Have you ever seen the Olympic sport called curling? With all due respect to the athletes who have dedicated their lives to it, it’s somewhat curious, you have to admit. One player pushes a granite stone down the ice toward the goal, while three others precede him, frantically sweeping the surface with cornhusk brooms. Those players, the ones smoothing the way for the stone’s speedy and accurate approach to its destination, do what good leaders do. They aggressively scrub out anything and everything that stands in the way of the stone reaching its target.
Like what? Well, like the bureaucratic nonsense that’s endemic in most organizations. The rules and regulations that often exist just to make work for the people who enforce rules and regulations. We’re not talking about the kind of guidelines you have to follow for reasons of the law or safety. We’re talking about petty stuff that gums up progress. The CFO who says everyone gets a 2 percent across-the-board increase because it’s been a tough year, performance be damned. The IT manager who’s more interested in process than innovation, or in data collection more than analysis. The corporate lawyer who has a reason why almost anything can’t be done.
A leader’s job is to sweep away that kind of junk.
And while we’re at it, to sweep away those kinds of people in every group—the action blockers, the change resisters, the process obsessives. “That’s not how we do it around here.” “It didn’t use to be that way.” Sometimes it’s OK to tolerate a couple of these individuals—sometimes. They contribute institutional memory, or they counteract a strong culture of acquiescence, which is never to be desired. But most of the time, these people are nothing more than self-appointed, self-righteous scolds who drain energy and waste time. Good leaders know the difference, and effectively use their brooms to prove it.
Fourth, Joyfully Demonstrate the “Generosity Gene”
A scientist would have to tell you if there really is a DNA marker for generosity or whether it’s more of a learned behavior, but it doesn’t make any difference to us. We just know that the best, most effective, most awe-inspiring leaders share one pronounced trait: They love to give raises. They’re thrilled to see their employees grow and get promoted. They celebrate their people in every way they can—with money, more responsibility, and public praise. And it turns them on to do it. We know of a manager, for instance, who was working closely for weeks with one of her employees on a project. It wasn’t going well; even after hours of coaching, the employee couldn’t deliver what the manager was expecting. Then one morning, the employee came to work dragging. “I was up all night,” she told her boss; “check your email.” The boss did, and there, in an attachment, was the project completed to perfection. The boss burst out of her office, calling out, “You did it, you did it!” for everyone to hear. That kind of drop-the-barriers, authentic generosity of spirit from leaders unleashes people to feel great about themselves and do great things for the team and for customers.
Sometimes people ask us about the prevalence of the generosity gene. That’s a hard one. Personally, we’ve seen it, but then again, we’ve worked in and with some excellent companies, which tend to attract, enable, and reward this leadership behavior. In the big picture, we’d say it’s probably less common. Too many leaders like to hold back on raises and promotions; they’re cheapskates by nature or nurture, both financially and emotionally. They often hide their best employees to better the impression of their own performance. We have a friend, for instance, who quit a big media company out of frustration with her pace of advancement. It was only at her exit interview with HR that she learned her boss considered her a “superlative high-potential.”
This manager wasn’t critical of our friend, but he wasn’t expressive, either. “I don’t think he ever said one nice word to me,” she told us. “And when I got my annual raise, it was without explanation. I didn’t even know that it was the biggest in the company until HR told me on my way out the door.”
It could be our friend’s experience is the norm. We hope not, because nothing unleashes performance and commitment like unleashing the generosity in a good leader’s heart—as well as their wallet.
And Fifth, Make Sure Work Is Fun
Can we be completely exasperated for a moment and ask, “What is wrong with people when it comes to fun at work? Really, what?” That is, why do so many—too many—assume that work is only work when it’s hard, grim, dull, or otherwise unpleasant?
It kills us.
Work is not something you do while you’re waiting to live. Work is life. Maybe not all of it, as we said earlier, but a lot of it. And that’s why, if you’re a leader, permitting a workplace to be a bastion of “quiet desperation,” as Henry David Thoreau so famously put it, is awful. Forget about how detrimental it is to productivity and results (which it is).
Hello, fun is great. It’s healthy and energizing—for organizations and individuals alike. We bet 99.9 percent of all managers would agree with that, too—in the abstract. But then, some number of them—again, too many—get to the office and suck the fun out of the place. Some do it with their negativity or lack of candor or politicking. Some do it because they think fun isn’t serious, and work needs to be serious. Some do it simply because they don’t realize that fun is their responsibility.
It is. Your people give their days (and sometimes their nights) to you. They give their hands, brains, and hearts. Sure, the company pays them. It fills their wallets. But as a leader, you need to fill their souls. You can do that by getting in their skin, by giving the work meaning, by clearing obstacles, and by demonstrating the generosity gene. And you can do it, perhaps most powerfully, by creating an environment that’s exciting and enjoyable.
How? The options are numerous and many are wonderfully easy. Celebrate milestones and small successes. Embrace humor and candor. Let people be themselves. Smite bureaucratic behaviors every time they creep in. Banish jerks. Do stuff together outside the office. Whoever said bosses and employees shouldn’t be friends was crazy. Why wouldn’t you want to be friends with the people you spend all your time with?
Look, we know work has its moments of difficulty and stress; of course it does. But a leader cannot let that be the status quo. Even in the hard times, work has to be a place where people want to be. Making it so is part of what leaders do.
At the beginning of this chapter, we made the point that private equity provides a storehouse of examples about how companies can escape no-man’s-land through the combined power of alignment and leadership.
But let’s be clear: these same tools exist to transform floundering companies or divisions in every variety of business, from a family-owned restaurant to a global tech giant. Stagnation is all too common because people are all too human, and their organizations will pay the price.
We’re not going to claim that taking the grind out of work is a layup. It’s not. But it’s certainly achievable, and probably more quickly than you think.
Alignment and leadership: put them together, and it’s game on.
2. Getting Whacked— and Getting Better
The other day, one of us—not the one who fell asleep during the concert in Vegas, OK?—was in the garage looking for a favorite old golf club. The prospect wasn’t promising, frankly, in that our garage is mainly a place where boxes go to die.
Surprisingly, however, one such box did hold the missing club. And it was just after locating it that our protagonist stood up and did a complete head slam into a shelf that was jutting out from the wall.
It was the ouch heard ’round the block, although perhaps it wasn’t exactly an “ouch.”
Look, getting whacked hurts like crazy. First there’s the true, “I-see-stars” kind of pain. And then, right along with it, there’s the shock. “How in the world,” you wonder, “did I let that happen?”
It’s only later, usually long after the bump is gone, that you come to say, “You know, getting clobbered actually