they take twenty-five words, they at least understand what’s being asked of them.

Others will pause for a moment and then launch into a lengthy discussion of the idea, because they have trouble identifying the core point. Granted, it’s not easy – a point that’s been captured in many sayings through the ages. “Simplicity is the ultimate sophistication,” said Leonardo da Vinci. And in words attributed to Mark Twain (and many others), “I didn’t have time to write a short letter, so I wrote a long one instead.”

Another possible explanation is that a lag exists in the business world. There was a time when simply having certain information was a competitive advantage. Now, in the Internet era, with oceans of data available to all with just a few clicks of a mouse and keyboard, others can get easy access to the same information. That puts a greater premium on the ability to synthesize, to connect dots in new ways, and to ask the simple, smart question that leads to an untapped opportunity.

“I’d love to teach a course called ‘The Idea,’ ” said Dany Levy, the founder of DailyCandy.com. “Which is basically, so you want to start a company, how’s it going to work? Let’s figure it out – just a very practical plan, but not a business plan, because I feel like business plans now feel weighty and outdated. It seems, back in the day, that the longer your business plan was, the more promising it was going to be. And now, the shorter your business plan is, the more succinct and to the point it is, the better. You want people to get why your business is going to work pretty quickly.”

“Schools could do a better job teaching the value of brevity,” said Guy Kawasaki, the co-founder of Alltop, a news aggregation site, and managing director of Garage Technology Ventures.

“What you learn in school is the opposite of what happens in the real world,” he said. “In school, you’re always worried about minimums. You have to reach twenty pages or have so many slides or what ever. Then you get out in the real world and you think, ‘I have to have a minimum of twenty pages and fifty slides.’ They should teach students how to communicate in five-sentence e-mails and with ten-slide PowerPoint presentations. If they just taught every student that, American business would be much better off. No one wants to read War and Peace e-mails. Who has the time? Ditto with sixty PowerPoint slides for a one-hour meeting.”

Steven A. Ballmer, the CEO of Microsoft, said he understands the impulse to share all the underlying research that led to a conclusion. But he changed the way he runs meetings to get to the conclusion first.

“The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a slide deck or presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call ‘the long and winding road.’ You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion. That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill Gates used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: ‘What about this? Have you thought about this?’ So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.

“I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore. I don’t think it’s productive. I don’t think it’s efficient. I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: ‘I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.’ That lets us go, whether they’ve organized it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.”

Some CEOs put strict limits on PowerPoint slides. The rule, of course, is a way to force people to put in the time and energy to sort out what’s truly important and what’s extraneous. Sometimes this work is most effectively done away from a computer. A blank piece of paper. A pencil. These are the only tools that really matter for what is often the most difficult step: thinking.

“I say, ‘Three slides, three points,’ ” said James Schiro of Zurich Financial Ser vices. “You really can’t manage more than three or four things at the most, but I like to see it in three slides. I hate Power-Point presentations. If you’re working in an area, and you are running a business, you ought to be able to stand up there and tell me about your business without referring to a big slide deck. When you are speaking, people should focus on you and focus on the message. They can’t walk away remembering a whole bunch of different things, so you have to have three or four really key messages that you take them through, and you remind them of what’s important.”

Simplifying the complex is the CEO’s job, and CEOs do it all day long. They are paid to create order out of chaos, to identify the three or five things employees need to focus on rather than twenty things that will send people off in different directions. They want to avoid the corporate equivalent of that expression frequently heard on the golf course – paralysis by analysis.

“Even before I go into a company,” said Greg Brenneman of CCMP Capital, “or even if we’re looking at a business here at CCMP, I’m constantly asking the question, ‘What are the two or three levers that, if done right, if pulled correctly, will really turn this business?’ Then I take that and put it into a one-page plan. If I can’t simply put what needs to be done on one page, I probably haven’t thought it through very well. I learned back in the days when I was consulting at Bain & Company – and before that when I was at Harvard Business School doing case studies – that they give you more information than you could possibly read. So you needed to quickly step back and say, ‘What are the two or three things that really matter?’ And I find in the world that people don’t really do that often. They just dive into all this detail and start using acronyms and buzzwords and they don’t step back. When one of our guys is presenting an investment, you always kind of know they have it if they can explain it very quickly. And if it takes a really long time and you’re into the square root of the price of oil in Uzbekistan, you probably know that it’s gotten too complicated, and that’s when I start asking questions – when people start having trouble simply saying, ‘Here’s the idea.’ ”

William Green of Accenture offers a telling example of the art of simplification. He shared the story of how he once sat through a three-day training session for new managers. He said he counted sixty-eight things that the managers were told they needed to do to be successful—“everything from how you coach and mentor to your annual reviews, filling out these forms, all this stuff.

“And I got up to close the session, and I’m thinking about how it isn’t possible for these people to remember all this. So I said there are three things that matter. The first is competence – just being good at what you do, what ever it is, and focusing on the job you have, not on the job you think you want to have. The second one is confidence. People want to know what you think. So you have to have enough desirable self-confidence to articulate a point of view. The third thing is caring. Nothing today is about one individual. This is all about the team, and in the end, this is about giving a damn about your customers, your company, the people around you, and recognizing that the people around you are the ones who make you look good. When young people are looking for clarity – this is a huge, complex global company, and they wonder how to navigate their way through it – I just tell them that.”

Tachi Yamada, the president of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation’s Global Health Program, said that this ability to spot the key levers in any project or plan is vital for executives as they get further away from doing the work itself, and more into a management role where they must delegate. Yamada advocates for an alternative approach to micromanagement: what he calls “micro-interest.” A prerequisite for that is being able to quickly figure out the two or three things that matter in any project.

“I think the most difficult transition for anybody from being a worker bee to a manager is this issue of delegation,” he said. “What do you give up? How can you have the team do what you would do yourself without your doing it? If you’re a true micromanager and you basically stand over everybody and guide their hands to do everything, you don’t have enough hours in the day to do what the whole team needs to do.

“Learning how to delegate, learning how to let go and still make sure that everything happened, was a very important lesson in my first role in management. And that’s where I learned a principle that I apply today – I don’t micromanage, but I have micro-interest. I do know the details. I do care about the details. I feel like I have intimate knowledge of what’s going on, but I don’t tell people what to do. Every day I read about a thousand pages of documents, whether grants or letters or scientific articles, or what ever. I have learned what the critical things to read are. If there are ten tasks in an overall project, what is the most critical task among those ten? What is the one thing that everything else hinges on? And what I’ll do is I’ll spend a lot of time understanding that one thing. Then, when the problem occurs, it usually occurs there, and I can be on top of what the problem is. It’s just having enough experience to understand when problems do occur and how they occur, why they occur, and being prepared for that particular problem. Problems can occur in the other ten areas, but they won’t determine the outcome of the overall project. But there may be one or two points where the outcome of the entire project is at stake, and you’d better be on top of it.”

Meridee Moore of Watershed Asset Management looks for that ability to simplify when she’s assessing job candidates.

“We give people a two-hour test,” she said. “We try to simulate a real office experience by giving them an investment idea and the raw material, the annual report, some documents, and then we tell them where the securities prices are. We say, ‘Here’s a calculator, a pencil, and a sandwich. We’ll be back in two hours.’ If an analyst comes in there and just attacks the project with relish, that’s a good sign. After two hours, two of us go in and just let the person talk about what he’s done. The nice thing about my being trained as a lawyer, and never going to business school, is that I’m able to ask the basic financially naïve questions, like: ‘What does the company do? How do they make money? Who are their customers? What do they make? How do they produce it?’ That throws some people off.