THE ENGAGING LEADER

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© 2003 by Ed Gubman
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gubman, Edward L.
The engaging leader : winning with today’s free agent workforce /
Ed Gubman.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 0-7931-6514-8 (6X9 hardback)
1. Supervision of employees. 2. Employee motivation. 3. Employee
retention. 4. Leadership. I. Title.
HF5549.12 .G83 2003
658.3′02—dc21
2002155111
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iii
C O N T E N T S
Acknowledgments vii
Introduction ix
1. Engaging Leadership 1
The Thrill of Victory 1
Engaging for Success 3
What Engaging Leaders Do 4
Drivers and Builders 5
Engaging Leaders Are Versatile 10
Engaging Impacts 15
2. The Urgency of Engagement 29
Market-Driven Employment Relationships 29
The Coming Talent Shortage 30
What Talent Wants 35
Engaging Leadership Is the Solution 39
Mixing Sports and Business 41
The Rest of This Book 45
3. Talent: Get What You Need 49
Build on Your Strengths 49
Like-Minded People 51
Select for Fit 54
Fit versus Talent 61
Talent versus Genius 63
Change Your Talent or Change to Your Talent? 65
Talent + Toughness + Teamwork = Victory 69
4. Talent: Develop and Diversify 77
The Return of the Individual 77
Build a Dynasty 79
The Development Mandate 83
Close Your Gaps 86
Different Strokes 88
More Diversity Means More Talent 90
On-the-Field, Off-the-Field 94
Lives in the Balance 97
5. Goals:Winning Is the Only Thing 105
Engaging What’s Real 105
Focus: Aim High and Keep It Simple 106
BHAGs: The Value of Big Goals 109
Enemies of Big Goals 113
Risk: Do It Big, Do It All, Do It Fast 119
Risk Requires Anticipation, Innovation, and Sacrifice 121
Risk Energizes Employees 123
Risk Takers Need Support 128
Making Risk Pay Off 130
6. Chemistry: Trust First 135
Chemistry = Trust + Structure 135
A Short Course in Trust 136
Trust among Peers 142
Big Egos Destroy Trust 145
No More Command, Control, and Constant Criticism 147
Superb Communications 149
All You Need Is Love 151
No Appreciation, No Talent 155
7. Chemistry: Structure 161
The Structure of Engagement 161
Accountability—Don’t Get Too Comfortable 164
Execute with Excellence 167
Roles: Shining Stars 172
What Does Money Have to Do with It? 176
It’s Money That Matters 178
Winning over Whining 181
iv C O N T E N T S
Conclusion 185
Appendixes 189
Notes 193
Index 203
C O N T E N T S v
vi E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
vii
A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
Books are labors of love—you have to love writing to do the
labor. Creating this book was a particular pleasure for me because
it combined two of my passions—leadership and sports. I often
look at leaders in business and sports through the same motivational
lens.
I took this view a lot in my 17 years with Hewitt Associates. For
the first 15 years there, I was building and leading a team—first a
small one—then a global one, as a practice leader. Now I work independently,
still consulting with executives about their teams. I
can always find a good quote from Casey Stengel or a Zen inspiration
from Phil Jackson to explain a situation or rally people’s spirits.
During my last few years at Hewitt, we helped assist the people
who worked with Fortune to select its list of the 100 best companies
to work for in America. Working with this information, as well as
personally with several of these companies, it became obvious to
me that a particular kind of leadership, what I call “engaging leadership,”
lifted some companies to best employer status and left
others as also-rans. I also realized that winning and losing with employees
involved the same kinds of leader behaviors I saw in successful
sports teams. Increasingly, great employees are like great
athletes—they have choices about where and how hard to work,
and their skills are in high demand. It doesn’t matter what the unemployment
rate is, there’s always a shortage of talent to help your
business win. This book describes engaging leadership.
Many people contributed to this book—especially the business
executives with whom I’ve worked and watched lead. I’m also very
appreciative of the great coaches who I’ve observed as a fan and the
sportswriters who’ve depicted them. Two individuals deserve allstar
mention. John Bausch, a prized colleague from my Hewitt days
and a good friend, gave an early manuscript a close reading and
suggested the framework that I ultimately used. John is a talented
management consultant and business communicator, as well as a
former sportswriter, so he was the perfect person to critique this
work. My editors Jean Iversen, Don Hull, and their teammates at
Dearborn Trade have been enthusiastic supporters of this project.
What a great team to have on the field with me!
Above all, thanks and love to my wife Rachel and my two sons,
Mike and Charlie, who are the inspiration for everything I do. (See,
I wasn’t just wasting my time watching all those games on TV.)
viii A C K N O W L E D G M E N T S
ix
I N T R O D U C T I O N
During the summer of 1999, I was reading about the collapse of
the Colorado Rockies baseball team under manager Jim Leyland.
Leyland came to Colorado as a high-priced savior, but he and the
team never meshed. Things got so bad that he announced his resignation
before the first season was over. This came as a mystery to
the sports world, because Leyland was commonly referred to as a
“baseball genius.”
A genius in baseball is someone who gets more wins from his
players than the payroll suggests. Leyland did this with a series of
underpaid, overachieving Pittsburgh Pirates teams in the early
1990s. Claiming poverty like most small market teams—funny how
St. Louis spends like a big market team and the Chicago teams pretend
they’re in small markets—the Pirates traded away their players
when they became stars and could demand more money.
Eventually, Leyland got tired of seeing Barry Bonds, Bobby
Bonilla, and other talents leave, so he followed them out the door.
A DISENGAGED DISASTER
He landed in Miami, where billionaire owner Wayne Huizenga
promised to buy him a winning team. Huizenga was true to his
word, and in 1997, Leyland led the Florida Marlins to the World
Championship.
Baseball purists were shocked that Huizenga could do this so
quickly, but Huizenga must have decided it was too easy. After all,
it took him decades to make his billions in the waste hauling and
movie renting businesses, but only a few years to win the World
Series. When he won in 1997 but lost money in the process and
couldn’t get a new, publicly funded stadium, Huizenga got rid of
his star players and prepared to sell the team.
Maybe Leyland was a baseball genius, but his real smarts were
in having an out clause put into his Florida contract. If Huizenga
ever started acting like he owned the Pirates, Leyland could leave.
That’s how Leyland went to Colorado in 1999.
What struck me about Leyland’s short tenure with the Rockies
was that it was full of the same problems I see in many people in
business and other organizations. Leyland wasn’t engaged in his
work anymore. He didn’t have a strong attachment to his job or his
team. Being disengaged, he couldn’t engage his players. Leyland
didn’t fit with his new organization, and he already had realized his
professional dreams, so he didn’t have any new ones to motivate
him in Colorado.
At one time Jim Leyland was a great manager. Still, his experience
in Colorado helped me to realize that leaders in pro sports and
in business deal with many of the same issues, especially today
when we have free agents in both arenas.
From that day on I started reading the sports pages with a different
set of eyes. Instead of just enjoying them as a sports fan, I
started looking at them from the perspective of my work as a management
consultant and business psychologist. I began to apprecix
I N T R O D U C T I O N
ate that you could learn an enormous amount about leaders and
their performance and careers by rethinking the sports section. In
fact, almost every day some new drama plays out in sports that
highlights a lesson about leaders—both good and bad.
Above all, the characteristics that make an engaging and successful
leader in business today are pretty much the same things
that make a winning leader in sports. The great thing about sports
is that you can see this on a public stage, and the outcomes are readily
apparent. If you pay attention and know what to look for, it’s
right there for you.
This book explains how to be a winning leader, based on my
work with executives for the last 25 years. Instead of just using business
examples, I am going to use stories from professional sports. I
think this makes the lessons fresh, fun, and easy to remember. Plus,
there are plenty of great illustrations of what to do and what not to
do. I use these ideas in my consulting with leaders, and they work
wonders for my clients. Now you can make them work for you.
I N T R O D U C T I O N xi
xii E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
1
1
C H A P T E R O N E
ENGAGING LEADERSHIP
“He thinks group, but he always sees individuals.”
—Former Senator Bill Bradley, describing his friend Phil Jackson’s coaching style1
THE THRILL OF VICTORY
Ever wonder why some teams just keep winning? Consider this:
• In October 2000, the majestic New York Yankees won the
World Series against their hated crosstown rivals, the Mets.
This was the Yanks’ 26th championship, far more than any
other baseball team, and more than any pro team in any
sport. It was also the 4th time in five years that the Yankees
won the Series, all under the calm and responsive leadership
of manager Joe Torre. In 2001, an aging Yankees team made it
to the World Series again, defeating powerful Oakland and
Seattle teams before falling to a tremendously tough Arizona
team in seven incredible games. The Yankees had the best
record in baseball and made the playoffs again in 2002, losing
in the first round. Torre’s streak ranked with the best of the
great New York teams throughout baseball history.
• In 1999, Phil Jackson took over the talented but troubled Los
Angeles Lakers. Built around stars Shaquille O’Neal and
Kobe Bryant since the 1996–1997 season, the team never
meshed. It collapsed in the conference semifinals the season
before Jackson arrived. Jackson brought his Zen persona, triangle
offense, and coaching assistants with him to Los Angeles
and won the NBA championship in his first year with
essentially the same team. Even though O’Neal and Bryant
fought for team leadership most of Jackson’s second season,
the coach righted things by the end. The Lakers won their division
and went on a 15–1 run through the playoffs, the best
in NBA history, to repeat as champions. The next year Jackson
added his third straight championship with the Lakers to
the six titles he won in Chicago.
• At the end of the 2000 baseball season, the Seattle Mariners
said good-bye to free agent all-star shortstop Alex Rodriquez,
who went to the Texas Rangers for the biggest contract
in baseball history. It was the third year in a row Seattle
lost an all-star and likely future hall-of-famer. Pitcher Randy
Johnson left in 1998, and outfielder Ken Griffey, Jr. left after
the 1999 season. Yet in 2001, a rebuilt Mariners team tied an
83-year-old major league record with 116 wins. Under wily
manager Lou Piniella, the M’s reinvented themselves to become
a team of great speed, pitching, and defense. In recognition
for his work, Piniella was voted AL Manager of the
Year for the second time. Ultimately the M’s lost to the Yankees
in the American League Championship Series, but given
the New Yorkers’ remarkable run, that’s no disgrace.
2 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Still wondering why some keep winning? It’s leadership.
Of course, Torre, Jackson, and Piniella would be the first to tell
you it’s not all about them. They’d say it’s about the players—the
talent, and they’d be right. As Casey Stengel said when asked about
his remarkable World Series winning streak with the Yankees, “I
couldna’ done it without my players.”2 Torre doesn’t win without
Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and their talented teammates. Jackson
won with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago—the best
duo to play together until O’Neal and Bryant came along. Piniella
had Edgar Martinez, Ichiro Suzuki, and other stars on the Mariners.
But winning is about how leaders engage the talent on their teams to
perform to its maximum capabilities. Torre won four World Series, including
three in a row, in an era when players change teams constantly,
and every year teams spent just about as much as the
Yankees. The Lakers had the same players the year before Jackson
arrived and couldn’t get it done. Very few baseball experts picked
Piniella’s Mariners to win their division in 2001, let alone tie the
mark for all-time wins. Talent is wasted when it’s not engaged. In fact,
the ability to engage talent is the main ingredient of skillful leadership
today. This is true in sports and business, and it has never been
as critical a success factor as it is now.
ENGAGING FOR SUCCESS
Aleader is someone who can engage people for success. Engaged people
are passionately committed. If you are a leader who engages your
employees, your people have strong psychological, social, and intellectual
connections to their work, your organization, and its goals.
When people are engaged, they love what they do and what
you’re trying to achieve. They feel valued and the workday goes by
quickly for them. They’ll gladly put in extra hours and effort to help
1 / Engaging Leadership 3
you get where you want to go. They’ll soar “above and beyond” to
create greater quality and service. They’ll brag about you and your
organization to others—they’re your best salespeople. And they’ll
commit to stay with you. It would take enormous offers to get them
to leave, and even then they may not do it.
Think about the enthusiasm and commitment you feel when
you’re most engaged in your work. What could your team accomplish
if everyone felt that way?
Engaged followers should be your goal, and the goal of every
leader. Engaged people are more productive, produce higher quality,
and show higher rates of retention. They display more pride in
their companies and share that pride with others. They build customer
loyalty. They attract other high-caliber people. You need all
of these things to win.
So that’s your target—engaging your people—and this book
will help you hit it.
WHAT ENGAGING LEADERS DO
Is there a single secret to becoming an engaging leader? I don’t
think so. You have to do lots of things to engage people, and to
make sure you have the right talent to engage. The closest I’ve seen
to a good prescription for engagement is the quote from Bill Bradley
about his friend Jackson that starts this chapter. “He thinks group,
but he always sees individuals.”3 This is an apt description of the
way to engage people today. Point the group toward the goals you want
to achieve, but spend a lot of your time catering to the unique needs of individuals
in your group, particularly the most talented ones. For years,
this didn’t matter so much because there were more than enough
skilled people to go around. If a talented person didn’t work out,
4 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
you could replace him or her without too much trouble. Not so
today. If you don’t spend time caring for your talented people,
they’ll leave, you won’t be able to replace them quickly or cheaply,
and you’ll miss out on significant opportunities.
To describe engaging leadership in detail, let’s look more closely
at leadership styles.
DRIVERS AND BUILDERS
A friend and colleague of mine, another sports fan who makes
his living as a management consultant, once told me about something
Tex Winter said. Winter, a legendary basketball coach and
close colleague of Phil Jackson’s, noted that there are two kinds of
coaches—drivers and builders. Though they might make strange bedfellows,
Winter’s description is just like that of Douglas McGregor.
More than 40 years ago, McGregor, the well-known MIT management
professor and business author, wrote his classic book about
Theory X (drivers) and Theory Y (builders) managers.4 Some very
recent work at the Harvard Business School used quite similar
types to describe companies, based on how they were led.
There are many more sophisticated ways to describe leaders,
but this one is simple and has passed the test of time. Leaders do
fall into these two categories pretty naturally, and their followers
talk about them this way. It’s often the first thing I see in a new
client situation when I’m working with executives and their teams.
Most leaders aren’t “pure” types, but some are.
Drivers:
• Put results first. They want things done their way, and they
want them done now.
1 / Engaging Leadership 5
• Stress economic value above everything else. Financial results top
their lists.
• Make the decisions. They like being decisive and in control so
they set the agenda and make as many decisions as possible.
• “Crack the whip.” They keep the pressure on for accountability
and come down hard when goals aren’t met.
• Focus on “what” and “when.” They want to know what have
you done for me lately and when can I expect those results on
my desk.
• Take a short-term focus. The day’s, week’s, or quarter’s results
are what matter.
• Get “in your face” a lot. They thrive on confrontation and let
you know right away when you aren’t performing.
• Are more critical than positive. They’re hard to please and take
delight in pushing you for more all the time; you can never
do enough.
Pat Riley, coach of the Miami Heat, is a notorious driver. He
pushes himself and his players hard, nonstop. That’s the only way
he believes in coaching. When forward A.C. Green played for the
Heat, he said of Riley, “You never satisfy coach.”5 Builders are the
opposite of drivers.
Builders:
• Put people and processes first. It’s crucial to them that relationships
are good and people feel involved. They believe this
leads to results.
6 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• Stress organizational capabilities. They want to build systems
and talent and will sacrifice some financial gain to do it.
• Get others involved. They seek lots of input into decisions and
delegate them as much as possible because they think that
makes better decisions.
• Let solutions emerge. They don’t try to tackle every problem
right away. They believe the best solutions arise naturally
and some problems solve themselves or go away.
• Focus on “who” and “how.” The want to know who is affected
or should be involved in a situation and how the issue was resolved
in the proper way.
• Take a long-term focus. They’re concerned about positioning
their teams for success a year or two down the road.
• Stay “behind the scenes” more. They let their employees take
center stage.
• Are more positive than critical. They practice the old saying of
“you catch more flies with honey than with a fly swatter.”
A classic builder is a “player’s coach.” Dennis Green, formerly
of the Minnesota Vikings, is the perfect example. He let his players
do their thing, and that’s how he got them to buy into his agenda.
They loved it, and it worked for years. Before he resigned, when
there was talk of firing him, his temperamental star receiver Randy
Moss said, “I can tell you that, straight up, if there were another
coach, I probably wouldn’t want to play here.”6 When Green left on
his own terms, Moss reconsidered.
You can be quite successful as a driver or a builder, as long as
you do it well and communicate effectively. Communication is the
1 / Engaging Leadership 7
fundamental leadership skill for everyone now. But you won’t be a consistent
champion today if you just stay within your style. Both Riley
and Green are winners—Riley has championship rings, and Green’s
teams got to the playoffs almost every year. They have records other
coaches envy. Yet since they rely too heavily on their primary styles,
they don’t win it all anymore. They limit themselves by not expanding
their behaviors.
Riley hasn’t won a conference or NBA championship since the
1987–1988 season, when he worked with a whole different generation
of players. For the last several seasons, Miami has been beaten
early in the playoffs by lower ranked teams. After the Charlotte
Hornets swept his higher seeded Heat in the first round of the
2000–2001 playoffs, he said he probably should be fired. Lucky for
him, he was president and coach of the team, and the president
didn’t feel like firing the coach. In 2002, the Heat didn’t even make
the playoffs.
Green took the Vikings to the playoffs in eight of his first nine
years as coach. He won four Central Division titles and in 1998 and
2000 coached heavily favored teams in the NFC Championship
game, only to lose them both. The 2000 team lost the title in one of
the most lopsided games ever, 41–0, to an unknown and underdog
New York Giants team. The team was emotionally devastated afterwards,
and it never recovered.
My lesson for leaders here is that neither Riley nor Green is versatile
enough. Riley doesn’t stop driving long enough to let his players
catch their breaths and enjoy their achievements. Constant
driving just grinds people down. It doesn’t engage them. No wonder
Riley’s teams run out of energy at the end of the long NBA season.
He pushes them so hard all year that they can’t regroup, renew,
and refocus to be successful in the playoffs. Because he’s concentrating
so heavily on short-term success, his playoff defeats have
8 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
driven him to make big changes in team personnel every year.
Under Riley, the Heat has to rekindle its chemistry annually. There’s
not enough continuity.
Green’s teams had the opposite problem. The Vikings had trouble
turning up the intensity for big games. Green took the same
steady approach all the time and expected the players to motivate
themselves. After all, isn’t that the definition of a professional?
Green rarely, if ever, “cracked the whip” so when the Vikings ran into
a team that was really psyched, like the Giants in the championship
game, they were overwhelmed right from the start. The Giants won
that game in the first quarter. Randy Moss, Green’s devoted fan,
said even before kickoff he could tell the team wasn’t ready, “I think
all of our losses this year [2000] were because we were either too
cocky or not up for the challenge. Nobody talked about coming out
and smacking them in the mouth.”7 After the debacle of that game
and the death of a key player the next season, Green simply lost
control of some of his stars and, ultimately, the team.
Of course, you can find other faults in these cases, like Riley’s
complicated, slow-motion offensive style or Green’s inability to
build a strong defense. But if we stay focused on their leadership
styles, we can see these coaches are limited because they rely too
heavily on one approach. Strengths taken too far always result in
weakness.
You also can find people who are ineffective with their styles: A
driver who doesn’t push hard enough for results but gets overly obsessed
with details; a builder who is inclined to create strong relationships
but lacks the emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills
to make it happen. If you know what your style is, the first thing
you need to do is develop it into a strength. You can discover your style
by taking the quick, self-scoring inventory at the end of this book. Then,
by using what’s in this book, you can take the necessary steps to
1 / Engaging Leadership 9
become more versatile. You may think drivers are more talkative and
builders are more reserved. Sometimes that’s true, but loud or quiet
can go with either style. Success comes when you’re communicating,
whatever the volume. Torre and Jackson are quieter builders, while
Green is more talkative. Piniella and Riley are extroverted drivers,
but Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is a more introverted
driver who won the Super Bowl. You have to look across the range
of behaviors I listed earlier to come to a correct categorization.
So, there are drivers and there are builders. Most people can’t
and don’t change their basic leadership styles. Change happens
very rarely and only after people go through some significant life
event, like a great trauma, from which they learn a significant lesson.
Even then, it’s pretty unusual to change styles, and leaders really
don’t have to change to win.
ENGAGING LEADERS ARE VERSATILE
If overreliance on your basic style is a limitation, and people
generally don’t change, then what’s a driver or builder to do? You
could hire a second-in-command who complements your style, but
that has its own set of issues. Instead, you need to become more versatile.
You need to understand versatility, recognize situations where
a departure from your usual approach will be more successful, and
act accordingly. When you do this, you are better able to engage a
broader variety of talents. You’ll be able to guide a wider range of
people and situations. This will make you more effective and successful.
You won’t change your basic style, but you will use some of
the best behaviors of the opposite style more often. This isn’t easy, but
engaging leadership isn’t supposed to be easy. That’s why there are
so few consistent winners among leaders.
10 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Phil Jackson showed this versatility in bringing the Lakers together
during the 2000–2001 season, but it was hard. For much of
the year, O’Neal and Bryant fought each other over who was the
team leader and Los Angeles played way below its potential. The
infighting threatened to sink the entire season. Jackson tried to let
them work it out by themselves. But even then, he scolded the two
of them publicly and privately for their childlike behavior, calling it
“silly” and likening it to a “sandbox fight.” He also took Bryant
aside to talk about trading him, while making it known that Shaq
wasn’t going anywhere.
Eventually, his comments got through to Bryant, who saw the
team win without him while he was injured. Jackson thought the
squabble forced a change in his coaching, “I’m much firmer with
these guys. I was more lenient and patient last year than this year.”8
He didn’t want to be. His inclinations as a builder were to let the two
of them work it out, but he recognized he had to do something. Moreover,
comments from the other Lakers showed they wanted Jackson
to take control and solve the problem. They wanted him to lead.
In 2001, throughout baseball’s long season, Lou Piniella showed
a level of versatility that had been growing for several years. Afiery,
hard-driving guy, Piniella was known early in his playing career for
his temper and his toughness. Even as a manager in the late 1980s
and early 1990s, he kicked his hat at umpires and trashed water
coolers in the dugout. He pushed and prodded the 1990 Cincinnati
Reds, with their “nasty boy” pitchers, to a surprising World Series
victory. But age, maturity, and wisdom combined to calm him
down. “I’ve really learned to manage since I’ve been here in Seattle,”
he says. “I manage myself and I manage my team better.”9
Jay Buhner played for Piniella with both the Yankees and the
Mariners. “We can remember his tirades, him kicking his hat and
pulling up bases, and then, the next day, him coming in and he can’t
1 / Engaging Leadership 11
bend over because he pulled his back out trying to get the base out.
He’s still a very emotional guy. He wears his emotions on his sleeve.
But he realizes he doesn’t have to kick some of these guys in the
butt. He’s an absolute pleasure to work for and I would run through
a wall for that guy.”10
Drivers and builders become more engaging when they become
more versatile and flexible in their approaches by adapting the best
behaviors of the other style. Engaging leadership is not a third style.
You’re either a driver or a builder, and you’re unlikely to change.
But you become an engaging driver or an engaging builder when
you learn to take on some good habits of the other style when it’s
necessary. The more you’re able to do this, the more engaging you
become. And the more engaging you become, the more you win.
As with Piniella, engaging leadership usually is learned through experience.
Your natural inclination will be toward driving or building,
but engaging people takes time and the wisdom you acquire by trying
out different leadership approaches. Torre managed three different
teams over 14 years and had a lifetime losing record before
he got to the Yankees. Jackson was a player-coach, minor league
coach, and assistant coach before taking over the Bulls. Some things
take time and experience, and becoming an engaging leader is one
of them.
What does versatility look like? We’ll explore this throughout
the book, but briefly:
• Drivers become more engaging when they become more
patient, positive, and responsive to individual needs. They
need to listen more and show greater concern for people,
relationships, and processes. They become more engaging
when they “dial down” the control, treat people like individuals,
and trust them to do the right things.
12 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• Builders become more engaging when they become more demanding
for results and accountability. They need to increase
the pressure to get results and the appropriate consequences
when the results are not met. They become more engaging
when they insist people get with the program by putting
aside their own agendas, and trust that people can handle the
heightened demands.
As a result of being more versatile, engaging leaders in business:
• Get their results through people. They know that’s how to win
consistently.
• Stress results and reinvestment. They push hard for profitability
and growth, in part so they can make sizeable reinvestments
in developing people and organizational systems that
enable people to work better.
• Make the big decisions. They make the big or tough decisions
on a timely basis with a useful amount of input. They know
followers expect them to lead. They also leave decisions
about execution to the people closest to the work.
• Intervene when appropriate. They develop a feel for stepping in
at the right times, not too often or too seldom. They know
when to press hard to solve a problem or demand greater
performance, and they know when to let people work things
out on their own.
• Focus on the head, hands, and heart. They understand that getting
work done requires head and hands, but more gets done
when it is fueled by a love of the work. They make sure that
people enjoy what they do and feel respected. This often
1 / Engaging Leadership 13
involves finding out what the person wants to do and enabling
them to do it.
• Balance the short term and long term. They keep one eye on the
present and one on the future. They’re quick to take action to
address what’s necessary for today while continuing to build
for tomorrow.
• Are “in the moment.” They vary between stepping front and
center and hanging back, depending upon the situation.
They’ll shield their team if necessary or encourage team
members to take the stage and the credit.
• Show their feelings. They express their emotions in an authentic
and respectful way. Some leaders show a lot of emotion,
others show less because of their personalities. But engaging
leaders know the value of displaying their feelings. Your people
learn to understand and expect your rhythms because
they’re real and out in the open. Engaging leaders are much
more positive than negative because people respond better to
that. They know the most important emotion is hope—hope
is the wellspring of motivation. Still, they recognize they
have to be realistic too. They can be effective when they’re
angry or critical as long as it’s genuine and happens less frequently
than joy, optimism, and praise.
Quarterback Trent Green summed up the description of an engaging
leader when he described his coach in St. Louis and Kansas
City, Dick Vermeil. Said Green, “Dick is such a positive and upbeat
[person], always finding the best in a certain situation and always
trying to stay real positive. He’s not afraid to scream and yell, don’t
get me wrong, but for the most part he tries to keep everything pos-
14 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
itive. He’s very demanding in terms of the amount of hours we
have to spend and as much work as we do on the field.”11
ENGAGING IMPACTS
When you display these behaviors, you engage your employees
in several ways.
• You enable them to get to know you.
• You show them that you care about them.
• You help them admire you and want to work for you.
• You show them you’re intensely passionate and optimistic
about your work and your goals.
• You help them understand the value of taking a disciplined
approach to performing.
Exposure and Knowledge
Today, you have to expose yourself to your people in ways leaders
never had to before. The old, formal, distant, hierarchical-based
idea of leadership is dying. Your talented people expect to relate to
you in a more informal, egalitarian way, even if you would prefer
to have it another way.
One of the best examples of this I ever encountered was an entrepreneurial
leader I know who built a multibillion dollar technology
company. When the packing and shipping line went down,
he’d head straight to the warehouse to help put machines in boxes.
When he wasn’t needed for packing, he’d stay in the warehouse
1 / Engaging Leadership 15
anyway, making sure people had the supplies they needed and coffee
and food to keep going. Gordon Bethune did a similar thing in
rebuilding Continental Airlines. He’d work the ticket counters and
tarmacs on a regular basis.
On the other hand, one of the biggest weaknesses I see in some
business leaders is that they keep their distance from their employees.
I don’t mean their fellow executives; I mean the people who
serve customers, load boxes, think up marketing campaigns, enter
data, and so on. How can you expect to know how customers are
being served or how much quality goes into your products if you
don’t know what people are thinking and feeling? Teams take on
the personalities of their leaders. Do you want yours to be cold, distant,
and uncaring?
People expect to get to know who you really are—your personality
and your preferences. That’s why engaging leaders show their
true feelings. They understand people want closeness. You shouldn’t
keep your distance, even if your employees want to keep their distance
from you.
Employees also expect you to get to know them. David Grainger,
who built W.W. Grainger into the United States’ largest industrial
and office supply business before retiring, was famous for walking
the halls and distribution centers, remembering people by name,
asking them about their families, and recalling their celebrations.
That’s one reason he became a beloved leader.
Sports have an advantage over many businesses in this regard:
most sports teams and organizations are small so it’s easy to get to
know people. On the other hand, it’s impossible for a coach to hide
his weaknesses as a person. If you lead a small organization or
work team, you must get to know your people personally—their
families, hobbies, interests, and issues. In a large organization, it may
be impossible for you to do that, but everyone can get to know you
16 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
if you reveal your true self. You have to be authentic; people can
sense when you are trying to be something you’re not. By the way,
if people don’t like what you reveal, they’ll tell you. Today, if you
don’t change, they’ll probably tell you on your way or their way out
the door.
Relationship Building and Caring
What I’m describing is relationship building, and as you build
that relationship, you have to show you care. People aren’t going to
care about you and your concerns unless they know you care about
theirs. General Colin Powell said, “The day soldiers stop bringing
you their problems is the day you stopped leading them.”12
Engaging leaders don’t do this just to be nice, though it’s the
right way to deal with people. They do it because the more caring
they show, the more performance they can demand. Think about it. For
whom are you more likely to extend yourself, someone you love or
someone you don’t know or don’t like?
In 1998, the Center for Creative Leadership did a study on what
distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective ones. After reviewing
mountains of data it found only one difference: effective leaders
cared about their people.13
Demonstrating caring is done one on one. That means knowing
what each member of your team needs to make him or her feel valued.
Appreciation is a highly personal thing. It’s different for each
individual. To show appreciation, you may have to take as many
different approaches as you have unique people. Your people will
feel appreciated based on the personal relationship you build with
each of them as their leader.
1 / Engaging Leadership 17
Dusty Baker, formerly of the San Francisco Giants, now the
manager of the Cubs, won baseball’s Manager of the Year award
three times. He knows the way to a player’s heart is through his
stomach. Giants’ star, Barry Bonds, gave away Baker’s secret to success.
“He always brings food in every day. He takes care of everybody.
When he knows you’re down and out, he does something to
perk you up. When you’re struggling, he’ll say, ‘Here I brought you
lunch. You’re looking a little weak. I want you to get strong.’”14
Baker learned the value of good nutrition from Hank Aaron and
now spends $50 to $60 a day on food for his team. He knows every
good restaurant in National League cities—not the fanciest, just the
best. But he doesn’t deliver food just to make people happy, he does
it to win. “You’ve got to be nutritionally strong. In the end, only the
strong survive.”15
Phil Jackson feeds players egos, not their bodies. Former player
Stacy King didn’t get along well with Phil when they were with the
Bulls. Now a coach in the CBA, King patterns himself after Phil.
Said King, “During my first two years with him, I despised about
95 percent of Phil’s approach. Now I see the big picture that I didn’t
see before. My style is actually a lot like Phil’s, especially how he
handled players. They all have personalities, and to mesh them together
without too many restrictions on them takes a lot of work.”16
Jackson discovered that Shaquille O’Neal wanted a close, fatherson
type relationship because of O’Neal’s family background. So
that’s what Jackson worked on, even before he started coaching
him. He also joined with O’Neal’s family to encourage him to finish
his degree. O’Neal, with the Lakers’ blessing, left the team for a few
days during the 2000–2001 season to attend graduation ceremonies
at LSU. To Jackson, it was a matter of supporting O’Neal and his
family and getting priorities right.
18 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Admiration and Integrity
The ability to make smart, tough decisions, while still acknowledging
the emotional side of things and responding to people’s feelings,
makes you a hero to your people. And people want to work for
leaders they admire. I hear this all the time in my consulting. Employees
spend a lot of time looking upward in their companies, and
when they talk about bosses they admire—whether it’s their supervisors
or the CEO—they say it with a smile and great personal
pride.
The desire to admire may be a distinctly American trait. I’m not
certain. Some experts talk about Americans being hero worshippers,
based on our culture that celebrates individualism. At the
same time, much of the literature on leadership says that heroic
leadership is overrated and unnecessary in organizations, even
though that’s what the business press likes to write about.
I agree you don’t need to be a heroic leader, like the classic
stereotype, to be a success. Still, you have to want to lead and be
willing to get out in front. You don’t have to be particularly charismatic,
though you have to be able to communicate. People love and
are inspired by everyday heroes. It helps them feel like they’re
working in the right company if they can look up to their leaders.
Arthur Ashe, the great tennis player, described very well the
kind of hero to which I’m referring. Ashe said, “True heroism is remarkably
sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all
others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever
cost.”17 Leading by serving others to reach your organization’s goals is the
essence of engaging leadership.
When I ask people what traits they most admire in leaders, the
first thing they say is integrity. There are many other traits that people
1 / Engaging Leadership 19
admire in their leaders, but integrity appears to be the foundation—
courage, confidence, and caring all flow from it.
Integrity is a big word that can mean many different things. But
keep it simple. If people are going to follow your lead, they expect
you to act honestly and ethically. We’ve all seen what happens to a
company when its leaders lack integrity—Enron comes to mind.
The best people, the kind you want to keep, won’t hang around if
you do one thing and say another or don’t play fairly.
People watch this very carefully all the time. Former New York
mayor Rudy Giuliani earned everyone’s overwhelming admiration
for his leadership during the World Trade Center crisis. Though his
political career was near ruin before September 11, after the horrible
terrorist attack he showed the combination of toughness and
tenderness that marks great, engaging leaders. People saw an authentic,
emotional side to him that hadn’t been visible before, and
they were uplifted by it.
The one time he slipped in people’s eyes was when he proposed
staying on as mayor after New York City’s November 2001 election.
New Yorkers were highly critical of him because they saw this as a
violation of the integrity of the election process. Once he dropped
his ill-thought case for staying in office, New York’s new love for
him quickly returned.
Passion and Intensity
Your people also won’t give you outstanding effort unless they
see great passion from you. If it’s not tremendously important to
you, don’t expect it to be very important to your team. Your team
will take on your characteristics. If you want intensity and enthusiasm
from your people, show them yours. If you’re not prepared to
20 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
work harder and longer than your people, you can’t ask for maximum
effort and quality from them. Engaging leaders ask and get
people to work as hard as they do.
The Cleveland Browns, an expansion team, fired coach Chris
Palmer after its first two seasons, hardly enough time to get started.
When asked why, Browns’ president Carmen Policy said, “I think
football is almost as much feel and emotion as it is execution. A
team will never grow unless it has spirit, energy, direction, and
hope. And I think we were lacking a great deal of each of those.”18
Policy replaced Palmer with Butch Davis, a much more emotional
and optimistic coach, and the Browns improved right away.
Is there an appropriate level of passion or intensity for a given
type of business? I think so. Here the sports analogy fits again. Football
has a relatively shorter season than baseball or basketball, and
it’s a collision sport. There are fewer games, but a football coach
asks his players to do lots of dirty work and unnatural things—
wear lots of padding, hit people hard, tackle other players who are
running at you at full speed, play in all kinds of weather, and so
on. This probably takes more pure emotion—executed at a louder
volume—and a driver mentality. Drivers coached the last several
Super Bowl winners. There are no dynasties anymore in football because
of the salary cap, increased movement of players, the impact
of the draft, and a scheduling process that rewards weaker teams by
giving them easier schedules. So football has a shorter-term focus:
A team gets a two or three year window to win it all. This helps explain
why an engaging driver, like Dick Vermeil or Brian Billick,
wins and Dennis Green falls short.
Still, the newer coaches in the NFL, with a few exceptions, tend
to be teachers more than screamers. They’re calmer, but if they’re
versatile, they have their loud moments. Steve Marriuci, the successful
coach of the San Francisco 49ers, described his approach, “I
1 / Engaging Leadership 21
think you can be a gentleman and succeed and treat players fairly
and like men.”19 The hardcore screamers, like Mike Ditka, have faded
into the past.
Basketball and baseball seasons, on the other hand, are a longer
grind in which the teams play almost every day for seven months
with fewer people. This requires a steadier approach, more like the
builder mind-set. As Steve Kerr, a long-time NBA player with several
teams said, “I think it’s difficult as a player when you’ve got a
coach jumping up and down on the sidelines all the time. You feel
more relaxed when your coach is relaxed.”20
In my experience, businesses that are more operationally focused,
where the activities are more repetitive, controlled by processes,
group-oriented, and perhaps less intellectually stimulating,
are more like football. They require more passion from the top for
employee motivation, and effective and engaging drivers can do
well. Many manufacturing and process-driven companies, like
Whirlpool or Southwest Airlines, benefit from this kind of leadership.
So do customer service companies that involve short-cycle
sales or more straightforward service operations, like FedEx or Wal-
Mart. Though there may be less intrinsic motivation in the work itself,
you need to provide more inspirational leadership throughout
the company. This requires more volume and outward emotion
from you and other leaders.
When work is more individually focused and personally and
intellectually challenging, like engineering, legal work, health care,
and consulting, or the emphasis is on long-term, carefully cultivated
relationships, the calmer approach is better. In companies like
Merck or IBM, you can appeal to the person on an individual level
about issues of quality, service, and the other results you need.
Leadership doesn’t usually require the same volume, and highly
aggressive leaders often are counterproductive. They become a dis-
22 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
traction to the thinkers who are creating products and relationships.
A builder is a more effective leader in these types of companies.
Still, the importance of communicating passion can’t be overstated
for any kind of work. Both cold drivers and calm builders
have to change their approaches. Your passion, as long as it’s positive,
unlocks the energy that fuels people to victory. Without passion,
you can’t have quality. People want passion and hope in their
lives, and talented people want to feel it in their jobs.
At the same time, engaging leaders know the difference between
intensity and tension. They raise the tension just enough to
have intense motivation. Too much tension becomes its own focus
and causes distraction. This is the downfall of many drivers who
can’t move beyond their usual style. On the other hand, builders
who aren’t versatile seem not to create enough tension or they inadvertently
cause too much. When they don’t create enough, their
people lack the fire that it takes to win. When they effect too much
tension, it’s because they let a problem go unresolved for too long.
Their followers feel overly tense because they’re waiting nervously
for their leader to help with the problem.
Your task as an engaging leader is to create just enough intensity so
people can enjoy their work every day. People need to have fun to win.
You can actually measure whether the intensity level is right by
how much people love what they do. Tense or fear-oriented leadership
takes the fun out of it for everyone. As Lou Piniella says, “Basically,
I let my players play. I want them to have fun, I want them
to be relaxed and loose and go out and give me all they’ve got.
When players execute, it makes the manager look good.”21
If the proper intensity is there most days and you’ve built
strong relationships with your team, you can turn up the intensity
when you need to rise to a challenge or make big changes. You can
ask for more and get it during big moments. You can ask people to
1 / Engaging Leadership 23
extend themselves even further than they think they can. They’ll
reach for the impossible and do it when they’re able because you’ve
engaged them.
Discipline and Participation
The last fundamental for an engaging leader is to set a discipline
for performing. In some ways, this comes easily for both drivers and
builders, though they approach it differently. How things get done
is very important to both of them—for drivers it’s often “my way”
and for builders it’s “let’s agree on how to do it?” Ineffective leaders
rely too much on their own usual approach—either “my way or the
highway” or “you people decide and let me know.” Engagers understand
it’s a combination of both top-down direction and bottomup
involvement. They know when to make the decision, how much
input to get, and when to let others decide. People need to buy in to
what you want to get done, but they won’t accept it unless they
have a voice in goals and methods.
Engage people by establishing accountabilities and a structure for accomplishing
them, and then let them operate. This may seem obvious
after all these years of employee involvement, but I still see many
companies grind people down with operational efficiencies, driving
pride and creativity out in the name of process control. Varying
processes does disrupt efficiency, but a lack of opportunity for input
just puts people to sleep. You need to strike a balance between
prescribed methods and enabling employees to have their say, or
you can watch your productivity fall as dullness overcomes your
workplace.
Engaging leaders balance the right fundamentals for playing
their games or running their businesses with the right level of par-
24 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
ticipation by their team members. During the 2001 baseball playoffs,
Piniella’s Mariners got beat by Cleveland in game four by a
score of 17–2. Piniella hated to lose but he wasn’t upset with the
score. Instead he was concerned because his team didn’t play good
defense. He didn’t scream after the embarrassing loss because he
knew his veteran team would steady themselves. His players took
it upon themselves to go into their locker room to sit and talk it
over. They said they spent most of the hour kidding each other and
laughing, forgetting about how badly they played, so they could get
ready for the next game. It must have worked. The Mariners won
the decisive fifth game to go on to the League Championship.
Phil Jackson surprised people at how quickly he was able to
take the same Lakers team all the way to the top after it collapsed
in the playoffs the previous year. Even the man who replaced him
with the Bulls, Tim Floyd, was impressed with the structure Jackson
brought, “He [Jackson] did a remarkable job of organizing that
team, identifying and giving them roles, identifying who their shotmakers
were, shoring up their defense, teaching them how to play
playoff basketball, the whole deal.”22
These behaviors—learning about your people, relationship
building, caring, integrity, passion, and discipline—form the foundation
of engaging leadership, whether you’re a driver or a builder.
When you read positive comments about coaches from their players,
these are the things players almost always describe. What
would your team say about you?
People who watched Bill Belichick lead the New England Patriots
to the Super Bowl Championship said he changed and grew as
a leader. He was still the same defensive mastermind, but he was no
longer so aloof and remote, a communications disaster. This was his
second try at being a head coach, and he learned to loosen up and
listen more. One of his players, Terrell Buckley, said, “The great
1 / Engaging Leadership 25
coaches listen to their players but keep control. That’s when you
have something special. It makes players around here excited.”23
Tough and tender. A loveable taskmaster. Realistic optimist.
Whatever you call it, the intersection of driving and building behaviors
is what engages most people. Successful leaders learn this
in their interactions with people. They become more versatile, expanding
their own styles by taking on some behaviors that are unnatural
to them at first, but become second nature as followers
reinforce them by responding favorably. The ability to incorporate
parts of these seeming opposites, like the skill of reconciling group
goals and individual needs, will make you an engaging leader and
a long-time, big-time winner.
T H E H U D D L E
1. Now that you’ve read about drivers and builders, what’s
your style? How do you know? (Complete the short questionnaire
at the end of this book to find out.) Which coaches
or leaders do you most admire? What are their styles? Usually
you admire people who are like you or the ones you
want to be like.
2. How versatile are you? Do you regularly use behaviors of
both drivers and builders? Which behaviors? What do your
people say about you? How engaging do they think you are?
3. Answer the following questions using a 1-to-5 scale, with 5
being a high score:
• How well do you get to know your people?
• How successfully do you show your people you care
about them?
26 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• How much do your people admire you?
• How often do you display your passion and optimism
for your work and your goals?
• Do you bring a disciplined approach to getting things
done the right way?
What do you need to do to bring each score up to a 5?
1 / Engaging Leadership 27
28 E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
2
29
C H A P T E R T W O
THE URGENCY OF
ENGAGEMENT
“If Phil goes, I’m right behind him. At this point in my career,
I couldn’t play for anyone else.”
—All-Star center and MVP Shaquille O’Neal on his coach, Phil Jackson1
MARKET-DRIVEN EMPLOYMENT RELATIONSHIPS
You’ll notice that the quote from Shaq is just like the quote in
the previous chapter from Randy Moss about Dennis Green. Great
leaders inspire that kind of loyalty. And, engaging leaders win.
There’s an urgency to becoming an engaging leader that never
existed before. You must become more engaging, and you should
do it right away. It’s not just that engaging leaders win; it’s the
changing nature of business and the workforce. You have to become
an engaging leader if you want to get and keep the talent you’ll
need to achieve the results you want.
We now live in an era of unprecedented volatility in labor markets.
Like it or not, and there are many reasons not to like it, justin-
time workforces are the rule. For example, in one year, from
October 2000 to October 2001, we spun from the tightest labor market
in recent history—employers couldn’t find people to hire no matter
what they offered—to widespread panic over layoffs. We lost over
1.5 million jobs in the United States during this period as business
slowed down, and even profitable companies cut jobs and people.
Though there’s evidence that avoiding layoffs is good for business,
fewer companies seem to acknowledge or practice this, and
sometimes layoffs do seem unavoidable. Laying off people to cut
costs occurs more widely with each dip in the business cycle. Some
companies now get rid of people just because profits aren’t growing
fast enough. No wonder our workforce is wary and distrustful.
The laws of supply and demand rule labor markets today, just
like they do markets for money and goods. This wasn’t always the
case. Until the early 1980s, many companies shielded employees
from downturns because that was how they maintained loyal
workforces. No more. Since then we’ve built a market-driven employment
relationship, where the workplace and the outside marketplace
move hand in hand. When business is slow and jobs are
scarce, power and resources belong to employers. When business is
good and jobs are plentiful, employees have the power.
Guess what? Talented employees are about to gain more power
than ever. You’ll need them more than they’ll need you.
THE COMING TALENT SHORTAGE
Here’s a dire warning for business leaders: The demand for skilled talent
is about to far outstrip the supply, and stay that way. Even during
the downturn and recession of 2000–2002, unemployment stayed
low by historical standards. There were shortages of skilled people in
some industries and parts of the country. These shortages are going
to spread and increase, even when the economy isn’t booming.
30 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Talent shortages will become a way of life for you and your
business. Think of October 2000, when unemployment hit 3.9 percent
nationwide, as a preview of things to come. Quite soon you’ll
feel like you’re in a permanent talent shortage, always challenged
to get the people you need. As management guru Peter Drucker
said about the new workforce, “Accept the fact that we have to treat
almost anybody as a volunteer.”2
Demographics and Skills
The reason for this is primarily demographic. The U.S. workforce
is growing very slowly. Soon it will actually shrink for several years
before it returns to another period of slow growth. The talent pool
won’t be able to keep up with employment needs and you’ll have
trouble hitting your business goals.
It’s a matter of numbers. There were about 77 million people
born between 1946 and 1964—the baby boom generation. But there
were only 52 million people born between 1965 and 1978—generation
X. This means you’ll see a huge drop-off in the number of people
who are in their prime working years, ages 21 to 60, over the
next few years as baby boomers start to retire. In fact, the most conservative
projections, based on U.S. Department of Labor numbers,
tell us that by 2006, when the first boomers turn 60, there will be
two million more jobs in this country than people to do them. By
2011, the shortage will be five million people.3
Even in a slow economy, we’ll still have a shortage of talented
people. The Department of Labor numbers only assume a moderate
growth rate in the gross domestic product, quite a bit slower than
we had during our long economic expansion from 1992–2000. So,
the actual talent shortage could be much bigger. Some demogra-
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 31
phers and economists think it may grow as large as 10 million people
over the next 20 years.
When will you see relief? Not for a long time. Generation Y,
largely the children of baby boomers, numbers about 78 million.
The first of them are entering the workforce now, but most won’t be
educated and ready for years. By then, many of Gen Y’s baby boom
parents will be retiring, so their entry into the workforce won’t ease
the pain too much. All they’ll do is replace the departing boomers.
In addition to the numbers, there’s also the issue of skills. We
aren’t educating highly skilled people fast enough to keep up with
the growing demands of our more complicated jobs. An increasing
number of jobs now require the equivalent of a college education to
perform them. Jobs that used to be simple now call for complex
problem solving as more technology is put into use. Computers
haven’t made things simpler; they’ve made them more difficult. In
ten years, the United States could have a gap of at least 3.5 million
jobs requiring bachelor’s degrees with no one to fill them.
Attitudes and Values
People’s attitudes and values about work have changed too. In
market-driven employment relationships, the attitude of both companies
and employees is “what have you done for me lately?” Job hopping increases
or slows down in sync with the economy, but even in bad
times skilled people keep moving to better opportunities. This will
only increase as the talent pool shrinks.
Indeed, many people no longer think about long-term jobs in
organizations. Loyalty to organizations is pretty much dead in business.
Corporate America killed it through layoffs, restructurings,
mergers, and similar activities of the last 20 years. People have learned
to fend for themselves.
32 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Consider this:
• According to the Department of Labor, almost 40 percent of
American workers have been with their companies two years
or less. This is double what it used to be.4
• Less than 10 percent of American workers have been with
their companies more than 20 years. This is about half of
what it traditionally was.
• It used to be that, on average, people had three or four jobs
during their careers. Now that number has grown to seven or
eight, and it keeps growing as people become more mobile.
• Even companies on Fortune magazine’s list of the 100 best
places to work in America report average voluntary turnover
of about 14 percent.5
• Department of Labor numbers suggest that about one-quarter
of American workers are “free agents.” They’re self-employed
or work temporarily or in very small businesses that employ
just a handful of people. These free agents outnumber people
that work in manufacturing or the public sector, the largest
parts of the economy.
Surveys of American workers show repeatedly that while a
large majority of people would like to be loyal to their employers,
most know their loyalty will not be reciprocated.6 They realize
they’ll be let go without much hesitation whenever the company
wants. Most people now understand that job security doesn’t exist
and their career security depends on their skill set, not their companies.
In addition, only about one-third of Americans love their
jobs.
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 33
Workforce attitudes break out like this:
• About one-quarter to one-third feel real loyalty to their employers,
defined as wanting to and expecting to stay at their
companies for the next few years. This percentage is much
higher for executives and much lower for rank-and-file
employees.
• One-third feel “trapped.” They’d like to leave their companies
if they could, but they think it will be difficult to find another
job. This feeling is strongest among younger baby boomers and
generation Xers who have growing family responsibilities.
• Another one-third would leave their jobs tomorrow. The
younger you are, the more likely you are to feel this way.7
Additionally, with big technology changes in the ways companies
hire and the ways people look for jobs, today more than half of
the workforce is constantly “scanning” for new opportunities—
checking Web sites, posting resumes on the Internet, looking at
Web-based job boards, and so on.8 They also do things the oldfashioned
way, talking to friends about where they work and answering
calls from recruiters.
Companies may not like this, but it’s probably the right mindset
to have. It shows flexibility and self-preservation, just like the
ways companies hire, fire, and pay people. Long-term employment
has become a thing of the past for most. Pension plans, promotions,
and annual pay increases have given way to defined contribution
plans, flatter organizations, and variable pay, so reward schemes no
longer bind people to companies. Benefit plans are portable and
pay is contingent on performance. This is the market-driven employment
relationship.
34 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
WHAT TALENT WANTS
The new realities of employment have fueled many of these attitude
changes. Changes in values drive a lot of them too. Today baby
boomers and gen Xers make up the bulk of the workforce, with gen
Yers starting to join. Parents raised these generations with heavy
emphasis on the individual. Though there are big differences between
these three generations, it’s fair to say that a large majority of
them are looking for four things from work: freedom, control,
accountability, and caring.
Freedom
Freedom means the ability to be who you are and express yourself
without having to be someone you’re not. Self-expression started with
the boomers and grew stronger in succeeding generations. People
expect to be able to voice their opinions, dress as they want within
reason, and bring their personalities to work, not check them at the
door. They also expect to be listened to and taken seriously by their
bosses. Self-expression also stands for finding meaning in your
work, or at least liking what you do. This is another key value of
these generations. Finally, talented employees expect to have opportunities
for development so they can keep learning and growing.
They know this is really critical for their own personal career
security in the permanently unstable working world.
Control
Demands for self-expression also lead to increasing expectations
for personal control over work. People enjoy their work when they
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 35
know what their responsibilities are and have the autonomy to
achieve them. They don’t want to be told what to do and how to do it.
Even when the what-to-do comes down from above, talented employees
expect to figure out how to do it themselves. You also see this in
increasing demands for control over how people spend their time at
work. Boomers were the first to ask for some flexibility in their work
and lives. Gen Xers went further and asked for work-life balance. Gen
Yers believe their work should reflect their true interests and unique
personalities—work and life should be completely integrated. Corporations
that try to fit them into cubicles will have lots of empty spaces.
Accountability
Accountability means giving someone an assignment and holding him
or her responsible for delivering results. This isn’t unique to these generations
but it’s heightened in them. It’s part of the spirit of free
agency, of working for yourself. Talented people want this because
they believe performance is the only guarantee for their futures. Paternalism
and protected employment are dead, so the attitude is
“give me the chance to perform and hold me accountable so I can
show you what I can do.” In fact, one sure way to tell if you’ve got
high-initiative, high-talent employees is to see if they want to be accountable.
When people shrink from accountability, they’ll want
you to take care of them and assure they’ll be okay even when they
don’t deliver. Who wants employees like that?
Caring
Caring relationships increase people’s investments in your workplace.
Warm relationships help employees feel connected, like who they
36 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
are matters. This multiplies their motivations to help you meet your
goals. Employees who like their associates will want to do well for
their friends, coworkers, and you. They also want people they can
talk to about personal things at work, others to confide in about
their issues. For some of that, they’ll come to you, if they feel safe.
For the rest, they want some friends. A sure sign of disengagement,
as well as poor social skills, is when a person doesn’t have close relationships
at work.
Freedom, control, accountability, and caring are ways for people
to seek some measure of individual stability in a very unstable and
constantly changing world. They help people feel like they’re important
and that they’re working for themselves. This is the best of
the free agent mind-set, and what you want your employees to feel.
The more they sense these things, the more they’ll feel they’ve chosen
to work for you. Choice may be the most powerful motivator of all.
Perceived choice also increases people’s sense of self-reliance,
because they think they did it themselves. When all you see around
you is impermanence, you have to become your own anchor. Think
about the work experience of gen X. When it started to enter the
workforce in the late 1980s and early 1990s, it hit tough job markets,
fed by restructuring employers and uneven economic times. Then
when things started to boom in the mid-1990s, Xers were in such
hot demand, they could name their own terms. When the slowdown
hit in 2000, they saw their jobs evaporate, particularly in the technology
sector. No wonder they learned to fend for themselves.
Respond to These Values
To engage people, you have to respond to these attitudes and
values. You can’t impose a “one size fits all” command and control
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 37
approach. You have to give people room to feel they’re making their
own decisions about how to do their jobs and the amount of effort
to put into them. At the same time, you can’t be too lax or you won’t
be successful. People in organizations want structure; if they didn’t,
they’d be out working on their own. Yet people still want to feel the
pride associated with being successful. It takes standards to get
there. You have to adapt and hit the right balance.
This is one reason hardcore drivers like Pat Riley don’t win as
much anymore. Many drivers don’t provide enough room for individuals
to feel like they’re making their own choices. Riley was
born at the end of the last generation to emphasize teamwork and
sacrifice individualism for duty. This is the “Ike” generation, born
between the end of the Great Depression and the end of World War
II and named after war hero President Dwight Eisenhower. As children,
they grew up watching America, led by big government, rise
up out of financial disaster, defeat the Axis powers, and rebuild
much of the world after the war.
Seeing this, Ikes learned to trust institutions, making it the last
generation to put the corporation first, ahead of home and family.
No surprise that the team movement in American business hit its
peak while Ikes were CEOs. But for Ikes or anyone else to win today
they need to adapt. Riley’s methods worked well when he was
coaching older boomers, like Magic Johnson and Kareem Abdul
Jabbar, who still could be taught to buy into his way of thinking.
People feel very differently today, especially Xers and Yers.
They don’t trust government, business, or other institutions, including
your company. They don’t see stability in them; they live
change. They believe personal security comes from trusting their
own instincts and abilities. We might yearn to go back to a simpler
time, but it’s not reality. Riley’s now coaching Xers and Yers, but he
hasn’t changed to accommodate their different beliefs. It’s no sur-
38 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
prise he doesn’t like playing rookies on his teams and only does so
when there’s no alternative.
Still, hard-driving, command-and-control leadership is not just
the province of the Ike generation. A funny thing happened to Buck
Showalter on the way to the 2001 World Series. He had managed
and helped build the two teams that competed, the Yankees and the
Arizona Diamondbacks, but he wasn’t leading either of them in the
series. Showalter is a baby boomer who’s every bit as hard-driving
as Riley. His organizational manual for the Diamondbacks was
thick and rule-bound, just like Riley’s playbook. Showalter even
told players how high to wear their socks. In New York and Arizona,
Showalter built his teams and got them to the playoffs, but
lost in the first round. Then he was fired from both places for being
too controlling. Each time a more laid-back person—Joe Torre in
New York and Bob Brenly in Arizona—replaced him, and each time
the team won the World Series the next year.
Quite telling was Brenly’s first big move after taking over Arizona.
When training camp opened, he gathered all the players together.
He took Showalter’s big manual and dropped it to the floor.
In its place he took out a napkin and wrote down his rules: Play
hard and be on time. His players followed them and became the
fastest expansion team to win the World Series.9 Brenly clearly understood
how to engage people by giving them the freedom to succeed.
ENGAGING LEADERSHIP IS THE SOLUTION
No one knows where these huge changes in the employment relationship,
the talent shortage, or new attitudes and values will take
us, but one thing is apparent: For the foreseeable future, talented people
won’t stay in jobs they don’t like. They’ll have more opportunities
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 39
than ever, and they won’t stay with their companies if they can’t
stand their bosses. As the old saying goes, “people don’t quit their
jobs, they quit their bosses.” This is truer today than ever. Lousy
leaders will run the stars out of your companies.
On the other hand, there’s plenty of evidence to suggest that
skilled people want to work for winning leaders. Grade A talent
wants to work for Grade A leadership. It won’t settle for less. You
can build loyalty to engaging bosses, even if you can’t build it to companies.
Stars like Shaquille O’Neal can play anywhere. He’s already
played for two teams and several coaches, but he loves playing for
Jackson. To be an engaging leader, you need to figure out how Phil
Jackson and others like him build this kind of devotion.
For three years, I helped lead Hewitt Associates in gathering and
analyzing the data that Fortune magazine used to publish in its list
of the 100 best places to work in the United States. Several factors
contributed to a company making the list. The number one factor
was leadership. Leaders who emphasized inspiring and engaging
people were the keys to being a great employer. These leaders knew
they had to manage relationships, as well as the bottom line, to have
lasting success. With this kind of leadership, these companies had
twice the applicant pool and half the turnover of other companies.
The lesson for you is you have to develop your skills at engaging
people whether you manage in a for-profit business, a not-forprofit
organization, or even lead volunteer work in your church or
community. The opportunities available to talented individuals and
the demands placed on them will keep them very, very busy in the
years ahead. As a leader, you will face huge challenges in getting
and holding skilled people—bigger obstacles than you’ve ever experienced
before.
You’ll have to navigate your way through these rough waters,
and you’ll need some kind of compass. Very few employers have
40 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
been here before, and there’s no proven business model showing
how to do it. You have to look somewhere else for clues.
That’s why I picked pro sports as a way to illustrate engaging
leadership. Sports have been dealing with a shortage of skilled talent,
great mobility, and a workforce full of gen Xers and Yers for
several years. Leadership in sports shows us some huge triumphs
and some gigantic mistakes, so it’s a great learning laboratory.
When your best talent can change companies like Shaquille O’Neal
can change teams, the place to look to learn how to lead people today is
professional sports.
MIXING SPORTS AND BUSINESS
Does it really make sense to look at sports to learn about business
leadership? Yes, because the worlds of professional sports and
business never have been more similar, particularly when it comes
to leading skilled, highly mobile talent.
I think you can learn a lot about effective leadership as we examine
how a variety of individuals and organizations win. It’s also
undeniable that pro coaches and teams have made some spectacular
mistakes in leading players. We’ll look at some of these errors,
along with the successes, to understand how you can become an engaging
leader.
Just think about how much alike professional sports and business
are now.
• Above everything else, talent now defines whether you win
or lose. This always has been true in sports. It’s true today in
business where more than 80 percent of U.S. jobs are in the
service and information industries. Value creation in these
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 41
industries is mostly a matter of brain power and sharing information—
in other words, talent and how it works together.
• Pro athletes and skilled employees both have unprecedented
freedom of movement, and this will continue to grow. Athletes
achieved this through strong unions, agents, and the
premium placed on athletic skills. Employees are getting there
due to the talent shortage and new technology.
• Loyalty has evaporated in both places. Corporations broke
the loyalty bonds with their continual restructurings and layoffs.
Free agency took care of it in sports. Comedian Jerry
Seinfeld says players move around so much in sports that
we’re just rooting for the uniform now. In other words, we’re
all cheering for laundry.
• Because talent is so critical for success and so mobile, both
sports and business now invest money and time more heavily
in recruiting. Witness the wooing of free agents in baseball and
basketball. Then look at how similar that is to what companies
do on college campuses, particularly in knowledge-based
industries. One Chicago law firm even rented out Comiskey
Park to host a softball game between Northwestern and University
of Chicago law students as a recruiting event. Moreover,
sports and business both are looking at younger and
younger talent, even reaching into high schools to find future
stars. IBM and other companies sponsor a high school road
show urging college-bound youngsters to major in technical
fields so these companies will have a future talent pool.
• In both worlds, competitive pay is absolutely necessary to
get the talent you want, but it’s not sufficient. There’s increasing
evidence that great athletes and employees want more.
42 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
They want to play or work in successful organizations for
terrific coaches. In some cases, they’ll even turn down more
money to go with a winner.
• There’s much more media attention and pressure for shortterm
results in sports and business now. New cable channels,
radio stations, and Internet sites are constantly emerging to
discuss winners and losers. Not only that, but owners and
shareholders are more impatient than ever.
Bill Parcells, former coach of the NFL’s Giants, Patriots, and Jets,
made the same comparison in the Harvard Business Review, when he
was asked to discuss his approach to leadership. Parcells said, “The
people in your company have little loyalty; some even want you to
fail. Your star performers expect constant pampering. Your stockholders
are impatient, demanding quick results. And the media
scrutinize and second-guess your every move. I can relate.”10
Still, sports and business aren’t identical, and we should recognize
some big differences.
• Unions now are stronger in pro sports than they are in most
businesses. Unionization occurs only in about 10 percent of
for-profit businesses, and their power is concentrated in a
few segments, like transportation and the auto industry.
Union membership is higher in not-for-profit segments, like
education, health care, and government.
• Agents play a bigger role in sports than they do in business.
Some people think agents have ruined pro sports. The use of
agents is just beginning in business, but it’s definitely coming.
Some executive search and law firms are beginning to
play this role for executives and uniquely skilled individuals.
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 43
• The compensation systems in pro sports leagues don’t compare
to business, and baseball, especially, seems completely
broken. Most baseball teams report big operating losses year
after year, even though franchises continue to increase in
value. Yet as we’ve seen in the Enron, Tyco, and WorldCom
cases, compensation systems in business aren’t in great shape
either, particularly the ways executives are rewarded. It’s disgusting
to see CEOs get fired for poor performance and walk
away with millions. Say, that’s a lot like baseball.
• Sports have defined seasons by which they measure success.
Businesses have to measure success every day, though they
have quarterly results to report. Sports team will do major
makeovers in their off-seasons, but there’s no off-season in
business. Huge makeovers usually come during crises or
mergers and acquisitions.
• Sports teams can get rid of players easily, while it’s tougher
to do that in business. Players can be traded or released, particularly
when they’re thought to be too old to perform. We
have laws against that sort of thing in business.
These differences may seem huge to you, but the similarities are
stronger than the differences, and the two are becoming more alike
every day. As the business environment gets tougher, you need to
take the best ideas about leadership wherever you can find them
and use them to help you succeed. Your success depends on your
abilities to get and keep star talents and engage them to help you
win. You need to know how leaders who deal with scarce talent do
this every day and triumph.
44 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
THE REST OF THIS BOOK
Now that I’ve defined engaging leadership, sketched the coming
environment for talent, and told you why I think the analogy to
sports works, here’s what’s next. The remainder of this book digs
deeper into engaging leadership so you can build your understanding
and learn how to do it. To do that, we’ll focus on the three
key areas where engaging leaders build successful teams. This isn’t
everything leaders have to do, but they are the most important
things to do to become more engaging. I see this in business, sports,
and every team endeavor. These three areas are:
• Talent. How you select, develop, and keep the talent you need
to achieve high performance.
• Goals. How you excite people about your goals so they’ll put
in extra effort.
• Chemistry. How you build an environment with trust and
structure so people can work together effectively and with
excellence.
Drivers and builders have to address all three things to win.
They approach them differently, and I’ll point that out. Most crucial
is for you to recognize how you do these things now and how you
can become more versatile to engage your people.
Before we go any further, I acknowledge there’s a lot wrong
with professional sports. We all know it: greedy owners, coaches,
and players; escalating prices that drive fans away; strange collective
bargaining agreements that benefit the few at the cost of the
many; thug-like behavior by some athletes; gross immaturity by
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 45
others; unsavory agents; and so on. We’ve even reached the point
where Super Bowl XXXV MVP, Ray Lewis, doesn’t get asked to go
to Disney World or appear in the team photo on the Wheaties box
because of his off-the-field behavior. The only thing I can think of
that may be worse is college athletics. The athletes make millions
for their schools, don’t get paid for it, and can’t transfer without
penalties, all while their coaches take off for richer jobs at the drop
of a new shoe contract.
We can’t ignore the bad in pro sports, but I really want to concentrate
on those golden moments when a team comes together and
wins. How did the coach engage his players to do it? How does an
organization stay on top for years? What kind of leadership does
that require? How come some teams never win? How do you avoid
that trap? These are the things you can learn from and apply to your
own skills to become more engaging and successful.
While you probably could understand all you need to know
about leadership just by using the Yankees and Cubs as examples—
after all, who typifies winning and losing more than those two
teams—you’d be missing out on too many other great stories.
Looked at through the right lens, pro sports provide a great picture
of engaging leadership.
T H E H U D D L E
1. Describe the employment relationships you have at your
company. Do you practice layoffs or loyalty? Do you talk
about one and do the other, or are your words and actions
consistent? What impacts does this have on your workforce?
2. What are you doing to get ready for the coming talent
shortage?
46 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
3. How in tune are you with the attitudes and values of your
employees? How do you describe them? What generational
differences do you observe? What similarities?
4. How have you modified your leadership style to address the
employment relationships and attitudes and values that you
described? How has this helped you lead? What should you
do better?
2 / The Urgency of Engagement 47
48 E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
3
49
C H A P T E R T H R E E
TALENT
Get What You Need
“Money or not, it still comes down to your ability
to evaluate talent.”
—Brian Sabean, San Francisco Giants general manager1
BUILD ON YOUR STRENGTHS
A fan asked Yankee coach Don Zimmer, “What makes Joe Torre
such a good manager?” Zimmer replied, “Good players.”2 He was
only half-serious. Zimmer knows you can’t win without the right
players, but he thinks Torre’s a terrific manager. Still, not every
coach wins with great talent.
The upside of our mobile economy is that talent will move in
good times or bad. People will come to work for you when you
offer the right inducements. One huge inducement is the opportunity
to win.
Ernie Accorsi, general manager of the New York Giants said,
“Because of free agency, players are here because they want to be
here. It’s not like you draft them, and they have no choice. They
don’t come here . . . if they don’t think they have a chance to win.”3
Highly skilled employees are just like free agents in sports. Your
critical tasks are to know what you need to win and pick the best
people who fit your team.
This begins with understanding your strengths and building on
them. Certainly if your team has some glaring weaknesses—gaps in
your skills or knowledge—correct them. But winning comes from
concentrating on your strong points and building them to championship
status. This forces you to focus on doing a few crucial things
better than anyone else does—the things you have to do to win.
This is the road to success. Trying to do everything well—being all
things to all people—is too expensive, causes you to lose focus, and
ultimately confuses your customers and employees who don’t
know what to expect from you.
This is one area where there isn’t much difference between
drivers and builders. It has nothing to do with style. You either get
this concept or you don’t. You’ll be successful or you won’t.
Sports may be a little easier to understand than business on this
point because success models in sports are pretty constant. In baseball,
the old adage is pitching is 80 percent of the game. This always
proves true in the World Series. The team with the best pitching,
smart defense, and just enough hitting wins. You may make the
playoffs with a lot of hitting and just enough pitching, but no team
slugs its way to win the World Series. It just doesn’t happen.
It’s basically the same in other sports. In football, basketball,
and hockey, it’s almost always the teams that play the best defense
and have just enough offense that win championships. The St.
Louis Rams were an exception to this rule because they won the
Super Bowl with offense. On the other hand, the Denver Broncos,
who won the two previous Super Bowls, didn’t win throughout QB
John Elway’s brilliant career until they developed a stout defense
and a great running game. The Baltimore Ravens and New England
50 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Patriots, champions of Super Bowls XXXV and XXXVI, showed that
brilliant defenses, even with mediocre offenses, win.
In business, there are many different ways to win, but the principle
of focusing on your strengths is the same. Research on market
leadership shows successful businesses emphasize their dominant
value proposition to build their core competencies and drive those
to become market leaders. You have to be competitive on price,
product, and service, but you have to pick one of those values and
use it to dominate your market. You do this by building your organization,
systems, and talent to fulfill this dominant value proposition,
the way Wal-Mart does on price, Nextel does on product, or
the Four Seasons Hotel does on service.4 Your business strategy, operating
model, and goals should come from your dominant value
proposition and help you get to the top.
Some rare companies are skillful enough to differentiate—be
somewhat better than competitive—in a second area, like the way
Southwest Airlines dominates on price and differentiates on service,
or the way BMW wins on product and is better than most on
service. This enables them to have the best margins in their industries.
But even these companies are few in number, and nobody can
afford to dominate in more than one area. (Then again, maybe differentiating
on service in the airlines and automotive industries
isn’t that difficult.)
LIKE-MINDED PEOPLE
As great teams in business and sports build on their strengths
and continue to win, they become known for these strengths. This
evolves into their personalities and traditions. It enables them to
attract and develop the best people who share the same traits and
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 51
skills. They win by extending their strengths and doing just enough
to solve their weaknesses.
Knowing your strengths and building on them will help you engage
people because you’ll attract like-minded people who want to do business
your way. You’ll also develop people in the areas they care about the
most. Do just enough to plug your weaknesses, but don’t dwell on
them, unless they’re in your core area or threaten your ability to
compete. At the same time, remember the intelligence, skills, attitudes,
and values you need reside in a diverse population of people.
It’s easy to mistake like-minded for “just like me.” This can be
fatal because you’ll choke off the differences that lead to creativity
and customer responsiveness.
The St. Louis Cardinals know what kind of talent they want and
get it. For as long as they have played in Busch Stadium, the Cardinals
have won when they’ve had great pitching and defense and just
enough hitting. Their stars have been their pitchers and fielders, like
Bob Gibson, Lou Brock, and Ozzie Smith. They often seem to win
with less offense than other teams—usually just a couple of big hitters
in the lineup—because their pitching, defense, and speed carry them.
The Cardinals tried to change a few years ago. First, they moved
in the outfield fences to encourage more home runs. Then they acquired
Mark McGwire, the great home run hitter. But this didn’t
work; it wasn’t true to who the Cardinals were. Even in 1998, when
McGwire became the first man to hit 70 home runs in a season, the
Cardinals finished third in their division for lack of pitching. The
next year, he hit 65 home runs, still a prodigious number, but the
Cardinals finished fourth. When this happened, general manager
Walt Jocketty and manager Tony LaRussa knew they needed to get
back to the Cardinals’ traditional strengths of pitching and defense.
Before the 2000 season, Jocketty acquired several veteran starting
pitchers, all proven winners. He bolstered the bullpen with a
52 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
new closer, and improved the defense with second baseman Fernando
Vina and center fielder Jim Edmonds. The plan worked
beautifully. Although McGwire missed most of the season with injuries,
the Cards won their division by a large margin and made the
playoffs for the first time since 1996.
The Cardinals kept the same plan for 2001. Looking ahead to
the season, Jocketty said, “One thing I would like to improve on for
next year is more team speed. We also need to continue to improve
our bullpen.”5 No more chasing after big boppers to try and change
the Cardinal tradition. In fact, the first trade the Cardinals made for
2001 was to send a power hitting third baseman and a pitching
prospect to the Montreal Expos for two quality pitchers.
Despite these acquisitions, the Cardinals struggled until late in
the 2001 season. Then, right before the trade deadline, they sent an
outfielder to San Diego for pitcher Woody Williams. Williams, a
pretty ordinary pitcher, was transformed in St. Louis, and, in turn,
changed the Cardinals. When he got there, Williams made some adjustments
with the pitching coach and went 7–1 to finish the season
and lift the team into the playoffs. The team stayed on its traditional
path for 2002 and won its division.
Contrast this with a team that hasn’t established a tradition. The
NFL’s Arizona Cardinals, who used to play in St. Louis, never have
established a reputation as being strong at any aspect of the game—
passing, running, defense, or special teams. They usually have losing
seasons, so they get their share of high draft choices. Still,
ownership and management have been too impatient or inept to
point the team in a consistent direction. They haven’t created
strengths to build on, so they haven’t prospered.
Most losing teams—in sports or business—don’t know who they are
or get away from what made them successful. When that occurs, any
kind of talent will do, but it usually doesn’t mesh into a coherent
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 53
whole. It doesn’t matter whether you’re a driver or a builder. Both
kinds of leaders make these mistakes and don’t engage people in a
consistent direction. Whatever talent these teams have usually dissipates
because people don’t pull together or build on each other.
SELECT FOR FIT
During the three years I worked on gathering data for Fortune’s
list of the 100 best companies to work for, we asked organizations
how they hired people. The top companies always told us selection
for fit with their values and beliefs was the most important criterion
they used. This meant looking at how new hires would fit in with
the company’s culture, people, and operating style, not just whether
they would get the job done. If someone didn’t fit with the team and
couldn’t do the job the way the organization wanted it done, he or
she wouldn’t be hired. This puts a premium on people’s values, enthusiasm,
teamwork abilities, and interpersonal skills.
What separated the best from the rest was how careful the best were in
selecting new employees for cultural fit. The best spent significantly
more time, money, and effort to pick the best employees who fit.
Other companies didn’t put the same resources into it or were content
just to find people who had the technical skills to do the job. An
amazing number of companies think fitting a person to the job requirements
is enough, but the best employers understand each hire
is a strategic move. Your work culture must sync with your strategy,
so your hires must fit your culture.
I see a few differences between builders and drivers in selecting
for fit. Some builders give people more latitude—both in whom
they select and in feeling they can persuade people to change and
fit. Phil Jackson and Dennis Green will do this. They succeed with
54 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
some people and not with others. Drivers tend to have very definitive
views of who they want—people who will follow their plans.
This often works right away, but drivers tend to not look as closely
at values and behaviors. This is one reason drivers often fail in the
long term. They’re also more likely to have less ambitious selection
criteria and a greater willingness to get rid of people who don’t
produce in the short term.
Should you pick people who only fit with your style? Absolutely
not. You need the complementary styles on your team to balance
things and build a winning chemistry. A team of only drivers
will fight each other over goals and who’s in charge. A team of only
builders will struggle over process and fall short on accountability.
I experienced this with an executive team I worked with in the
financial industry. It was all builders except for one driver whose
position was not in the core functions of the business so his influence
was limited. Most of the builders assumed that all employees
were good people, there to do right for the company and customers.
As a result, for a long time they resisted acting on a few really nasty
and selfish employees, people who disrupted the work in their departments,
complained all the time, and provided service based on
their moods, not the customers’ needs. This crummy behavior ruined
the morale of people around them and discouraged coworkers
who wanted to do well. Why bother to perform if leadership allowed
this to continue? Meanwhile, when confronted about this,
executives responded that coaching would correct the problem. Unfortunately,
they had let things slide for too long—the situation was
much too ugly for that. With a lot of education, we got the right
leaders to confront the disrupters with the choice to either change
or leave. The ensuing changes and departures raised the mood and
service throughout the whole company.
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 55
Should you pick people you like? Absolutely. There’s nothing
worse than having someone on your team you can’t stand. It raises
the tension level for you, the person you don’t like, and everyone
else on the team. If you don’t like a person, everyone will know it
and others probably won’t like him either. Dick Vermeil says that
the “l” in leadership is for likeability.6 You need to like the people
on your team.
Obviously it’s hard to care for someone you don’t like or to build
a positive relationship with that person. One caveat: don’t be narrow
in your tastes about people. That leads to discriminatory behavior.
Likeability doesn’t have anything to do with race, gender, religion,
or other background issues. If it does for you, get over it. Learn to
like a wide variety of people. You’ll become a better person.
The Oakland A’s have selection for fit figured out. The A’s never
have much money to spend. The team had the fifth lowest payroll
in the American League on opening day 2000, second lowest in baseball
in 2001, and third lowest in 2002. Still, they won the AL West
Division Championship in 2000 and made the playoffs in 2001 and
2002 by sticking to a formula for fit. The formula is based on general
manager Billy Beane’s belief, “You can get a good bat for 20 cents
on the dollar. Pitching’s going to cost you two dollars on the dollar.”
7 The A’s don’t have much money, so they spend it very wisely.
Beane and the A’s focus on young power hitting because it fits
their niche strategy. It’s cheap and this is the one thing they do best,
so they build on their strength. They also draft pitchers out of college,
who can become stars before they get too expensive. Here’s
their formula.
• No high-priced free agents
• Draft power hitters out of high school
56 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• Teach hitters to take pitches and draw walks in the minor
leagues; rewards are given for players who walk a lot and
those who don’t are traded or released (walks are important
because they put people on base in front of the power hitters
and wear out opposing pitchers)
• Draft pitchers out of college because they’ll reach the big
leagues sooner
• Bring in a few low-priced veterans to act as “mentors” to the
young players
• Invest in a baseball academy in the Dominican Republic to
find cheap talent
• Fill in the gaps by trading for or signing unwanted players
and not surrendering much player value or money in return
Pat Gillick, general manager of the Mariners described Beane
and his formula this way: “He doesn’t detract from his game plan.
He has a certain profile of the player he’s looking for and certain parameters
he has to work under.”8
Beane and his assistants also are known to take risks and make
a big trade if they can. “They’re prepared,” Rockies general manager
Dan O’Dowd says. “They know what they want to do. They’re
not afraid to make a decision. If they really want to get something
done, they make it work.”9
If the A’s can hang onto enough good young pitchers before
they leave for more money in free agency, this approach has a
chance to take them all the way to the top. It should, at least, help
them be competitive and profitable most years against teams with
much greater resources. Like the A’s, you must have a detailed approach
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 57
to selection for fit. You have to articulate the characteristics you want
that go far beyond whether someone can do the job. They must include
personal characteristics that fit with what you believe and
how you do business. Then go after the best people you can. Successful
leaders and companies always spend more time and money
on the process of hiring the best. When talent determines whether
you win or lose, your return on investment goes up when you put
more effort into getting better people.
Even when money’s no object, smart teams look for fit. At the
end of every season, the Yankees evaluate their talent to decide
what free agents to pursue to contend for another World Championship.
“Whoever we bring in here will have to fit,” said general
manager Brian Cashman,10 who knows Joe Torre won’t accept it any
other way. Cashman learned this in 2000 when he acquired slugger
Jose Canseco for the pennant drive although Torre didn’t want him.
Torre ended up leaving Canseco off the postseason roster.
At the same time, in a free agent world, free agents get to choose too.
Mike Mussina had his pick of several teams to play for in 2001 and
expressed a desire to play in a smaller town closer to his home in
central Pennsylvania. One of the factors that helped him select the
Yankees was that Joe Torre called him right after the World Series to
tell him how much he wanted him on the team. Other Yankee players
called also to tell him he could live a quiet life in the suburbs,
much like he had in Baltimore. Mussina said this show of appreciation
made a huge difference in deciding where to sign.11
Fit also was crucial when all-pro quarterback Rich Gannon
signed with the Oakland Raiders. Gannon had played for the Raiders’
despised rivals, the Kansas City Chiefs, hated the Oakland
team, and thought it lacked discipline. But then-Raiders coach Jon
Gruden studied Gannon carefully and decided he was his man because
of his work ethic, intensity, abilities to run a complex offense,
58 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
and decision making on the field. Both are hard-driving people, so
Gruden thought they could be terrific together.
Gruden’s task was to convince Gannon he could help him bring
greater discipline to the Raiders. He appealed to Gannon’s work
ethic and businesslike approach to the game. At their first meeting,
they went out for a quick, cheap meal and headed right to Gruden’s
office to study film. Gannon said, “I knew right then [this was the
right place].” Gruden’s instincts were confirmed. “I felt we clicked
right away. I had never been around a guy so passionate about
playing.”12 Gannon led the Raiders to the AFC Championship game
in 2000, losing to the eventual Super Bowl champion Ravens. He led
them deep into the playoffs again in 2001, before losing to the soonto-
be-champion Patriots on a snowy night in Massachusetts.
Bill Walsh, who led the San Francisco 49ers to three Super Bowl
championships and then helped rebuild the team as general manager
ten years later, never abandoned his philosophy of how to
build great football teams. Like most professional football people,
Walsh knows a strong defense and solid running game form the
foundation to winning. What’s unique is his approach to talent.
Walsh feels offense can be taught, but defense comes from the genes.
According to Walsh, “The only way you can play defense is
with athletes. Offensively you can coach a system of football that
can be productive, but defensively you have to have players.”13 This
means using high draft choices or free agent dollars to get the best
athletes available for defense and using what’s left on offense.
The keys to good selection for fit are knowing what you’re looking for
and having an experienced, first-class hiring department. Brian Sabean
of the San Francisco Giants thinks the secret is knowledge. “Our
emphasis is on experience. In the front office, in scouting, and
player development, we have personnel with, on average, 20-plus
years in the game.”14
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 59
This is the same approach the Vikings took under Dennis Green
and continue under new coach Mike Tice, and they develop good
new players every year. Green loved offensive talent and for years
relied on a veteran group of five front office people who had been
together a long time—more than 90 years of experience with the
Vikings among them. Near the end of his Viking career, some people
said Green stopped listening to this group, and this contributed
to his downfall. All of these men survived Green’s departure; in
fact, many of them got bigger responsibilities.15
Perennial losers like the Cincinnati Bengals illustrate what happens
when you underinvest in selection. The team hasn’t made the playoffs
for more than ten years, the longest drought of any NFL team. Despite
the high draft picks the team gets almost every year, it hasn’t
had a winning record since 1990.
The Bengals have front office and scouting problems. Mike
Brown, the owner, is his own president and general manager. He refuses
to hire a personnel professional or give power over personnel
decisions to his coach. Most successful football teams take one of
those two approaches. He also employs one of the smallest scouting
staffs in the league, only five full-timers, when many teams have
twice that. Brown denies these are the reasons the Bengals are so
bad, but the abysmal record is there for everyone to see, especially
the deprived fans, many of whom wear bags over their heads at
games for fear they’ll be recognized. Some players criticize the team
so often Brown had to put a clause in contracts to prevent them
from slamming the Bengals in public.16
When companies ask me what is the most strategically important
people practice, I always answer “selection for fit.” If you get
that right, everything else about leading people to high performance
can fall into place. In particular, you’ll build the kind of culture
you want, and this will unleash your talent to achieve great things.
60 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
To do this well, you have to be very detailed about the types of people
you want to hire, particularly regarding values, attitudes, and
how they work together, and you have to overinvest in evaluating
people for hire and promotion. There’s no substitute for creating
deep expertise in selection.
FIT VERSUS TALENT
What happens when someone of great talent doesn’t fit within
your company? Sports teams, particularly in pro basketball, are
famous for chasing talent and not worrying about fit. Maybe it’s because
the teams are smaller, so coaches think they can make misfits
conform. However, because the team is smaller, every player has more
impact to help or hinder victory. Beware of this if you are leading a
small work group—one bad apple will ruin your whole bunch.
Leaders, both builders and drivers, often feel they can tame
anyone. This isn’t a difference of style, it’s the difference between a
big ego and a strong ego. Big egos often overestimate what they’re
capable of doing. Some of the merger mania in business comes from
executives believing they should be running bigger companies
while lacking the patience and discipline to grow them organically.
Big egos ignore or discount the substantial data that shows that
most mergers fail; big egos are sure they can make them work.
Sometimes taking on a questionable person works, but only with a lot
of help and great pain. Many times it’s a disaster. Phil Jackson took on
bad boy Dennis Rodman with the Bulls because he desperately
needed a rebounder. Rodman helped the Bulls win three NBA titles,
despite constant acting out. But Jackson wasn’t the only one trying to
contain Rodman. Michael Jordan laid down the law too, and he had a
big influence on Rodman who knew better than to mess with Michael.
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 61
It didn’t work out so well in Los Angeles for Jackson with J.R.
Rider. Jackson took on Rider, a notorious troublemaker for coaches
and teammates, because the Lakers needed another offensive
weapon. The coach figured he could tame him like he did Rodman.
However, Rider disrupted the team; Jackson called this “The Rider
Effect.”17 In L.A., neither Shaquille O’Neal nor Kobe Bryant were
mature enough to play the Jordan role with Rider. The best Jackson
could do was to bury Rider at the end of the bench so he wasn’t a
big distraction.
Maybe the longest ongoing feud in basketball is between
Philadelphia 76ers’ coach Larry Brown and his star, Allen Iverson.
Iverson doesn’t like Brown’s demands and every year Brown
threatens to quit or trade Iverson, one of the best players in the
NBA. For his part, Iverson said the one word he wanted on his
tombstone was “misunderstood,” because that’s how he feels about
the way Brown treats him.18
In this case, the rift healed during the 2000–2001 NBA season
because Brown, a demanding driver, learned to relax about Iverson’s
off-the-court behavior and offered more on-the-court praise.
Brown showed a versatility that wasn’t always there before. For his
part, Iverson matured and began to understand what Brown wanted.
Both sides changed to make it work, and it did. Brown and Iverson
combined to lead the Sixers to the NBA finals against the mighty
Lakers. Too bad the wound reopened during the next season.
When talent and fit clash, you have three choices. You can stick to
your system and get assistance from peer leadership to help the outlier
conform. This is rarely a complete success, but it can work if the
person genuinely wants to do well. Builders can make this work better
than drivers because they’re more likely to foster peer leadership.
Or you can get rid of the person because you think your team
will function better without him or her in the long term. This usu-
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ally is referred to as “addition by subtraction.” Your team may actually
be less talented, but improvements in focus, teamwork, and
chemistry may overcome the loss. Drivers usually are more willing
to make this tough call sooner than builders.
Finally, you can relax your methods a bit and hope the person
will respond. For a driver, this is a sign of versatility and can lead you
to becoming more engaging. To do this, listen more carefully and
try to understand the person’s needs that he may not be communicating
to you, increase your praise to the person when he behaves
properly to shape him in the correct direction, and create a more
positive atmosphere. If you’re right about the person, this’ll work.
Be aware, however, that trying to reform a truly bad apple can be
dangerous. Letting up on your standards will cause chaos if the person
doesn’t come around. The others on your team will perceive that
your structure has broken down and some of them will act out too.
If this happens, you’re not a driver or builder who’s trying to be more
versatile, you’re just a leader with a big ego who made a mistake.
Obviously, all of these choices are high risk. Unless you’re dealing
with an extraordinary talent and have great support from the
person’s peers, you’re probably better off getting rid of the person.
How often do people mature when you need them to?
TALENT VERSUS GENIUS
Larry Brown agonized waiting for Allan Iverson to grow up
and lead, but he didn’t have much choice. Philadelphia didn’t have
a lot of other talent and had built the team around him. The Sixers
breakthrough performance in 2000–2001 probably came just in time
to save the team. Otherwise Brown, Iverson, or both would have
been gone.
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 63
The Lakers already had one star in O’Neal, but they put up with
Bryant’s egocentric behavior during 2000–2001 for a different reason.
Bryant showed flashes of real genius.
This is the one exception to the idea about getting rid of the person
who doesn’t fit. If the person is a real genius at what he or she
does, you have to work with the individual and wait for him or her
to mature. You’ll also have to change some of the ways you lead.
There isn’t much real genius in the world. If you’re lucky enough to encounter
it, let it flow. It will raise the standards you set for your team.
There’s an old saying, “Genius does what it must, talent does
what it can.” Could Bryant’s stubbornness be a sign of genius? Did
his rare gift force him to challenge O’Neal, or was it just ego?
On a small team it’s almost impossible to have two stars who
want to be “da man.” It’s totally impossible to have them fight with
each other or have one who won’t buy into the program. Horace
Grant played with Jordan and knew this. “You have to put your ego
aside. You can’t have two Batmans. You have to have one Batman
and one Robin.”19
If you’re fortunate enough to have a genius on your team, give
him or her as much freedom as you can. Jackson always treated Jordan
differently from the rest. Grant may have forgotten, but he didn’t
like it. Neither did some of the other Bulls, but they saw where Jordan
took them. Center Luc Longley said, “I made a career out of
backing MJ.”20 The one thing Jackson insisted on was that Jordan
learn to trust his teammates and get them involved so they wouldn’t
just sit back and watch Michael play. It took Jackson a long time to
get this point across to Michael, but he had to be patient. When the
lesson finally took, all of the Bulls players became better, and they
won six championships.
That’s the thing about geniuses; they lift everyone else around
them. Tiger Woods has required everyone else on the pro golf tour
64 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
to improve his game to keep up with him. Phil Mickelson, perhaps
the second best golfer in the world, said of Woods, “He seems to
create shots at very opportune times, which forces me to perform at
that same level or higher.”21 Vijay Singh, winner of two major championships,
went further. “I think a lot of guys are in awe of him, totally,
to the point that they might feel they’re five shots behind him
before the tournament even starts. The top guys seem to have more
trouble with him . . . they think if they don’t beat Tiger, it’s the end
of the world.”22
Doc Rivers, coach of the Orlando Magic saw the similarity of
Woods’s and Jordan’s impacts on their competition, “I look at Phil
Mickelson and David Duval, and that must be the way Karl Malone,
John Stockton, and Patrick Ewing felt throughout their careers.
Why did I have to be born now?”23
Fortunately for the rest of us, there aren’t many geniuses out
there. We don’t have to feel like we’re starting five shots behind.
However, you’ll end up way behind if you have a genius on your
team and don’t recognize it.
CHANGE YOUR TALENT OR
CHANGE TO YOUR TALENT?
When you don’t have the talent you need to play the way you
want, you have two choices. You can change your talent, or you can
adapt to what you have. An engaging leader takes the shortest path to
victory. If your talent is wrong or lacking, replace it or add to it. If
the talent is there, change your approach to mesh with it.
For several years, CDW Computer Centers has been recognized
as the best employer in Illinois. For years, like other best employers,
CDW relied on promotion from within. Our Hewitt studies showed
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 65
that most of the best employers are like Southwest Airlines. To
maintain its unique culture, Southwest rarely hired senior people
from the outside, always preferring to elevate internal candidates.
Founder Michael Krasny did the same in building the unique, dynamic
CDW culture—people grew with him as it became a $4 billion
enterprise. However, when Krasny was ready to step aside, he
knew he needed a different kind of leadership to nurture a more
mature organization through slower markets. He hired a chairman
and CEO from the outside. The new boss, John Edwardson, brought
in other new senior executives to deepen and diversify the executive
team, all the while hiring carefully for fit.
When Dick Vermeil took over the St. Louis Rams in 1997, he
knew he didn’t have enough good talent. “Only nine players from
the 1997 team I inherited were good enough to play on my 2000
Super Bowl Champions.”24 When Jim Haslett, another driver, became
coach of the New Orleans Saints, he also did a major makeover,
but he did it faster.
Haslett and general manager Randy Mueller took over the Saints
in 2000 following a 3–13 season in 1999 under Mike Ditka, who had
lost his passion for coaching. The Saints had only five winning seasons
in 34 years, but the Ditka years were especially painful because
of his larger-than-life reputation and the high expectations that accompanied
him to New Orleans.
Haslett and Mueller set out to change the entire chemistry of the
team. They kept its strength—many of the offensive and defensive
linemen—but picked up 31 new players through trades, free agent
signings, and the draft, despite not having a first or third round
draft pick. Mueller said, “We didn’t want people who were hindered
by the past failures of the Saints.”25
The team was plagued by injuries all season. It lost three starters
in its first preseason game alone. During the year, the Saints also
66 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
lost their starting quarterback, running back, and other key players.
Through it all, Haslett kept them together. He took an organized but
highly competitive approach to coaching. When a player went down,
Haslett just turned to the next one in line and told him to step it up.
Mueller thinks Haslett is one of a kind, “He just has an innate ability
of being able to kick the players in the butt and have them hugging
him five minutes later and playing their tails off for him.”26
The results were miraculous. The Saints went 11–5, won the
NFC Western Division title, and knocked off the Rams in the first
round of the playoffs. They also discovered a quarterback for the future
in Aaron Brooks. No one had heard of Brooks until he took
over with six games left in the season and led the team into the
playoffs. For his success, Haslett won coach of the year honors.
But Haslett, like a lot of drivers, had trouble sustaining his success.
In 2001, he “lost” his team and it collapsed during the last
stretch of the season. The Saints seemed to tune Haslett out after he
came down hard on one player with discipline problems but let another
one off easy. There were other locker room jealousies too. The
team stopped playing very hard and missed the playoffs, after being
in the running for the early part of the year. After the season, Mueller
and Haslett were at it again, making big changes in the roster and
coaching staff, adjusting the chemistry and talent levels. Ironically,
Mueller made so many changes so fast, the team owner fired him
for not keeping him informed of all the details.27
Brian Billick, another driver, took the opposite route. Billick was
the highly successful offensive coordinator of the Minnesota
Vikings when he was hired to lead the Baltimore Ravens in 1999.
His 1998 Vikings offense set a record for points scored. Many people
regard Billick as something of an offensive genius and a new age
thinker. Some others think of him as an egomaniac, a charge to
which Billick has pleaded guilty. Previously, he helped Bill Walsh
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 67
write a book on offense. Billick loves to use the computer to analyze
offenses and create new plays. He talks in computer-speak—so much
so that his players nicknamed him “Stat Boy.” Former Vikings receiver
Cris Carter, who played for Billick, said, “I’m kind of a computer
guy myself, so a lot of times I understand what he’s saying. I
speak Billick on occasion.”28
However, the Ravens team Billick inherited had a tremendous
defense and a woeful offense. Rather than a wholesale change of the
players on the team, Billick built on what he had. He tried to improve
the offense, going through a string of quarterbacks and drafting
a running back number one after the 1999 season, but this didn’t
help much. Mostly, he added to the defense that had been constructed
by his terrific defensive coordinator, Marvin Lewis.
The results were outstanding. Despite going five games in October
without scoring a touchdown, the Ravens went 15–4 and then
won the Super Bowl by shutting down other teams, kicking field
goals, and scoring on turnovers. The defense set a record for fewest
points allowed in a season, while the offense evolved into a unit
that scored just enough points to win while mostly trying to avoid
mistakes. “As long as we win, I’ll take it,” Billick said. “They’ve
pulled me over to the dark side.”29
In 2001, Billick’s Ravens stumbled. They made the playoffs but
didn’t get very far. Injuries and a bad decision to change quarterbacks
by Billick doomed them. Though the team still had a fearsome
defense, other teams figured out how to adjust and score on
the Ravens, and they encountered the usual problems repeating as
champions in the NFL.
They took different approaches, but both Billick and Haslett defined
what needed to be done and did it. They weren’t afraid to
change. Once they identified their strengths, they set their plans
accordingly and stuck with them, even when things weren’t going
68 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
well. The Saints’ injuries and the Ravens’ total inability to score
touchdowns didn’t stop them. They just kept going, playing to their
strengths. No twisting in the wind or pressing the panic button for
these two often-engaging drivers.
The lessons for you are clear. First, evaluate what you’ve got. If
it isn’t good enough to win, get rid of it. Know what you need and
go get it. Second, if your talent is strong, but it doesn’t fit your preferred
approach, be flexible. Change your ways. Talent is way too
valuable to waste because you’re stubborn.
The ranks of ex-coaches are full of people who believed in their
“system” but didn’t have the people who could execute it. His critics
in Boston said one of the reasons Rick Pitino failed with the
Celtics was because his coaching style that worked so well in college
didn’t graduate to the pro game. More skilled professional
players easily beat the full-court pressure, up-tempo transition, and
three-point shooting style of basketball that’s his trademark. Pitino
wouldn’t change, so he went back to coaching college basketball.30
TALENT + TOUGHNESS + TEAMWORK
= VICTORY
Winning takes talent and mental toughness. Vermeil, Haslett,
and Billick all brought a mental toughness to their teams that rubbed
off on the players and helped them win. Vermeil spent the first two
years with the Rams driving the players as hard as he could—extra
practices, grueling drills, and endless film sessions—until he could
establish the toughness he wanted in his players and see who could
handle it. Then he backed off some, knowing that you can’t start out
easy and get tougher, but you can start out tough and get easier. His players
asked for and appreciated it.
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 69
This is a vital lesson for drivers, who need to know when to
ease up, and builders, who need to know when to crack down, so
they can become more engaging and successful. Of course, learning
how and when to change your style is key. If you don’t do it right,
it can be your undoing. This is what happened to Haslett, a newer
head coach.
Mental toughness means you expect to win, believing you’re better,
stronger, and more resilient than your competitor. You know in
your heart you’ll find a way to win no matter the obstacles. Communicate
this attitude to your team.
Billick likes to talk tough to motivate his players. Before taking
his team into archrival Tennessee for a playoff game, he said,
“When you go into the lion’s den, you don’t tippy-toe in. You carry
a spear. You go in screaming like a banshee and say, ‘Where is the
son of a [gun]?’ If you go in any other way, you’re going to lose.”31
You may not put it in these terms, but you have to instill an expectation
of victory in people. People who think they’re going to lose,
probably will.
Arelated aspect of mental toughness is putting away your opponent—
closing the deal. Michael Jordan was the greatest “closer” in the history
of basketball. He wanted the ball in the last minutes so he
could take the last shots. He expected to come out on top and used
everything at his disposal to do so.
That’s another crucial lesson for leaders. You’ve got to have a
closer—someone you can turn to when the game or the deal is on
the line. You need your own Michael Jordan, an employee whose
mental attitude is so tough and his performance is so outstanding
that team members know he or she won’t let them lose. This might
be a project leader who always brings key initiatives in on time and
within budget, a department manager who always posts outstanding
results, a nurse who sets the tone in the ward and keeps things
70 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
cool under pressure, or a salesperson who can get the big account.
It’s your “go to” person. Acloser helps you instill toughness in your
team. He or she is a big part of the talent you need.
One of the quickest ways to build toughness in sports and business
is to form an “us against the world” mentality. Coaches do this
all the time—both drivers and builders. Dan Hampton, the hall of
fame defensive tackle of the 1985 Super Bowl Chicago Bears, called
it “sport’s oldest motivational tool.”32 No doubt Mike Ditka used it
all the time. Billy Martin, who managed several championship baseball
teams, relied on it wherever he went. Billick said he used it during
the Ravens’ 2000 championship run. He described it as “Going
against the odds. You have to take that mentality . . . it’s us against
the world, even if it’s fabricated a little bit.”33 Jackson used it in
Chicago, though over time the enemy went from being the Detroit
Pistons to the New York Knicks to the Bulls’ front office. That’s
when his reign ended.
There are two weaknesses with this approach that show up
much bigger in business than in sports. First, this is a short-term
way of doing things. It may last a season, but it won’t carry you for
the long run. It’s basically a “chip on the shoulder” attitude, born of
anger. After a while, particularly after some success, it’s hard to
maintain. Red Auerbach, former general manager and coach of the
Boston Celtics who won many times, said the hardest thing to do is
to win the second time. The players lose the hunger and they tune
out the forced anger. Billick found this out when the Ravens stumbled
the year after winning the Super Bowl. Maybe it’s why Billy
Martin kept changing teams. Business is all about long-run success,
so avoid this approach.
Second, though this is an easy way to build your team, it makes
it much harder to integrate your team with other teams in your company.
This leads to internal competition and destroys larger organ-
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 71
izations where processes have to flow across departments. If you
start with this approach, how do you change your message so your
team will cooperate with other groups whom you taught it to dislike?
One company I worked with had so much internal competition
it had to develop an evaluation criterion for its leaders that said
they could only speak well of other departments.
The right approach for the long term is to set your goal, establish a
framework of roles and responsibilities that complement each other, communicate
this structure clearly, and then address individual motivations.
Michael Jordan put it in these terms, “Talent wins games, but teamwork
and intelligence wins championships.”34
Joe Torre’s Yankees took this path. Yes, the team was blessed
with fabulous players, but not a single Yankee won the most valuable
player or Cy Young award in the team’s 1996, 1998, 1999, or
2000 title seasons. Instead, the team got contributions from everyone
on its roster, including players who were unknown outside of
New York, like Scott Brosius and Luis Sojo. Even star players put
the team goal of winning the World Series ahead of their own glory
and played whatever roles were asked of them. In particular, they
played some of the best team defense anyone had seen in baseball.
They knew their rewards would come with victory.
Along the way, Torre built an incredibly mentally tough team.
This showed itself in the 2001 playoffs and World Series. Down 2–0
in a five game series to the hottest team in baseball, the Oakland
A’s, Torre donned his “It ain’t over till it’s over” hat he got from
Yogi Berra and focused the Yanks on winning one game at a time.
They did. They beat Oakland three straight times, including twice
in Oakland, to win the series.35
Nobody needed toughness, teamwork, and intelligence more
than the Portland Trail Blazers in the 2000 NBAWestern Conference
finals. When they played the Lakers in game seven, the team that lost
72 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
would be done for the season. The Lakers had Kobe and Shaq, both
closers in their own ways, and Phil Jackson’s inside-out triangle offensive
system. The Blazers were a team full of great players, all playing
relatively equal roles. As good as they were, no one on the Blazers
really was used to carrying a team, of closing things in the last few
minutes, and they lacked a coherent way to play together. Their bestknown
player, Scottie Pippen, was voted one of the NBA’s top 50
players of all time, but he made his reputation as Jordan’s sidekick.
Portland built a huge second half lead and started the fourth
quarter ahead by 16 points. Then the Lakers turned up the pressure
and came after them. Nobody on Portland appeared to want the ball.
They kept passing up shots, waiting for their teammates to shoot.
Meanwhile Kobe and Shaq, with their supporting cast, stepped forward
and led a huge rally to win by five points and eliminate the
Blazers. It was the most dramatic comeback in NBA playoff history
and a great example of talent, toughness, and teamwork.
I ended the first two chapters with questions to help you discover
more about your leadership style and your employees. For
the rest of the book, I’ll give you some tips on how to become a
more engaging leader based on the topics in each chapter.
T H E H U D D L E
If you’re a builder:
• Recognize the strengths of your organization and spend your
time building on them. Address your weaknesses quickly if
they’re crippling your core operations. In particular, focus on
your value proposition and what kinds of people you should
hire to help you meet it.
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 73
• Hire people you like, and people who think like you about
your business. But remember to hire people with diverse
characteristics—don’t hire only other builders.
• Select people who not only have the technical skills for the job,
but also fit into your organization. Don’t give too much latitude
to people who don’t fit. When in doubt, throw them out.
• Don’t think you can change people. Be quicker to let go the
ones who don’t fit. You can more easily bring in new people
that fit than reform the current ones that don’t.
• Communicate more toughness and raise your standards, particularly
in the face of business challenges.
If you’re a driver:
• Recognize the strengths of your organization and spend your
time building on them. Don’t be stubborn about fixing weaknesses
unless they’re crippling. In particular, focus on your
value proposition and what kinds of people you should hire
to help you meet it.
• Hire people you like, and people who think like you about
your business. But remember to hire people with diverse
characteristics—don’t hire only other drivers.
• Select people who not only have the technical skills for the
job, but also fit into your organization. Be sure to look at their
values and behaviors—how they get results—not only at
their ability to deliver results.
• Recognize when you have to change your approach to match
your people. Don’t be too quick to judge or get rid of team
74 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
members. Develop some peer leaders to help you bring people
together.
• Communicate high standards and mental toughness but
know when to back off and relax a little.
3 / Talent: Get What You Need 75
76 E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
4
77
C H A P T E R F O U R
TALENT
Develop and Diversify
“There’s no I in team, but there is in win.”
—Michael Jordan1
THE RETURN OF THE INDIVIDUAL
Former baseball manager Billy Martin said he had one set of
rules, but he applied them 25 different ways. This was his way of
recognizing and respecting each player as an individual. Billy understood
this because he was an eccentric individual himself. Billy
Martin was ahead of his time.
When I did MBA recruiting at Hewitt Associates, the audience
always started the question-and-answer part of the meeting with
the same two questions: What are you going to do to develop me?
and What do you do about work-life balance? Development and balance
are on people’s minds today—not just on the minds of MBA students.
National surveys tell us these two concerns are foremost for
all employees.
Rather than answer myself, I asked each individual on our recruiting
team to talk about his or her own situation. This was much
more powerful than reciting our policies or rattling off facts and figures.
The audience could hear how others felt about how they were
developing at the firm and understand that each individual was
free to work out his or her own accommodations within the needs
of our business.
Then, typically, I would get a third question: “How do you
show that you value diversity?” This was something we were trying
to improve as a management team, so I took this issue myself.
Hewitt did a good job on development and balance, but we fell
short on diversity. Our hearts were in the right place, but we had
trouble implementing plans and needed to get much better. But we
didn’t work hard at any of these things to be nice. We did them to
get and keep the talent that was the life source of our company.
These issues engage people. To become an engaging leader, you have to
pay attention to development, balance, and diversity.
When people ask you about these things, they’re really questioning
whether and how you’re going to help them build their
skills and live their lives. They want you to do this in ways that
show you’ll recognize, reward, and respect them as individuals. In
essence, they are asking, “Are you going to value and help me grow
as a unique individual, or do you want me to be like everyone
else?” If you want them to be like everyone else, you won’t attract
much talent when skilled people are in short supply.
Some leaders, both drivers and builders, preach teamwork
above everything else, but it’s hitting the right blend between teamwork
and individualism that counts now. Increasingly, this favors
the individual. Talent becomes more mobile every year, and teams
aren’t free agents; individuals are.
Brian Billick’s players felt he let them be themselves on the road
to the Super Bowl. Then Ravens’ defensive end Rob Burnett said,
“He doesn’t want a team made from cookie-cutters, he wants us all
78 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
to be individuals.”2 This led to a lot of barking and bragging on the
way to winning the big game. The media criticized Billick and the
team for it, but they didn’t care. Popularity with sportswriters wasn’t
going to help them win.
Providing strong development opportunities enables you to get
and keep talent while you’re building the workforce skills you need.
Ensuring people can have balanced lives will help you get the most
out of people because they’ll appreciate what you’re doing for them.
They’ll stay for the long run. Valuing diversity means you’ll get the
broadest array of talent possible and be better able to serve a wide
range of customers. Addressing all three issues—development, balance,
and diversity—with total zeal will help you build your dynasty.
BUILD A DYNASTY
You create a dynasty by building leadership and talent year after year
to keep winning. Becoming a dynasty should be your long-term goal.
There have been a few dynasties in pro sports—the Montreal Canadiens,
Celtics, Lakers, Bulls, Green Bay Packers, Dallas Cowboys,
Pittsburgh Steelers, 49ers, and the greatest dynasty of all, the Yankees.
It’s become much harder to win consistently in recent years
with free agency. That’s why the Yankees’ record over the last several
years is so remarkable.
Business dynasties have had it easier until recently. When loyalty
reigned and there were more people than jobs, people stayed
with their companies. Continuity of talented people could contribute
to keeping you on top because those people knew how to
get things done in your company and how to serve your customers.
You also could grow your leaders from within, and that encouraged
people about their own opportunities.
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 79
That has changed. Even the best companies now turn over the
equivalent of their entire workforces every five or six years. CEO
turnover among the largest U.S. companies runs about 20 to 25 percent
per year, with about 15 percent of the new leaders coming from
outside the company.3
Yet the formula for building dynasties is pretty clear for both
sports and business. Start by creating a strong foundation of talent from
within. In business, this occurs through good selection and development.
In sports, it’s the same, selecting through good drafting and
developing through the farm system and other ways. Grow these
people and evaluate which ones are the keepers. Get rid of the rest,
then fill in your gaps with free agents. That’s how the Yankees, Braves,
Packers, Lakers, and other teams that win year after year do it.
Hockey is full of free agents who jump teams every year, but the
teams closest to dynasties now are the Colorado Avalanche and the
New Jersey Devils. They take pride in homegrown talent, with a
few key free agents added as needed. From 1995 to 2002, Colorado
won eight straight division titles and two Stanley Cups. The Devils
won four division titles and two Cups. They played each other for
the 2001 Stanley Cup, with Colorado winning. The Avs had 11 draft
picks on the 2001 championship team that beat the Devils, who
played with nine draft picks. In the 2002 playoffs, they each lost to
a team that made it to the finals, including the champion Red
Wings.
Lou Lamoriello, the Devils’ general manager, says the key to
success is developing a philosophy for drafting talent. His view of
selecting young players starts with the heart. “There’s such a thing
as a Devils’ player. He can be of any style, but he has to have something
here [in his heart] that we can’t teach. The core of the players
and veterans will not accept anything other than the best out of each
other.”4 Then the Devils trade as needed to bring in new players.
80 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
The other two strategies—only grow from within or buy all
your talent—aren’t viable for most companies, though a few very
special places, like Southwest Airlines and Harley Davidson, appear
to grow almost everybody. You probably can’t grow fast
enough if you only make all your own talent, nor can you compete
continually with organizations that are able to bring in key free
agents. Some of your young talent just won’t develop or stay with
you. Eventually, you’ll have a skill gap you can’t fill from inside and
another company will pass you by. The more highly skilled jobs you
have, the truer this is.
On the other hand, if you continually go to the outside for most
of your talent, you rarely get the chemistry, trust, and communication
you need. I once consulted to an oil company that was unusual
in the industry because it was made up largely of executives from
the outside. One vice president said to me, “We’ve got great people,
but we’ve got no culture.” This prevented them from sharing knowledge
because there wasn’t enough commonality among the people,
their values, and the ways they were used to doing business.
As Seattle pitcher Norm Charlton said, “The one thing about
signing free agents is you never know what you’re going to get, attitudewise.”
5 When a majority of key people are outsiders, they
may look out for themselves more than for your goals. Enron had a
huge number of outsiders. We’ve seen this in recent years with
teams like the Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Dodgers, and Texas
Rangers. They spend a fortune but keep turning over players and
rarely win. Wholesale changes only work when there’s a disaster.
The crucial skill that makes or breaks your opportunity to create a dynasty
is your ability to evaluate talent. You must know whom to select
and develop and whom to avoid or let go. Evaluation of people is
the toughest thing a leader does; it’s the hardest skill to master. It’s
particularly difficult when you have good relationships with your
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 81
people. Still, engaging leaders have to do it. This is the same philosophy
Jack Welch used at General Electric where he insisted on
rigorous performance evaluation, including generously rewarding
the top 20 percent of performers and firing the bottom 10 percent
every year.
Dick Vermeil says honesty is the key to good evaluation, “If you’re
always honest with them [the players], and you have the right communications
system going, they understand because you’ve never
misled them. They always know the bottom line is the bottom line.”6
You also have to be honest with yourself. Lamoriello says you
have to admit your mistakes in selection and do it quickly. You can’t
wait several years to see if someone will make it. “When we make
a mistake, we hold our hand up. The bottom line is to get the best
players out there to play. If they’re not, move on. As soon as you
know they’re not, get rid of them before somebody else finds out
they’re not.”7
Drivers and builders bring different strengths to these issues.
Builders are oriented toward developing people for long-term success,
which is a characteristic of a dynasty. In fact, I think builders
often follow the old Chinese proverb for dynasty creation.
If you want 1 year of prosperity, grow grain.
If you want 10 years of prosperity, grow trees.
If you want 100 years of prosperity, grow people.
Drivers will make a tough call on talent and performance
sooner, which is necessary to weed out poor performers. They’ll
turn people over faster. This means they often hire more experienced
people. GE and PepsiCo, companies built on a hard-driving
model, traditionally hire and fire more senior people than many
other companies.
82 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Still, to build a dynasty that engages people for sustained success,
you need to both develop and evaluate.
THE DEVELOPMENT MANDATE
If you’re going to build a dynasty, you have no choice but to start by
growing as much talent as you can. That’s your mandate for development.
Today, more than ever, your highly skilled employees demand
it. In fact, if you don’t focus on the individual development
needs of your high-flying young talents, you shouldn’t even bother
to recruit them. They’ll leave in a few years.
In a recent survey of high-potential gen X managers and executives
at global companies, a majority of people said they had no developmental
contracts or plans. Almost half said their companies
invested little or nothing in their personal development. As a result,
40 percent said they planned on leaving within two years.8 Those
companies are wasting that talent.
That’s another thing I found when I helped collect data for Fortune’s
100 best places to work list. Great employers offered more
hours of training to their employees every year. They offered more
approaches to growing people so development plans could be as
unique as the people pursuing them. They also put a heavy emphasis
on promotion from within. These companies retained their
talent much better than others who didn’t emphasize development
as heavily.
Again, the Super Bowl champion Ravens prove the point. Nine
of the 11 players they’ve drafted in the first two rounds since 1995
were starters. It’s only when you need to do a complete makeover,
like the New Orleans Saints, that you should put free agents and
newcomers above development.
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 83
What happens if you don’t develop people? You don’t win.
Four of the worst teams in baseball in 2002 were the Milwaukee
Brewers, Chicago Cubs, Tampa Bay Devil Rays and Baltimore Orioles.
None of these teams had all-star players on their rosters whom
they drafted and developed. Meanwhile, five of the Yankees’ six allstars
were homegrown talents.
You also need to know whom to develop. While great employers
offer a large menu of learning opportunities to everyone, smart
leaders pick out their best and brightest to help them grow into future
leaders. They determine who should receive special and accelerated
opportunities. They know everyone can be taught leadership
but not everyone can learn it. Focus significant time and attention
on those with the most potential. Above all, let them know you’re
doing it. This will increase their motivation to stay. People want to
feel special.
A really interesting story is happening in basketball with the
Los Angeles Clippers, of all teams. The Clippers may be the most
pathetic franchise in the history of the NBA. In 18 seasons in Los
Angeles, the team has had one winning record. It never seemed to
have a plan, careening from building with youth to chasing free
agents or trading for veterans of questionable talent. The only constant
in the team’s strategy was doing things cheaply. Because it always
lost, it always had high draft choices. But with the lack of
direction, terrible records, constant turnover of coaches, and an
owner who wouldn’t pay to keep them, young stars couldn’t wait
to get away as soon as they could.
Then, after the 1999–2000 season, buoyed by a new arena, the
team made an all-out commitment to building with youth. It made
deals to acquire two additional first round draft choices to add to
the one it already had. One of the deals also brought a 1999 first
rounder from another team. This enabled it to add four great young
84 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
players to some skilled, high draft choices from the prior years. All
of a sudden, the Clippers had some great young talent.
Just as important as acquiring the talent was the selection of
players and the team’s commitment to their development. Three of
the newcomers—Quentin Richardson, Corey Maggette and Darius
Miles—were high school friends from Illinois. These three knew
they could rely on each other to make the transition to pro basketball.
They each brought family members out to live with them to be
their support systems.9 The teammates and their families socialized
together to keep from being homesick. The team also brought in a
new coach, Alvin Gentry, who had a reputation as a teacher and a
builder, and he supplemented his staff with other coaches who
could teach. Finally, the team sprinkled in a few veterans to help
show the younger players how to manage in the NBA.
The first year results were great. The Clippers won more games
midway through the 2000–2001 season than they had in any of their
three previous seasons. Attendance at games was way up, and they
were finally able to beat their crosstown rivals, the Lakers, once in
a while.
With the core in place, the Clippers switched to phase two: trading
for some young, but more experienced players. Their big deal before
the 2001–2002 season was to get Elton Brand, a two-year veteran with
real leadership abilities. They acquired Brand from the Bulls for a
draft pick, instead of using the pick to choose another high school
player or someone with only a year of college. Brand is a role model
of steadiness and strong work ethic, as well as a talented player who
made the all-star team. The Clippers still had a losing record in 2001–
2002, but won more games than it had in years, almost making the
playoffs. Of course, the real payoff will come only if the Clippers
keep these players together for the long term. If the team is willing
to spend the money to do that, it could end its long-running misery.
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 85
Pick the right people and have plans and support mechanisms
in place to develop them. Tailor development strategies and tactics
to each individual. Identify what people need to learn to perform at
higher levels, put them in positions where they can succeed if they
stretch, and then push them hard to develop them. Kraft Foods calls
this “leaning into people.” It’s part of their developmental philosophy,
and it has created more talent for itself and more CEOs for
other companies than any other organization I can think of, with the
possible exception of GE, which is several times larger. When you
develop people and reward their successes the right ways, you can
lean into them all the way to the top.
CLOSE YOUR GAPS
With a solid core of skilled talent, you can fill in your talent gaps with
free agents. Before you do this, be certain that there are no internal
candidates. Then go outside for what you need.
With this kind of hiring, it’s critical to do two things. First, make
sure the person fits your hiring profile, especially matching your
values and beliefs. This likely will take a long interviewing process,
much more exhaustive than you might be used to doing. Next, communicate
to your existing staff why it is important to go outside.
Your people will want to know this isn’t a change from your primary
emphasis on growing from within and there still will be opportunities
available for them. When CDW went outside for its new
leader, it had to tell people why—in this case the heir apparents
weren’t quite ready—and reaffirm its belief in developing from
within.
In business, you have to buy what you don’t have, but in sports
you can fill in your gaps with free agents or trades. Developing a
86 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
core of good young talent is even more valuable because it saves
you money. This brings us back to evaluating talent. Brian Sabean
knows this. “The real key is to decide the right guys to trade. You
want to hold on to the golden nuggets.”10
The Yankees are the masters at this. The widespread perception
is they built their championship teams by buying free agents. In reality,
the core of the talent is homegrown—Bernie Williams, Derek
Jeter, Andy Pettite, Romero Mendoza, Mariano Rivera, and Jorge
Posada—or acquired in trades for other players, like Roger Clemons,
Chuck Knoblauch, and Paul O’Neill. In mid-summer 2000, the Yankees
traded prospects to acquire David Justice, Denny Neagle, and
Glenallen Hill for the stretch run. In 2001 and 2002, they traded
prospects for pitchers.
One reason people believe the Yankees rely so much on free
agents is that most of the prospects they trade don’t develop. In
essence, it seems like they get something for nothing. They often do,
but it’s not from just buying talent. More importantly, they get rid
of people who aren’t going to be very good before the other teams
find out—just what Lamoriello said. New York lets very few good
players get away; Jay Buhner of Seattle and Eric Milton and Christian
Guzman of Minnesota come to mind as the only players who
left the Yankees through trades and became stars. Ted Lilly may
be another.
More often you have to give talent to get talent. The St. Louis
Cardinals’ trade of a top prospect led to success in their 2000 season
and beyond. They knew they had a very good team, but identified
a gap in outfield defense and hitting. The team traded away a great
infield prospect, Adam Kennedy, and a veteran pitcher to get Jim
Edmonds from the Anaheim Angels. Kennedy became a very special
player for the Angels, and Edmonds was terrific for St. Louis in
2000. He was the Cards’ most valuable player, hitting .295 with 42
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 87
home runs and 108 runs batted in, and playing superb centerfield.
He even hit the home run that beat Atlanta in the first round of the
NL playoffs. He had great seasons in 2001 and 2002 also. The Cardinals’
surplus of young talent made this possible.
Here’s where business has an advantage over sports. You don’t
have to give up talent to get more. Just keep adding to what you have.
In sports, it’s possible to have too many players fighting for the same
position. But engaging business leaders know they can never have
enough talent because expanding talent pools will expand their
companies. Meanwhile, all the other rules of building dynasties are
the same. Select the right people for the right reasons, evaluate your
talent honestly, invest in developing people, and fill in your gaps
with experienced hires that fit. This is your recipe for success.
DIFFERENT STROKES
As an engaging leader, you face a paradox. People are more
self-reliant these days and more skeptical of organizations, withholding
loyalty because they don’t believe it will be returned. At the
same time, you need more from your people, and they need more
from you. You demand more hours and results. They need more resources
from you to help manage their lives, families, even their
pets. A recent survey of American workers reported that 88 percent
said the struggle to balance their work and personal lives was their
biggest issue.11 Because every person’s situation is different, you
can’t have a “one size fits all” answer. You have to tailor your responses
to each person.
That’s why issues about balance and diversity are merging. A
few smart companies have recognized this, but most haven’t, though
they must. Balance and diversity are both about respecting individuals.
88 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Moreover, taking an integrated view of balance and diversity
pays off in retaining talent. For example, research done by Professor
George Dreher of Indiana University shows that companies that
offer more work-life benefits are better able to keep and grow female
middle managers and senior executives. These family-friendly
employers create programs and policies that enable women to juggle
their careers and roles as mothers.12
In general, this is one place where builders have an advantage
over drivers. Their greater tolerance for individual differences
makes them naturally more comfortable with these issues. However,
drivers can stand out as versatile and engaging leaders by embracing
balance and diversity. They can bring their tremendous
energy to these areas and really make a difference for their people.
Regardless of style, your challenge is to celebrate all your people for the
different gifts they bring—no matter where they came from or how they
got there—and help them use their gifts to advance your goals. This is a
huge test, but it’s how you engage people for high performance. It
took Larry Brown years, yet he finally passed it.
Brown, coach of the Philadelphia 76ers, and his star, Allen Iverson,
battled for years because of their differences. Brown’s a highly
driven member of the Ike generation—placing team and duty first.
Iverson is a poster child for gen X in the NBA. Self and personal
experience come first. Their feud even led to threats of trading Iverson,
a ridiculous idea because the team was built around him.
According to Brown, “I’ve always felt that in his own way,
Allen was trying to win games. My issues have been off the court.”
For his part, Iverson pointed out, “When I first came into the
league, everybody saw the talent God gave me and wanted to make
me a guy who was 35 years old. Nobody ever gave me room for
mistakes.”13
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 89
Iverson played brilliantly in 2000–2001, leading the Sixers to the
NBA finals and winning the MVP award, amazing for one of the
shortest players in the league. But he and Brown fought for most of
the first half of the season. Brown even took a short break away
from the team due to the stress. Iverson made headlines with his
troubles. He released a rap album with lyrics offensive to women
and gay people, swore at a fan in the stands, and showed up late for
practices early in the year. Finally, he and Brown reached a truce. It
occurred when Brown started listening to Iverson and gave him the
freedom and praise he needed, and Iverson told Brown he wanted
to have a strong relationship with him. As Brown said, “I still don’t
like his music or the way he dresses, but Allen has a lot of good in
him, and I’m finding it out every single day.”14
To engage a wide spectrum of people, you have to learn the
same lessons Larry Brown did. Focus on the performance that
comes from diverse people, not their differences. Create more opportunities
for understanding and valuing the unique qualities of
people different from you.
MORE DIVERSITY MEANS MORE TALENT
September 10, 2000, was something of a red-letter day for diversity
in sports.
• There were 14 NFL games. The starting quarterbacks in those
games included nine African-Americans, one Hispanic, and
one Jew.
• Ablack woman, Venus Williams, and a 20-year-old Russian
male, Marat Safin, won the U.S. Open in tennis.
90 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• Tiger Woods, a self-described “Caublinasian” (reflecting his
diverse ethnic background), defeated New Zealander Grant
Waite to win the Canadian Open.
• Sammy Sosa, from the Dominican Republic, hit his major
league leading 48th home run. Of course the Cubs lost to
Houston because the Astos’ Richard Hidalgo, from Venezuela,
hit two home runs.
• Randy Johnson, a six-foot-eight-inch left-handed pitcher with
hair hanging over his shoulders, struck out 14 batters to become
the 12th pitcher in history to reach 3,000 strikeouts.
• Two older (by football standards) white males, Al Del Greco
of the Tennessee Titans and Jason Hansen of the Detroit
Lions, kicked last-second field goals to win games.
You’ll find more talent and get better results when you look for it
among people with diverse backgrounds, interests, and appearances. The
broader you search, the more talent you’re likely to find. Once you
recognize this, you can learn to love the differences among people.
When people see this from you, they’ll feel engaged by it. They’ll
want to stay and perform for you.
Searching far and wide for talent and accepting differences is
happening with much greater frequency on the field in sports. The
NHL used to be about 95 percent Canadian and 5 percent American.
Now it’s 50 percent Canadian, 33 percent European, and 17
percent American. Without European talent, the league could not
have expanded throughout North America.
Foreign born and educated players have become the rage in
basketball too, a game invented in America. The 2002 rookie of the
year, Pau Gasol, is from Spain. The number one draft pick in 2002
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 91
was Yao Ming, a seven-foot-six-inch center from China, and two of
the other top seven picks were foreign born. Three Europeans play
extensive minutes for one of the best teams in the league, the Sacramento
Kings.
Even baseball, our national pastime, gets about 25 percent of its
players from outside the United States. Baseball’s sensation in 2001
was Ichiro Suzuki of the Seattle Mariners, the AL Rookie of the Year
and the first Japanese position player to star right away in major
league baseball. As my younger son said, “You know you’re big
when everyone knows you by your first name.” Everybody associated
with baseball learned who Ichiro is.
Ichiro was a seven-time batting champion in Japan who was
extensively scouted and courted by the M’s. The team had to pay
Ichiro’s Japanese team millions just to negotiate a contract with
him, even before he signed. But what an investment! In his first year
in the major leagues, he helped lead the M’s to the division title and
the record-tying 116-win season. He won the batting title, hitting
.350, and had 242 hits, the most in 71 years. He hit .600 in Seattle’s
playoff victory against Cleveland and played the best right field in
the American League, winning the gold glove. He had another allstar
season in 2002.
Talent is everywhere; you just have to take the risks to find it.
Kurt Warner, who quarterbacked the Rams to the Super Bowl championship,
played at a small college, bounced around the Arena
Football League and NFL Europe, and was making his living as a
grocery store clerk when he got a tryout with the Rams. After he
emerged as a starter and led them to victory, he signed a long-term
contract for more than $40 million.
The New York Giants made it to Super Bowl XXXV because
they took a risk on Kerry Collins. Collins was a number one choice
92 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
at the start of his career and had early success with the Carolina
Panthers, but in his third year he created a number of problems. He
drank heavily and made a racial joke that outraged his black teammates.
His coach released him the next year after he thought Collins
quit on the team.
Collins tried again for a short while with New Orleans, but he
was still drinking. Mike Ditka cut him, and Collins was lost. The
NFL ordered him to get treatment for alcoholism and it turned his
life around. The next season the Giants signed him to a contract.
Wisely, the team brought him along slowly, alternating him with another
quarterback while he put his life back together. He emerged
during the 2000 season to have one of the most productive seasons
of any QB in Giants’ history.
Even the last on-the-field taboo, the black quarterback, has been
broken, but only in recent years. After decades of converting talented
black college quarterbacks, like Tony Dungy and Marlin
Briscoe, to defensive backs and wide receivers, teams have learned
that black QBs win games. Until the late 1990s, only Doug Williams,
James Harris, and a few others were allowed to play the glamour
position. Warren Moon refused to play defense, so he had to go to
Canada and establish his reputation as a QB there first.
In fact, most of the nine black QBs who started on September 10,
2000 were drafted in 1998 or 1999. Only a few played in the league
before then. What caused the change?
The answer’s simple. Just like in business, competition in the
NFL is more intense. Coaches lose their jobs faster if they don’t win.
As a result, they’ve become color blind, choosing the best player instead
of letting skin color and ignorance get in the way. Frank
Gilliam, the now retired Vikings’ vice president of player personnel
said it best, “As the emphasis gets more on winning, guys start los-
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 93
ing all these biases they had about quarterbacks. Coaches want to
win, so they get whoever can win for them.”15 Five of the 12 teams
that made the NFL playoffs in 2000 started black QBs.
ON-THE-FIELD, OFF-THE-FIELD
There is a glaring contrast between the on-the-field search for
talent that now covers the world and the off-the-field talent hunt for
management positions that barely gets beyond white owners’ comfort
levels. Not only is it racist, it hinders performance. Limiting the
talent pool limits your opportunities for high performance. Maybe that
explains why there’s so much turnover among coaches and managers.
Maybe it also helps to explain why there’s so much turnover
among CEOs.
Among the major team sports, the NBA has done the best job of
promoting diversity. Of course, it has the highest concentration of
black players. At the start of the 2002–2003 season, 13 of the 29
teams had black coaches and several African-Americans worked as
executives in the front offices.
Baseball talks a good game about increasing diversity, including
starting an equal opportunity committee of owners, but has shown
only a little progress. Seven minority managers started the 2002 season—
six blacks and one Hispanic. Three more Hispanic managers
were hired during the season. This is the most ever, but not nearly
enough, given the makeup of the players. And at the end of the season,
it appeared that things were slipping back. A few of the minorities
were fired and according to Felipe Alou, who had managed the
Expos successfully during the 1990s, opportunities were fading. Alou
said, “That’s the new trend, to have white and young managers.
Blacks and Latinos won’t have many opportunities from now on.”16
94 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Ironically, Alou was hired to manage the Giants shortly after
making the statement. Still, he was correct. Ten new managers were
hired after the 2002 season. Only Alou and Dusty Baker, who
changed teams, were people of color.
Among the 30 teams, only the White Sox and the Expos had minority
general managers in 2002. These were only the third and
fourth in major league history. The Sox and Expos also are the first
and only teams with minority general managers and field managers
at the same time. At the start of 2002, only one woman was president
of a baseball team, Wendy Selig-Prieb of the Brewers, and she got her
job the old-fashioned way. Her dad, Bud, gave it to her when he became
full-time commissioner. At the end of another disastrous Brewers
season in 2002, she kicked herself upstairs to be chairman and
gave the presidency to the first minority team president in baseball.
Most embarrassing is pro football. In 2002, approximately 70
percent of the players were black. Yet among the 32 teams, only two
blacks were head coaches, Herman Edwards and Tony Dungy. October
9, 2000, when Dennis Green’s Vikings played Dungy’s Bucs,
was the first time in league history when the opposing coaches and
quarterbacks both were black. There is one black person running a
team’s front office, Ozzie Newsome of the Ravens.
At the end of the 2000 season, nine head coaching jobs were
open. The men who had been acting as interim coaches filled two
of the jobs. There were three black co-coordinators, the step below
head coach, who were outstanding candidates for the seven other
jobs. But only one, Herman Edwards, was hired. Several Buffalo
Bills players endorsed defensive co-coordinator Ted Cottrell for
head coach, but he was passed over for a white assistant from another
team. Marvin Lewis built the defense that won the Super
Bowl, but he didn’t get a head coaching job either. In fact, he only
got one preliminary interview, also with Buffalo.
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 95
After the last vacancy was filled, the press offered its usual outcries
and the league gave its customary, lame excuses. Lewis, like
Dungy years before him, was accused of not interviewing well. But
the opinions of Green and Dungy were clear—race was the issue.
Speaking of Lewis, Dungy said, “You would have thought more
than one team out of nine would say that here’s a guy that should
at least be talked to. And you can only beg the question in your own
mind: If he were white, would it have been one out of nine? I don’t
think so.”17
I don’t think so either. If you’re going to engage people, you
have to engage everyone. In fact, in September 2002, attorney Johnnie
Cochran filed a report and threatened a lawsuit against the NFL
asserting bias in hiring. Cochran produced statistics showing that
black head coaches had been very successful when given the opportunity.
He alleged that black coaching candidates were being
held to a “higher standard” for getting jobs.18
The NFL said it was trying to do better, but actions always
speak louder than words. The NFL’s response was just like a recent
study of large businesses by executive search firm Korn Ferry.
Korn Ferry found that while 75 percent of a broad sample of corporate
executives believed their own organizations were effective in
achieving diversity, less than half of the minority professionals who
worked at these companies agreed.19 The employees wanted to see
real results.
The more diverse the talent pool, the more skills become available.
Research shows companies with a higher percentage of women
and minorities in leadership positions have better business results.
More diverse people lead to more diverse thought, and this means
greater innovation and more receptivity to a bigger group of customers.
What business wouldn’t benefit from that?
96 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
LIVES IN THE BALANCE
Sports careers don’t last that long, and they often involve a lot
of change—from team to team, position to position, player to assistant
coach or broadcaster, assistant coach or broadcaster to head
coach, and so on. Rarely does anyone stay with one team, play the
same position their whole career, and then retire. This is another
reason pro sports are a good metaphor for our economy. Employees
rarely come to you expecting, or even wanting, to stay their whole
careers. You may not want them to either.
The concept of working 30 years for the same company without
a break has faded away. Companies killed that, so people now want
to reinvent themselves and their careers at various times. At the
very least, they want to have periods where they work hard, then
take a break to do something else—spend more time with family,
travel, etc.—before resuming their previous pace. Careers aren’t linear
in time or direction anymore. They’re much more likely to be a series
of experiences and events.
To retain skilled people who look at their careers this way, enable
them to have a wide variety of experiences while working for
you. You can’t horde talent to try to keep it in one place doing one
thing. You need to let people try out new jobs and career paths, special
assignments, new locations, flex time, telecommuting, sabbaticals,
compressed work weeks, and other alternatives to traditional
careers if that’s what they want. This builds their loyalty because
they get the variety they want by staying with you.
You may think it’s just younger people who see their careers
this way, but it’s not. Ron Schuler was general manager of the White
Sox for ten years. At the end of the 2000 season, at age 52, he decided
to step down and return to scouting and consulting for the
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 97
team. Schuler had just remarried and wanted to cut back on his time
commitment and job stress to spend more time with his new wife.
Will Clark saw his career rejuvenate in 2000. In mid-season, the
first baseman was traded to the Cardinals to replace the injured
Mark McGwire. Clark exceeded all expectations, hitting .345 with
12 home runs and 45 RBIs. But after the season, Clark, 36, surprised
everyone by announcing he would retire. Clark said, “I can still hit,
I can still play, I can still field my position. The first part of my life
was based on being a baseball player. The second part of my life is
going to be based on being a daddy and a husband.”20
Lou Piniella is one of the very best managers in baseball. His
ten-year run as manager of the Seattle Mariners brought the team
back from mediocrity and financial crisis to become one of the
model franchises in the sport. Yet at age 59, after another winning
season, he left Seattle with a year on his contract to manage closer
to his home in Florida. Piniella explained, ‘’It’s just too far to be in
Seattle. It’s a burden on me, on my family. It’s just too far from
home.’’21
Golfers Jasper Parnevik, Phil Mickelson, Juli Inkster, and Bruce
Lietzke lead by example in this search for balance. Parnevik declined
to defend his Bob Hope Classic golf championship in 2001
because his wife was expecting their fourth child. No one could remember
a defending champ turning down a tournament for this
reason. The Parneviks had a baby boy on the Friday of the Classic.
Later that year, Phil Mickelson did much the same thing. He turned
down an opportunity to defend his PGA Tour Championship title
to stay at home with his brand new daughter. “I’d love to play,” he
said at the time. “It’s a very special tournament and having won last
year, it’s a tournament I’d love to defend. But right now, the time
I’m spending with my family is the most important thing to me,
and I wouldn’t trade it for anything.”22
98 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Juli Inkster was Tiger Woods long before Woods. She was the
first person to win three straight U.S. amateur titles, ten years before
Woods did it. She won two major tournaments in her first year
on the LPGA tour and has won seven majors overall. She is the only
female golfer of the modern era to win the career grand slam.
Yet according to Ty Votaw, LPGA Tour Commissioner, you can
divide Inkster’s career into three periods. “There’s Juli before kids,
Juli just after her kids were born, and Juli now.”23
Juli was a dominant player before kids. She won 15 titles in the
1980s. Her daughters were born in 1990 and 1994, and from 1990 to
1996 Inkster won only twice. She stopped practicing because she
had trouble balancing involved mothering with playing championship
golf. Inkster said, “I struggled with it. My mom was a stayat-
home mom.”
In 1996, Inkster decided to either play well again or give up
golf. She realized that she still could practice a few hours a day and
be a good mother. “I finally told myself, ‘The kids are loved. They’re
getting a lot of support.’ Once I came to terms with it, I started to
put more time into my golf.”
Inkster played well again in 1997 and 1998. In 1999 she broke
through winning two majors to complete the grand slam and became
the LPGA player of the year. She won the women’s U.S. Open again
in 2002. Inkster’s children and their nanny travel with her during
the summer, and she plays in fewer tournaments to have more time
with family. She takes time off during the winter to be at home and
coach her daughters’ school teams and turns down appearances that
require too much travel. She even carries drawings by her daughters
in her golf bag. Now she has struck the right balance and her
daughters appreciate that she is one of the best golfers in the world.
Bruce Lietzke carried this even further when he was on the
PGA tour. Lietzke began his pro career in 1982 and earned more
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 99
than $6 million before hitting the senior tour late in 2001. But from
1995 through 2001, he didn’t play in more than 16 events per year,
usually playing only nine or ten. Instead of playing, he spent his
time with his wife and children, taking family trips and coaching
the kids’ sports teams. He coached and caddied for his teenage son,
a good junior golfer, more than he played himself. He played much
more in 2002 on the senior tour as his son hit college age.
Lietzke also doesn’t spend time practicing. He thinks it just
screws up his game. Prior to a tournament, he plays a practice
round or two, just to learn the course and get loose. Lietzke prefers
to stay mentally fresh by not playing and relies on muscle memory
to keep his swing the same as it has been for years. His wife, Rosemarie,
loves their lifestyle and having her husband home rather
away playing and earning more money. “What would we spend it
on?” she asks.24
If your employees had Inkster’s and Lietzke’s resources, they
would opt for more balance too. Maybe they can’t afford to work
part-time or have a nanny so their children can travel with them for
work, but they would if they could. They can’t, so you need to help
them expand their options for their careers and find the balance
between work and home life if you want to engage them. Their
choices have to make sense for your business, but many leaders
go much further now than they thought they could, even a few
years ago.
One company that leads the way in helping balancing lives is
S.C. Johnson, makers of Johnson Wax, Pledge, Ziploc bags, and
other familiar household products. Johnson has shaped its culture
around the concept of balance, offering employees a wide range of
choices for how they work and support for their families. Johnson’s
programs include summer hours (Friday afternoons off), an onsite
childcare center and other parent support services, a concierge ser-
100 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
vice to help employees handle personal errands, and “no-meeting
Fridays” to help employees get more focused work done. These programs
pay for themselves because Johnson’s annual turnover, including
retirements, averages less than 7 percent. Most of the impetus
for Johnson’s programs comes from the employees themselves—the
company runs several highly efficient electronic opinion surveys at
any one time to find out what people need and want.25
Still, I know a lot of companies with good policies and programs
that have leaders who don’t believe in them. These leaders believe
“face time” is more important than flex time. They don’t balance
their own lives and send the message to others that they’re not hard
working or loyal enough if they do. Talented employees resent
working for people like this—they hate the loss of control over their
work lives.
The more flexible you are about how people do their jobs, the
more respect you show for them as individuals. Respect for the individual
is what engages and retains people today.
T H E H U D D L E
If you’re a builder:
• Create a development philosophy supported by a set of definable
processes and specific plans for each person. Hold
yourself accountable for implementing these plans and
measure the most important outcomes, like the number of
people you prepare for bigger jobs or the number of people
who get promoted. Work to increase your numbers.
• Make your calls on whom to develop sooner. Don’t wait for
people to emerge if they are taking too long. Also recognize
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 101
that not everyone can be developed to much larger responsibilities.
Be realistic about who gets developed for what.
• Cut your losses quickly when you see someone isn’t going to
make it.
• Regard diversity as a business issue, not as “nice to have” or
something that is socially desirable. Measure your progress
in diversity, looking at the most important outcomes.
• Insist on business reasons for establishing ways to support
work-life balance. “Good for business and good for people”
should be the justification for everything you do toward creating
more balance.
If you’re a driver:
• Understand the need to invest in development to achieve the
long-term results you want. Don’t immediately cut investments
in development when business slows.
• Create a development philosophy supported by a set of definable
processes and specific plans for each person. Hold
yourself accountable for implementing these plans and measure
the most important outcomes, like the number of people
you prepare for bigger jobs or the number of people who get
promoted. Work to increase your numbers.
• Focus more on the long-term potential of people. Take a little
more time to watch it emerge and to help it grow. Don’t be
afraid to give people a second chance.
• Appreciate that results are blind to color, gender, and demographics.
Reach out to a broader group of people who want
102 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
to pursue your business path regardless of where they started.
Bend a little to make them feel valued and celebrate their
differences.
• Create a business case and philosophy about work-life balance.
Don’t just give it “lip service”; apply it and live by it.
Make sure others know you think it’s important—particularly
your star employees.
4 / Talent: Develop and Diversify 103
104 E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
5
105
C H A P T E R F I V E
GOALS
Winning Is the Only Thing
“If you’re keeping score, win.”
—Red Auerbach, former Boston Celtics coach and general manager1
ENGAGING WHAT’S REAL
Every company creates a strategy for getting ahead and a business
model for enacting that strategy. Obviously, these are essential
and if you get your strategy or business approach wrong, you can
be in all sorts of trouble. The question for engaging leaders is how
much will either of these inspire your employees toward outstanding
performance.
You need to remember that for most employees, including some
people very high in your organization, your strategy and business
model are pretty abstract. These won’t matter much to them, unless
you can translate them into something real. People are far more
concerned with their day-to-day activities. To engage people, you
have to address them on a concrete level. Otherwise, you won’t get
through. They have too many other things on their minds.
Engaging people about what you want to achieve as a business
and how you want to do it—getting them excited about getting it
done—requires you to create three things: focus, BHAGs, and risk.
These will strike people as real and tangible if you do them right.
They can grab people, get them to pay attention, and turn up their
energy level for you. They will help your employees understand
clearly what you want and what they need to do to help you get
there.
FOCUS: AIM HIGH AND KEEP IT SIMPLE
The most engaging leaders and companies have a single-minded focus
on what they want to do to win—that’s all there is to it. Nothing else
matters and they don’t let things get in the way. Focus is a direction
that people really understand, remember, and follow every day.
Sometimes companies call it their mission; sometimes they call it
their vision. They might even call it something else. It doesn’t matter.
What’s essential is that the phrase describes in just a few words
how you’ll achieve greatness through what you’re selling or making,
who you’re selling it to, and what they’ll get from it. Employees
know they’ll win if they stay focused.
Coca-Cola wants to refresh people around the world—everywhere,
any time, every day—with its beverages. That sets a platform
for worldwide excellence in beverage taste and distribution,
along with local marketing built on the notion of enjoyment—quite
a lot to convey in just a few words. At Hewitt, we talked about
“helping companies and employees succeed together.” That meant
we tried to provide outstanding service and do things that increased
business results and made things better for people. Microsoft says
it’s about empowering people through great software—any time,
106 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
any place, and on any device. This is directing Softies to move beyond
the PC and develop software for all manners of devices and
the Internet.
The words or phrases companies use may be renewed every few
years, but the basic purpose and direction of a great company rarely
changes, despite new products and improved business models. The
best organizations, the ones that have enduring success, don’t really
change their focus—Microsoft’s always been about software even
when it only wrote it for PCs. In fact, frequent changes in purpose
or direction usually mean you don’t have one.
Brian Cashman, general manager of the Yankees, says that after
every season the management team sets as its focus winning next
year’s World Series. Then they evaluate the roster and make the
changes they need to do it. That’s the team they try to bring into
spring training. As the season progresses, they’ll make other changes
to keep advancing to their goal.2
What else could be so powerful and so simple? There’s nothing
ambiguous about it and nothing to cloud the Yankees’ vision. This
isn’t a new attitude. In 1955, legendary Yankees manager Casey
Stengel said, “That’s a lot of bunk about them five-year building
plans. Look at us. We build and win at the same time.”3
Compare that to other teams—like the Brewers and Pirates in
baseball, Cavaliers and Warriors in basketball, or Cardinals and
Bengals in football. Every year these teams tell their fans they’re rebuilding
to become competitive. Notice they rarely get there?
Now at this point you may be saying, “Sure the Yankees are
great, but it’s because they spend more money than anyone else.”
True they spend more, but spending it wisely is what counts. Smart
leadership, including a strong farm system and great trades, has been
the big factor in the Yankees’ success. Though the Yankees have
signed a big name free agent almost every year for the last several
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 107
years, they’ve spent most of their money to keep the players they’ve
developed.
Meanwhile, the Dodgers and Red Sox, who annually are among
the top five payrolls in baseball—some years spending nearly as
much as the Yankees—haven’t made the playoffs much recently. Conversely,
the Giants, Athletics, and White Sox made the 2000 baseball
playoffs with below-average payrolls. In 2001, the Astros and Athletics
(again) got there without being in the top half of the teams in
player salaries. The Athletics (for a third time) and the Twins did it
in 2002. The Giants and Angels played in the World Series in 2002
with the 10th and 15th biggest payrolls, respectively. In 2000, the
Washington Redskins had the highest payroll in National Football
League history and couldn’t make the playoffs. The Portland Trail
Blazers had the highest payroll in NBA history in 2000–2001, staggered
through the season, and were eliminated in the first round.
By itself, spending doesn’t guarantee anything. You have to
spend smartly. If you don’t, it’s easy to spend your way into a disaster.
If you aim high, you may pay high, but you don’t have to be
the money leader. The St. Louis Rams, Baltimore Ravens, and New
England Patriots won the last three Super Bowls without having the
highest payrolls.
Instead, engaging people to win requires you to develop a singleminded,
passionate focus on winning. Some might call this a culture
of winning. If you’re the Yankees, it’s referred to as your mystique.
Whatever you call it, it’s a belief system you instill in your people
that winning is what you’re about; it’s what matters. Help people
learn winning is your fundamental value.
To do this, try to distill the key points of your strategy or business
model into a few simple, concrete ideas that are easy to communicate
to employees. Better yet, do it in a few key words. If you can’t
do this, things may be too complicated for other crucial audiences—
108 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
like customers or shareholders—to understand as well. To help companies
with this, I usually ask clients, “What can customers get from
you that they can’t get anywhere else?” This is your competitive advantage.
Unfortunately, it is a surprisingly difficult question for business
leaders to answer. But if you can’t answer it, how are you going
to win in the marketplace? The answer becomes your rallying cry.
To be an engaging leader, talk about winning in these terms all
the time. Help people understand what winning in your world
means, what it looks like, what it feels like, and how you’ll know
when you get there. Talk about it in exciting, upbeat terms. Don’t
discuss losing. If you’re in a rough spot, acknowledge where you
are currently—that’s reality. Keep your attention and your people’s
attention straight ahead on winning. Use slogans, symbols, or signs,
if they mean something. Also let people know what’s in for them as
they win. Finally, refuse to accept anything less than ultimate victory,
although along the way take small wins and build them into
bigger ones. If some employees can’t understand that, help them
understand or get rid of them.
I know this sounds too simple and unsophisticated, like too
much sloganeering. But the most successful leaders I know work
this way. The others get too bogged down in complexity. You don’t
have the luxury of sports with its ready measures of wins and
losses, but you need to avoid the quicksand of trying to do and
measure too much. If you try to drag people into that trap, they
won’t follow you.
BHAGS: THE VALUE OF BIG GOALS
Once you’ve defined winning for your team, then cast it in terms
of how you’ll measure it and what level of success you demand.
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 109
This should be your big, hairy, audacious goal (BHAG) that will take
you to the top. Jim Collins described BHAGs in his book Built to
Last4 as the way visionary companies became and remained successful.
I think it’s a key way that engaging leaders “think group.”
Setting the big goal gives you something to inspire people with and
to execute against.
Winning starts with a BHAG: to be the biggest, to have the highest
quality, to be number one in your market, to win the championship,
however you define coming out on top. But make sure your
BHAG is in sync with your competitive differentiation. Wal-Mart’s
everyday low pricing makes sense for its BHAG of becoming the
biggest merchant in the world. It wouldn’t make sense if Wal-Mart
tried to offer the best service. For one thing, there aren’t enough people
to hire to supply that service. For another, Wal-Mart would have
to raise prices to pay for more help, and this would price it out of some
people’s reach. If you want to be large, you have to be low cost.
Make your BHAG simple so people can understand it, very ambitious
so they have to stretch hard to reach it, and keep it to one thing. Then
align all your resources, tools, and systems so you get it. Research
is very clear that if you focus on just one goal, you’re more likely to
hit it than if you dilute your attention. Don’t make it impossible to
accomplish or you won’t be able to enlist your people. But “close to
impossible” is probably where you should aim, as long as you’re
100 percent committed. As a friend of mine says, “If you strive for
perfection, you’ll get excellence.”
Setting a BHAG is crucial because it enables you to engage people
three ways. First, a BHAG inspires passion in your people. Quality
comes from passion—greatness comes from quality. Modest goals
don’t turn on anybody. Andy MacPhail, president of the Cubs, has
said on different occasions, “We’re committed to being competitive.”
5 How passionate is that? Not very passionate because the
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team is almost never any good. You energize people by getting them
to dream about becoming the best and convincing them you’re ready
to help them get there. Intensely passionate people win. A BHAG
will fire up your people.
The second purpose for setting a BHAG is to provide meaning to
your people and situation. No one wants to work or play for no
good reason—it deadens the spirit and the soul. Have you ever sat
in the stands late in the baseball season with your team hopelessly
out of the running? Usually, it’s as quiet as a mausoleum. The few
die-hard fans there are more interested in whether their faces show
up on the Jumbotron or who wins the electronic M&Ms race rather
than how the team is doing. The players aren’t thinking about winning.
They’re just thinking about adding to their individual statistics
or playing for a job for next year.
The pride that comes from winning, from being the best, provides
meaning all by itself. Setting your BHAG on winning will engage
people by giving them the pride, meaning, and identity they
seek. According to Philadelphia Flyers’ head coach Ken Hitchcock,
who led the National Hockey League’s Dallas Stars to the Stanley
Cup, “Any time you step on the ice, your team needs to have an
identity, and that identity should be to want to win.”6
Third, a BHAG enables you to be an inspirational leader. It will
give you something to talk to your employees about that will feed
their aspirations for greatness. It doesn’t matter how charismatic
you are. The BHAG will help you fuel your employees’ drive and
help you be more inspiring.
The 1997 and 1999 Ryder Cups, the biennial competition in
which the best golfers from the United States play the best golfers
from Europe, exhibit this. The 1997 event was held at Valderrama in
Spain. The captain of the Europeans was Seve Ballesteros, the dashing,
driving hero of Spanish golf.
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 111
Seve’s play and personality are the personification of charisma.
Notoriously wild off the tee, Seve was known for his amazing ability
to scramble his way to winning. His extraordinary save shots
from trees, roughs, and bunkers, while smiling all the time, captured
people’s affection and made him tremendously popular all
over the world. Ballesteros was intent on becoming the first European
ever to both play on and captain a winning Ryder Cup team,
and he wanted to do it on his native soil. This was his BHAG.
By all accounts, the Americans had the better team; they were
the 2-to-1 betting favorites. But Ballesteros would not let his team
lose. He zipped all over the course in his golf cart with his walkietalkie,
coaching his players constantly, picking them up when they
needed it, and calming them down when they were too emotional.
He also used his star players in more matches, while the American
captain, Tom Kite, used his players more equally throughout the
tournament. He was the embodiment of the engaging leader.
The newspaper and magazine stories later said that Seve had
“willed” his team to victory. That was the view of the American
players too. Tom Lehman, one of the few Americans who played
well during the 1997 Cup said, “I’m still totally convinced we have
the 12 best players. Today [singles matches] proved that. But put
their guys together, and they have magic at their fingertips. The
sum is greater than their parts.”7 A huge part of the magic was
Ballesteros’s zealous leadership.
The Americans wanted revenge in 1999 in Boston. This time
their captain was Ben Crenshaw, a marked contrast from Ballesteros.
Crenshaw was nicknamed Gentle Ben by the press, a quiet
Texan who showed his emotions only at particular times. His game
also was different than that of Ballesteros—very businesslike, with
a deft putting touch. Before the competition, golf commentators
worried that Crenshaw was too low-key to bring home the Cup.
112 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Instead, he turned out to be a great example of a builder who became
more engaging.
As in 1997, Crenshaw put a great team together, but the first
two days were a disaster. The Americans were down 10–6, facing
almost certain defeat. Winning required them to take 81/2 points of
a possible 12 on Sunday to capture the Cup.
On Saturday night, Crenshaw called his team together and gave
them a stirring speech about their destiny, his belief in their abilities,
and his confidence that it was their fate to win, despite the
odds. This was his intervention—his passion in the heat of battle.
He later recounted his remarks to the press, “I’m going to leave y’all
with one thought. I’m a big believer in fate. I have a good feeling
about this.”8
Then he sent his six best players out first and they swamped the
Europeans. The U.S. team won back the Cup, 141/2 to 131/2. With his
BHAG in sight, Gentle Ben was able to inspire his troops to overcome
a huge obstacle and beat the Europeans.
Golfers are the ultimate free agents. They earn only as they win,
and the more they win, the more they earn. They decide how many
and in which tournaments to play, at whatever level they compete.
Only rarely do they compete on teams, like in the Ryder and President’s
Cups. Typically, they are on their own. But these free agents
responded powerfully to BHAGs. Imagine what BHAGs can do to
engage your employees.
ENEMIES OF BIG GOALS
Big goals are audacious. They take courage to set and pursue.
Many times the forces of mediocrity will pressure you to stay away
from them. But to engage people, you have to overcome these
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 113
forces. Caution is the biggest obstacle to BHAGs. It takes courage
and self-confidence to fight the fear that predominates in too many
business organizations. Passion breeds courage and self-confidence.
That’s why it’s an essential characteristic of an engaging leader.
There are two other enemies of BHAGs worth discussing so you
can avoid them: mixed messages and lack of vision.
Mixed Messages
Mixed messages occur when you say one thing and do another. People
won’t believe your goals if you surround them with mixed messages.
The 2000 Chicago Bears sent out a ton of mixed messages.
In 1999, the Bears drafted quarterback Cade McNown in the first
round and signed him to an expensive contract. McNown played
sporadically that year, showing flashes of excellent play, amid plenty
of rookie mistakes. McNown also showed a difficult personality for
someone who needed to become the team’s on-the-field leader. He
missed part of training camp while holding out for more money, so
he fell behind in learning the offense while the team waited for him.
When things went wrong, he tended to blame his teammates rather
than take responsibility himself. He often veered from the offensive
plan to try to make something spectacular happen, throwing off the
precision the Bears were trying to achieve in their passing game.
Other players appreciated his competitiveness, but didn’t see enough
of the collaboration needed among football teammates. He also
didn’t form many close ties with his offensive mates, often skipping
the dinners they had together once a week. The result was this supposed
leader didn’t earn the trust of his fellow Bears.
When McNown wasn’t playing, Jim Miller and Shane Matthews,
two experienced, journeymen quarterbacks, ran the team. Matthews
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did an adequate job and was much more disciplined than McNown.
Miller, however, excelled. He gave the Bears the leadership they
needed and a big arm to throw the ball downfield. The team really
responded during the games in which he played. Unfortunately,
just as Miller was asserting himself, he tested positive for steroids
from an over-the-counter vitamin supplement he was taking. He
claimed he didn’t know steroids were in the product but took responsibility
and sat out the last four games of the season.
When training camp for the 2000 season came, the Bears’
coaches made two things clear. McNown, not Miller, would be the
quarterback, and they thought McNown gave them the best chance
to win. This was a mixed message because the Bears’ players knew
better. They thought Miller was their key to victory. As one Bears
veteran said, “As crazy as it sounds, we think we can win a Super
Bowl with Jim Miller.”9 If the coaches had said McNown was going
to play so he could develop and become a star in the long term, that
would have been a clear direction. But to position McNown as the
starter and say this was the way to win was confusing at best and a
lie at worst.
The 2000 season bore this out. McNown was lousy and led the
team to a dismal record of one win and seven losses in the first half
of the season. Then he went down with an injury. Miller started the
ninth game against a tough Indianapolis team and led the Bears to
an upset victory. Most of the players were quick to credit Miller for
the spark and confidence he gave them. But Jim Miller is just an unlucky
guy. He was injured for the season in the following game
against Buffalo. The team beat Tampa Bay in its next game on a cold
day in Chicago with Matthews at QB. After that game, McNown
was healthy and the team vacillated between him and Matthews.
The Bears drifted the rest of the season.
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Some of the problems may have come from a string of injuries
to a team that wasn’t deep with talent, despite the fifth highest payroll
in the NFL. But another problem may have been the comments
Bears Coach Dick Jauron made on his radio show after Miller took
over. In response to a question, Jauron insisted there had been open
competition for the starting QB job in training camp before the 2000
season. Yet the team and the fans in Chicago had seen a different
picture. Jauron’s comments were the talk of the city’s sports world
for a while, including the players on his team, and his credibility
was shot.
Mixed messages will blow your credibility. When that happens, your
integrity as a leader is gone. All you can do is start over.
In 2001, Jauron had to start over rebuilding credibility with his
players. He managed to do it and was helped when the team hired
a strong new general manager who got rid of McNown and several
other nonperforming players prior to the season. But Jauron created
several other problems. He picked Matthews over Miller to start the
season because Matthews was less likely to make mistakes, even
though the team clearly showed more life with Miller. He also kept
some very talented rookies on the bench.
As it turned out, some of the players Jauron wanted to start got
injured or didn’t perform well in early games. Miller took over at
quarterback when Matthews went down and immediately sparked
the team to several wins in a row and a few talented rookies were
pressed into playing, even though Jauron didn’t like how they performed
in practice. It seemed as if the right people got to play,
regardless of the coach’s decision.
Jauron showed why his style is almost “pure” builder. He’s extraordinarily
patient, often sticking to his plan, like with McNown,
regardless of the results. He’s very cautious and quiet, slow to tackle
problems, and appears to wait for problems to solve themselves.
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Still, he’s very dedicated to his players and assistants, treats them
very consistently, and they like him. This helped him rebuild trust
in 2001. Then, finally, he demonstrated some versatility. He flashed
some anger at the team during halftime of a game against Minnesota
early in 2001, and it woke them up. The Bears went on a winning
streak and had their best season in many years.
Lack of Vision
Lack of vision is the other enemy of big goals. Big goals come
from vision. Lack of vision is related to lack of courage, but it’s also
different. Vision enables you to see the future so you can form a big
goal. Courage helps you state it publicly and stick to it. Without vision,
you will be unable to create big goals.
Some leaders look to the future and form vision statements instead
of big goals. Personally, I think big goals have more impact on
employees than vision statements. I’ve consulted with several successful
companies that didn’t have vision statements per se, but instead
had BHAGs. The BHAGs were more short term and less lofty
than vision statements, but they energized and mobilized people.
The BHAGs also were more concrete and simple than the vision
statements companies usually write, so engaging leaders could use
them to greater effect in directing people. Finally, the BHAGs were
easier to stick to because they were less complicated and more
action-oriented.
When you lack the vision and courage to form big goals and stick with
them, you often end up with band-aid approaches to problems. You think
a little fix here and a little fix there will make you well, when radical
surgery is needed. If you were intent on pursuing a big goal, you
clearly would see the need for major surgery.
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You can look at any perennial loser and see this pattern. We can
go back to the Cubs for a perfect example. When Andy McPhail
came to Chicago to run the team, he set a big goal of rebuilding the
team for the long run by creating a great farm system and developing
terrific young talent. But McPhail and general manager Ed
Lynch continuously traded away good young players for veterans
with limited talents whom they thought could help in the short
term. They couldn’t resist the temptation of a quick fix. Promising
youngsters like Doug Glanville and Jon Garland left for little in return.
Even after Lynch left, the pattern continued.
This created big holes in the lineup. So every year the team
bought a few veteran free agents to plug the holes. Typically, these
weren’t the best players at their positions, because the best players
don’t want to play for a loser, and like most losers, the Cubs found
reasons not to pursue the best, even though they spent a lot of
money. Usually, the club hung on to one or two promising rookies,
but because the rookies weren’t in an atmosphere of excellence,
they didn’t learn how to win. The easiest way to learn to win is to
imitate successful people who live in a culture of winning. The team
told its fans it was on the road to success with each of its moves, but
it didn’t happen. The Cubs lost 94 or more games four times between
1997 and 2002. Patchwork is never enough. Band-aids don’t
cure big illnesses.
The Cubs have followed this pattern so long it’s their accepted
way of operating. Cubs fans no longer expect to win; they just go to
Wrigley Field to have a good time at the beautiful, old ballpark.
Everyone else knows it too. Pat Gillick, the highly successful general
manager of teams in Toronto, Baltimore, and Seattle interviewed
for the Cubs general manager’s job in 1987. He opted out of
the process saying, “I didn’t think the Cubs wanted to win. That’s
part of the marketing plan. Some of the mystique of the Cubs is
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ineptitude. If they win, there might be an expectation level to win
again.”10
Other long-time losers in business and sports act just like the
Cubs. They lack the vision and courage to see that commitment to
a BHAG of excellence, supported by major changes in the way they
operate, is necessary to break the cycle of losing. On the other hand,
you can turn around your team pretty quickly if you set a BHAG
and move fast. Especially today, when you can get new talent, communicate
new directions, and develop new processes in shorter
cycles, it’s possible to accelerate change if you commit to breakthrough.
Every year a few companies rise to the top after being on
death watch just a few years earlier.
Take a cue from Jack Nicklaus if you want to be an engaging
leader—believe it, and then do it. Success will follow. Nicklaus once
listed his ten tips for outstanding putting. Then he added an 11th:
No matter how impossible the putt, if you believe you’re going to
make it, you probably will.11 That’s setting a BHAG, casting aside
your doubts, and doing what it takes to win.
RISK: DO IT BIG, DO IT ALL, DO IT FAST
When Mickey Mantle died, Sports Illustrated wrote a great tribute
to him. One of the memorable lines in the story was, “The world
will always belong to those who swing from the heels.”12
Hitting your big goal of winning almost always requires taking
major risk, swinging from the heels like Mickey did. How big the
risk depends on how far you are from your goal. Usually you’re further
than you think.
The New Jersey Devils were, arguably, the best team in the National
Hockey League late into the 1999–2000 season. The Devils led
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 119
the Eastern Conference and were first in the league in points (a team
gets two points for a win and one for a tie) when the team went into
a brief slump. Players started showing some bad habits under coach
Robbie Ftorek, playing more like individuals than a team. General
manager Lou Lamoriello sensed trouble and an early exit from the
playoffs if things continued this way. He saw that the team was further
from the Stanley Cup than anyone else thought.
What did Lou do? He swung from his heels and fired Ftorek
with eight games left to go in the regular season. Lamoriello replaced
him with assistant Larry Robinson, who didn’t want to be head
coach. Robinson had been there and done that in Los Angeles, and
was fired for his efforts. He had been known as a very tough player,
but some saw him as a soft, “player’s” coach. Yet the hard-driving
Lamoriello has a reputation as a terrific judge of talent. He believed
Robinson could be an engaging leader who could bring the discipline
and “team first” ethic the Devils needed.
For his part, Robinson redefined the team, got them playing together,
and led them to a Stanley Cup victory over Dallas in a classic,
defense-oriented series. Why did he make such a risky move?
Lamoriello explained, “Good is not good enough, when better is
expected.”13
The impatient Lamoriello struck again in 2001 when the Devils
struggled. He replaced Robinson, with a hardcore driver, Kevin
Constantine, who coaches much like Ftorek does. Constantine got the
team playing better, and later in the season the Devils even brought
back Robinson as an assistant coach. When the Devils didn’t get to
the Stanley Cup final, Lou fired Constantine and brought in Pat
Burns, a three-time NHL coach of the year.
Actually, this pattern of alternating drivers and builders repeats
itself frequently in sports and business. People hiring leaders often
replace a person with someone who has complementary strengths
120 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
and style. They just keep switching to try new leaders until one fits.
Instead, they should look at how versatile and engaging the new
leader is, rather than the style of leadership.
When Dick Vermeil coached the St. Louis Rams, he took a huge
risk to win Super Bowl XXXIV. Getting the ball back with the game
tied 16–16 and 2:05 remaining in the fourth quarter, Vermeil knew
all his team had to do was to move down the field slowly, kill the
clock, and kick a field goal to win. His entire coaching experience
told him this was the right thing to do. Still, all season long, the Rams
won by throwing the ball deep, trusting offensive coordinator Mike
Martz’s wide-open attack. On first down, Martz called a long sideline
pass. Vermeil, a notorious driver, sure of his ways, hesitated.
But then, as hard as it is for a driver to delegate and give up control,
he went with Martz’s play. Quarterback Kurt Warner hit wide receiver
Isaac Bruce for a 73-yard touchdown and a 23–16 lead.
The size of Vermeil’s risk became evident as the Tennessee
Titans got the ball and drove down the field against the Rams. Tennessee
quarterback Steve McNair led the Titans almost all the way
to a touchdown. Only a last second tackle by the Rams’ Michael
Jones at the 1-yard line stopped the Titans short of scoring and winning.
Later, Vermeil replayed his agony over trying for the big play
with that much time left. He concluded that because he had relied
on Martz all season, he couldn’t justify abandoning him at the big
moment.14
RISK REQUIRES ANTICIPATION, INNOVATION,
AND SACRIFICE
Like Lamoriello and Vermeil, successful leaders, whether drivers
or builders, take risks. Sometimes risk is just about business.
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 121
Sometimes it’s personal, and when it is, it usually involves stepping
beyond your style. The payoff is you become more versatile and
engaging by doing so. Drivers do it when they give up control;
builders do it when they grab more of it.
Many of your best employees are risk takers. That’s one of the reasons
they’re your best. They respond well when you get out of your
comfort zone and show the determination and courage necessary to
win by taking the right risks.
Successful risk taking demands several things. First, it requires
anticipation. You have to be able to look ahead and see where things
are likely to go, and then move quickly to get there first. Lamoriello
anticipated problems for the Devils in the playoffs when teamwork
and defense become keys to victory. Devils’ defenseman Ken
Daneyko said Robinson’s hiring was a necessary move. “We were
probably headed for another early exit. But when they brought Larry
in, guys started pulling together instead of pulling apart.”15 Much
of that was attributed to Robinson’s calm, disciplined style that
earned the respect of the players.
Risk means innovation, like Vermeil and Martz’s offense. You
have to try new things. No team had ever spread the field more or
attacked opponents with greater speed than the Rams. Other teams
just couldn’t catch up to them in 1999. They were the first team to
defy convention and win the Super Bowl by relying on offense, not
defense.
Vermeil also took a big risk with Warner, who, until then, had
been an Arena Football League quarterback. No one had ever made
the jump from arena football to starting in the NFL. When Trent
Green, an expensive free agent, was injured in training camp, Vermeil
didn’t panic and trade for a veteran replacement. He figured if
Warner could star in the accelerated pace of the AFL, then he should
be able to make speedy decisions and release the ball quickly as the
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spread offense demanded. In fact, Vermeil said Warner wasn’t a
great practice player but was terrific under game pressure. Warner
turned out to be the perfect fit for the Rams’ fast-strike offense.16
Risk also means sacrifice because you often have to give up
something you’re already doing well. You have to trust that you can
reeducate yourself and others. When Phil Jackson coached the
Bulls, he realized teams could focus so much on stopping Michael
Jordan that the Bulls would be good enough to make the playoffs
but couldn’t win championships. It took a while, but Jackson persisted
and persuaded Jordan to sacrifice parts of his individual
game, trust his teammates, and get them involved. It often was a
struggle for Jordan to let less talented players assume leading roles,
but he was able to do it enough to win six championships. In two of
those championships, John Paxson and Steve Kerr hit the winning
shots in the final games.17
The three cornerstones of risk—anticipation, innovation, and
sacrifice—require trust in yourself and your skills and trust in others
to get the job done. Not coincidentally, your employees define success
as being trusted to do their jobs well. When you trust people, you
create possibilities for them to do great things. Your trust liberates
them, and they’ll respond by achieving your BHAGs.
RISK ENERGIZES EMPLOYEES
Trust is one reason risk energizes employees. Other reasons are
the excitement risk brings and the role model you set for your employees.
Most people love the action created by a good bet. Taking
a smart risk at work is like that. Plus, when people see you doing it,
they know they can take a chance too in the right situation. Taking
a risk to meet your BHAG is an extraordinarily powerful way to
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 123
energize your team. But energy sustains only if you’re willing to
keep taking risks when they’re needed. We can see this in examples
from Jerry Manuel and Dennis Green who didn’t keep it going.
Jerry Manuel took a risk when he jump-started the Chicago
White Sox to the 2000 American League Central Division championship.
It gained him the ALmanager of the year honors. Manuel did
it in spring training by challenging his biggest star, slugger Frank
Thomas, to become a better team player. The year before, Thomas
had a down year at the plate and was preoccupied by personal problems
and injuries. He seemed aloof from his teammates and sulked
at some of the criticism he received.
Early in training camp, Manuel was running the team through
sprint drills. Thomas didn’t want to do them, claiming a sore toe.
Manuel is a soft-spoken, philosophical builder, given to the long
view. The season before, he didn’t confront Thomas and the situation
got away from him. Obviously, Manuel came to spring training
with a different mind-set, focused and ready to go to war with his
star if that’s what it took. When Thomas complained about doing the
drills, Manuel got in Thomas’s face in front of everyone—players,
coaches, and the press. He insisted Thomas participate like his
teammates. They started arguing and took their fight into a private
room to reach an accommodation. After Thomas proved the toe
really hadn’t healed from an earlier injury, Manuel announced
Thomas would do the drills as soon as he was ready, and he did.
By making sure Thomas knew the team came first but enabling
him to back down gracefully, Manuel thought group but saw the individual.
It was the defining moment in bringing the team together
and getting it off to a fast start. It was a moment of versatility for
Manuel.
According to Manuel, “Commitment means changes, and sometimes
change is uncomfortable. If you’re going to be committed to
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winning a world championship, you have to be willing to change.
Because the White Sox haven’t won one . . . I’m here to change
them.”18 What he didn’t say was he also had to change himself.
Change starts at the top—you have to be adaptable to be engaging.
Coach Dennis Green took a different kind of risk to reenergize
his Vikings before the 2000 football season. Green’s team went 15–1
in 1998 but blew the National Football Conference championship
game against the Atlanta Falcons. In 1999, the Vikings slipped to
10–6, barely making the playoffs. They lost badly in the semi-finals
to the eventual champion Rams. Green knew the team was headed
in the wrong direction.19
Green’s a builder who was intensely loyal to many players. He
gave them a very wide berth about performance and behavior, both
on and off the field, and shielded them from the criticism that
accompanies this. People, particularly in the press, expect professional
athletes to act a certain way. Green believes in letting people
be themselves.
Yet, before the season Green felt the team’s chemistry was all
wrong. Coaches weren’t together in their thinking and didn’t communicate
well. Some veteran players were more concerned about
themselves rather than the team. Green said, “We had a lot of guys
focused on individual agendas.”20
In response, Green drew a hard line and made huge changes.
He got rid of his offensive and defensive co-coordinators and several
other assistants, let go of two Pro Bowl offensive linemen and
cut several other veterans and replaced them with people he thought
more closely shared his point of view. Green increased the focus on
his way to play and everyone’s accountability for performance by
taking such drastic action.
But the biggest risk Green took was getting rid of his veteran
quarterbacks, Randall Cunningham and Jeff George, and handing
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 125
the team over to untested Daunte Culpepper. In 1998, Cunningham
led the Vikings to its 15–1 season and was the league’s player of the
year. George took over for Cunningham midway through the 1999
season, was 8–2 as a starter, and added a playoff victory before the
loss to the Rams. In fact, Culpepper only played one down as a
rookie in 1999.
Still, Green felt Culpepper had all the physical and mental tools
to be successful. Plus, his huge size gave Green an additional power
runner, an unknown characteristic at QB. Above all, Green believed
in the talent he assembled around Culpepper and his offensive system.
He had a right to be confident. His teams had gone to the playoffs
seven times in eight years with six different QBs.
The Culpepper risk was a huge success. He became a star almost
from his first game. He led the team to an 11–5 record, a playoff
win and the National Football Conference championship game,
and was voted the starting quarterback for the Pro Bowl. Culpepper
had been a controversial draft choice because the Vikings badly
needed defensive help, but his size, mobility, and strong arm ushered
a new type of quarterback into pro football.
However, the inability to sustain this kind of risk taking and
versatility cost both Green and Manuel. I’ve already described how
the Giants pummeled the Vikings in the NFC title game, a game
that sent the team into a freefall. The trouble signs had been there
all throughout the second half of the season as the team struggled
after a very strong start. But Green never stepped up to take dramatic
action to refocus the team and put a little fear into his players
who needed it. Chris Carter, then the team leader, said, “We play
our best when we’re a little scared. When we get overconfident, we
don’t play well.”21 By the next season, the whole team was in disarray,
and Green resigned just before being fired.
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Manuel reverted to his usual building style in spring training in
2001. This time Thomas threw a fit over his salary and walked out
of camp, but Manuel didn’t take him to task. First he covered for
Thomas and then let the situation play out on its own. Newly arrived
pitcher David Wells came in with a back injury and Manuel
allowed the veteran to go his own way with workouts. When
Thomas got off to a slow start because of injuries early in the season,
Wells started questioning his toughness and leadership in the
press, even though Wells wasn’t pitching very well. Again, Manuel
seemed to let it go.
By this time the Sox ship was sinking. The team was losing.
Then Thomas, Wells, and several other pitchers were lost for the season
to injuries. When Wells went down, Thomas said it was karma.
Soon, a team that was expected to win its division was hopelessly
out of the race, 15 games under .500 by late May.
But in mid-June the team righted itself and went on to a winning
season. Some of it was just getting reorganized after all the injuries.
But the typically patient Manuel also had to shake things up
to get it going. The Sox started to win after Manuel openly discussed
breaking up the team through trades, benched two star players
for lack of effort, and criticized them publicly. “I was criticizing,
they were criticizing, I was jumping on guys,” Manuel said. “That’s
a part of a team maturing. There are certain things that have to be
confronted. A lot of times you don’t want to confront someone
when they’re down, but you want to know that you can confront
him when you’re not getting the effort.”22
What would have happened if Manuel had confronted Thomas,
Wells, and the rest of the team in spring training when things
started to go bad? Could he have avoided the slow start despite the
injuries? Who can say for sure? But chaos surrounded the team from
the start and wasn’t replaced by order until June.
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 127
RISK TAKERS NEED SUPPORT
A word of warning: Before you take these kinds of risks make
sure you have someone covering your back. Nobody succeeds
alone. Even the most successful leaders need support. Whenever
you see someone taking risks and winning, you see a strong person
helping. This may be someone who reports to you, a boss who believes
in you, or an independent-minded board member. When I
coach leaders to be more engaging, we always identify a supporting
person who can help monitor the changes, give feedback and
provide some cover if problems arise.
Whoever it is, your support person needs to help you think things
through clearly, tell you what you need to hear—not what you want to
hear—and give you emotional aid when times get tough. Find someone
who can give you this kind of help. Few of us are smart enough or
tough enough to change all by ourselves. The people who think
they need the least help are the ones who often need the most.
It’s much more effective when your support person has the
style opposite from yours. He or she will see the world from a different
perspective and complement your viewpoint. This can help
you become broader and more versatile.
Joe Torre, a builder, gets his help from Don Zimmer, a driver.
Zimmer is a baseball lifer, with more than 50 years as a player,
coach, and manager. Zimmer has sat next to Torre on the Yankee
bench during all of the championship seasons, dispensing advice
and opinions that keep Torre steps ahead of opposing teams.
Bobby Cox, another builder, has led the Atlanta Braves to
eleven straight division titles, a record that’s unmatched, built on a
foundation of fabulous pitching. His number two man has been Leo
Mazzone, his pitching coach and a driver. Watching the two is a
study in contrasts. Cox is calm and low key. Mazzone paces, chews
128 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
gum constantly, and maintains a steady conversation with Cox, his
pitchers on the bench, and the guys in the bullpen. He is the fire to
Cox’s ice in the Braves’ dugout.
Phil Jackson has depended on long-time assistant coach Tex
Winter. Winter, now in his late 70s, invented the triangle offense
Jackson loves. More than that, Winter provides players with a counterbalance
to Jackson’s approach to coaching. Jackson is highly psychological,
symbolic, and subtle, often accused of being a “master
manipulator.” Winter is straightforward and direct. Jackson gets in
people’s faces when he has to—Winter does it all the time. Winter
was one of the few people who didn’t get caught in the middle of
the Bulls’ feud between Jackson and general manager Jerry Krause.
Winter told each of them exactly what he was thinking without holding
back. He played no favorites and wanted no favors. When Jackson
left the Bulls, he hired Winter to come with him to the Lakers.
Leading and taking risks without any support, or surrounding
yourself only with people who won’t challenge you, will prove
deadly. You have to have someone with a different view to help you
think about all the possibilities, including an exit strategy if things
don’t work out. Ed Lynch discovered this as general manager of
the Cubs.
The 2000 season was another miserable year for the Cubs. In
July, Lynch started talks with the Yankees about trading slugger
Sammy Sosa. Sosa is not only the star of the Cubs, but also extremely
popular in New York, which has a large population from
Sammy’s home, the Dominican Republic. New York City once even
threw a ticker tape parade for him.
Sosa, who is very sensitive, found out about the trade talks,
went into a funk, and fell into a deep slump at the plate. The Cubs
started losing even more than usual. Eventually, the Yankees decided
the Cubs wanted too much for Sosa and wouldn’t trade.
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 129
Now Lynch was in real trouble. When the trade talks became
public, a lot of Cubs fans were outraged that the team would even
think about trading its most productive and popular player. After
the deal collapsed, Lynch looked foolish and ineffectual. He couldn’t
make things happen he thought were necessary. Sosa, of course,
was delighted. He loves being the hero of Chicago and despised the
idea of a trade. After trade talks stopped, Sosa went on a hitting
rampage and the team went on a rare winning streak. This made
Lynch look even worse.
At this point it became clear Lynch no longer had the support of
the fans or his boss, Andy MacPhail. MacPhail had been general
manager of the Twins, but once he joined the Cubs as president, he
was eager to disengage and kick himself upstairs. If he had given
Lynch the go-ahead to explore trading Sosa, he retreated once things
went badly. Lynch was left to fend for himself.
After the Sosa fiasco, Lynch and MacPhail agreed Lynch should
step down as general manager, move out of town, and become a
consultant to the team. As Lynch had operated alone, there was
no clear successor. MacPhail took over as general manager and announced
his first order of business would be to not trade Sosa. He
signed Sosa to an expensive, long-term deal before the start of the
2001 season.
Maybe Lynch could have made a good trade for Sosa, but he
didn’t have the support from above to help him consider his options
clearly. He surely had no support once his plans failed. He had
no exit strategy, so he had to exit himself.
MAKING RISK PAY OFF
Legendary baseball executive Branch Rickey was fond of the
adage “luck is the residue of design.”23 Of course, you often just
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need to be lucky. But sometimes taking risks to meet your goals can
improve your luck.
The New York Giants were a mediocre football team in 1999
and again in 2001, finishing 7–9 both years. But they had a big year
between these seasons during 2000. They got off to a fast start at 7–2
leading their division and surprising everyone by overachieving.
Then bad things started to happen. The Giants played poorly and
lost two straight games at home, falling behind in the standings to
the even more surprising Philadelphia Eagles.
That’s when Jim Fassel, their usually steady and measured
builder head coach, took his big leap and turned mediocrity into
success. During a news conference, Fassel guaranteed, to everyone’s
surprise, that his team would make the playoffs. With a big smile,
he announced, “I’m raising the expectations. I’m raising the stakes.
I love it.”24 Then he went upstairs to tell his bosses what he did.
Fassel’s boss, Ernie Accorsi, was supportive. “If he feels good
about the team’s chances, that’s great. He has the pulse of his team.”
Moreover, Accorsi said Fassel’s job was not in jeopardy because of
what he said. “I don’t think that any of the evaluation process will
have to do with the words.”25
Fassel’s risky ploy worked for himself and his team. The Giants
won seven straight games and captured the National Football Conference
championship to make it to the Super Bowl. The team
played well above its skill level. His players said Fassel’s guarantee
pushed them to make it happen. Tackle Lomas Brown said when
Fassel offered his guarantee, “I remember we all looked at each
other. But it was good. . . . He gave us all tunnel vision and focused
us in on winning. It was a stroke of genius on his part.”26
Part luck, part motivation, Fassel’s words were just what the
Giants needed to reenergize. Fassel’s words also are a good example
of how BHAGs require risk taking, and how people respond to
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 131
them. Giants running back Tiki Barber was clear about that. “We
were playing without a lot of enthusiasm. Coach Fassel just put it
out there. He’s our coach, and we believe in him. He made a goal
for us, and we chased it.”27
Maybe Fassel should have made another guarantee in 2001.
T H E H U D D L E
If you’re a builder:
• Identify your big way to create success, and insist everyone
gets on board with you. Builders often have trouble focusing
on just one thing because they don’t want to rule out other
people’s goals and interests. Get over it.
• Take the leap, set a BHAG, and commit 100 percent to it. Create
an absolute measure of success. This will feel risky to you.
Learn how to live with it.
• Be quicker to grab control of a situation. Don’t wait for problems
to solve themselves. If you need to confront people, do
it sooner. Don’t carry the stress yourself—give it back to the
people causing it.
• Find a driver in whom you can confide. Use this person as a
sounding board to help solve problems. This will give you
another perspective on things.
If you’re a driver:
• Be sure you’re not the only one who feels passion about your
direction. It must be meaningful and inspirational to others.
132 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Drivers often are able to focus on one key to business success
but they often don’t consider how motivating this will be to
others. Get everyone involved.
• Be careful not to set your BHAG so high that it’s impossible
to attain. “Stretch” is good, but don’t overdo it. People won’t
even try if there’s no chance of success.
• Be quicker to delegate and empower people. Many drivers
are afraid of giving up control. Hire highly skilled people and
learn to trust them. If they’re good and you don’t trust them,
the fault may be with you.
• Find a builder in whom you can confide. Use this person as
a sounding board to help solve problems. This will give you
another perspective on things.
5 / Goals: Winning Is the Only Thing 133
134 E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
6
135
C H A P T E R S I X
CHEMISTRY
Trust First
“It’s very tough to commit unless you trust.”
—New York Yankees manager Joe Torre1
CHEMISTRY = TRUST + STRUCTURE
Earl Weaver, the highly successful manager of the Baltimore
Orioles in the 1970s and 1980s, used to say, “Chemistry is a threerun
homer.” On any given day, he was right. Three runs can cure a
lot of ills if you’re losing a baseball game.
But over the course of a season, a critical project, a fiscal quarter,
or longer, things are more complicated. In sports and business,
you can assemble all the right talent with all the mental toughness
you need, but unless you build superior chemistry among team members,
you won’t get far. You certainly won’t hit your BHAG. Good chemistry
sparks high performance.
In business, we’re used to talking about culture—the shared
values that build up over a long time and help guide operating relationships
and decision making. Culture is the glue that holds
companies together and creates a competitive advantage when you
know how to use it. But how do you build a sustaining culture when
business conditions change so quickly and people switch jobs as
often as they do? Where do you start? How do you create a winning
atmosphere quickly, particularly as things and people keep moving?
In sports, coaches are more likely to talk about chemistry, something
you can mix faster than culture. Chemistry can start with just
two people. A positive chemistry—a chemistry of trust—can be expanded
into a climate of trust, one that influences many people.
Chemistry and climate lead to a desired culture, if you extend them
over time. Engaging leaders start with chemistry to build winning
environments.
The two keys to building good chemistry are trust and a structure of
clear roles, accountabilities, and rewards. The two are completely interrelated.
People have to trust to follow the structure you establish to
attain goals. The more trust they feel, the more they’ll buy in to how
you want to do things. Meanwhile, as your structure creates dependability
and success, they’ll feel greater trust with you and each
other. Increasing trust and creating a more effective structure means
more and bigger wins for you. Usually, drivers are better at structure
and builders are better at trust. Engaging leaders excel at both.
In this chapter, we’ll talk about building trust. Trust requires
you to step up, expand your versatility, and use all your person-toperson
and small group skills. I’ll also tell you how to go beyond
trust to engage people further, once trust is in place. In the next
chapter, we’ll complete the picture by discussing structure.
A SHORT COURSE IN TRUST
People use the word trust every day, but it’s a challenging concept.
It’s both how people relate to each other and the outcomes of
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these relationships. These outcomes are the social climate you create
and the concrete results coming from that climate. A trusting climate
breeds positive results. Rarely can you get the results you want
without trust, and if you do, the results will take much longer to
reach and won’t last as long.
It takes a while to build trust, but trust can be lost in seconds.
Many leaders think they have it in their organizations, but employees
don’t experience it. It’s impossible to quantify in any real way,
but easy to identify when it’s not there. As leader you must be able
to see signs of it, so you can fix it or grow it; but, basically, you’ll
know trust exists when you and your people feel it.
Employee research says people feel trust when leaders do what
they say they are going to do. Most leaders think they do this, but
studies say only about half the people in a company trust their leaders.
The further down the ladder you go in an organization, the less
trust there is. Usually, only about a quarter of the people at the bottom
trust the top.2
Think about trust as meeting expectations. Mistrust comes from
missing expectations. Mistrust occurs when leaders promise too
much to people and deliver too little. They create expectations they
can’t meet. Another problem is a lack of communication; leaders
don’t say enough about what they’re going to do so people fill in
the gaps with their imaginations. Few leaders can live up to these
kinds of expectations. Leaders who don’t get to know their people
well and don’t let people get to know them suffer from both kinds
of problems. The closer you are to your people, the easier you make
it for them to build realistic expectations.
Keeping promises is the start of trust, but just doing that doesn’t
necessarily engage people. We can trust baseball owners to stumble
over their own greed in dealing with the players’ union, but this
doesn’t mean we’re engaged by their cause. What if people know
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 137
you’ll cut their jobs at the first sign of trouble? You can fulfill their
expectations but they may not appreciate it.
To engage people, build trust on a foundation of positive social values.
Start with integrity, honesty, and fairness. Employees see these as
the cornerstones of trust. Then add caring to the mix. Don’t violate
any of these four things—ever. This will enable people to look up to
you. Remember, people want to work for leaders they admire.
Data on engaging employees show that engaging the spirit is
incredibly important to people, and the more education people
have, the more important it is. In addition to challenging work and
the freedom to do it without much interference, skilled people want
to find meaning on the job. My analysis of the data from the best
employer surveys shows you can create a spirit of “a day here is a
day well spent” by doing two things. First, help your team understand
it’s producing a valuable product or service for others. As a
leader, you can talk about your mission as selling more computers
or you can talk about it as making technology easier and more
available for people. You can discuss being more efficient in patient
care or you can talk about providing more access to health care for
more people. In each instance, wouldn’t the second approach give
your group a stronger sense of purpose?
The best companies and most engaging leaders state their missions
clearly, concisely, constantly, and in the context of how it helps
others. Their employees “get it” and respond accordingly. That’s
why Southwest Airlines doesn’t talk about itself as a discount airline;
it talks about offering great service at low fares so people have
the freedom to fly. CDW Computer Centers helps its employees
understand they’re there to find solutions for their customers’ computing
problems, whether it’s hardware, software, service, or training.
Selling more is a way to get there, but CDW won’t grow unless
these are genuine solutions to real problems.
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If employees are going to give you 8, 10, or 12 hours a day, they
want to feel their time is worthwhile. People know you’re in business
to make money. While you have to educate them about how
that happens, there’s no need to remind them about it every day.
Instead, great leaders engage people around a higher purpose to increase
motivation and business results. Of course, if you do this you
have to mean it and act like it. Don’t talk about providing products
that improve people’s lives and then scrimp on quality or service
that customers need.
The second thing to do is help people feel like your team or organization
is good for your community. Some of the initiative for
this may come from your company, but you don’t have to wait. I’ve
seen engaging supervisors create opportunities for volunteering or
good deeds at the work team level. These can be good team-building
efforts too, like a canned food drive, working in a soup kitchen, participating
in a charity walk, and so on. The time spent in these worthwhile
activities energizes employees for their work activities and
brings a great return on your investment.
These two things enable people to feel like they’re contributing
to something bigger than themselves. This picks up their spirits and
makes them feel special. It helps them trust that you’ll act ethically
because you have good social values.
Teams take on the personalities of their leaders, so to build
trust, be trusting. Start by extending trust to your people. Do this by
showing people you expect them to do their jobs well, and then
give them plenty of freedom to perform. Micromanaging is the great
enemy of trust. It signals your doubts about their abilities to succeed.
If you had doubts, you shouldn’t have hired them or given them the
assignment in the first place. Another key to engaging people is giving
them opportunities to offer input about how their work should
be done. Micromanaging cuts off that involvement and influence.
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It makes people feel like they should keep their mouths shut and
just take orders. Who wants to feel like that? People need to feel
they’re working with you, not for you.
Extending trust may take a leap of faith for you, and it requires
putting your own ego aside. But you have to go first and show trust
if you want to create the right climate. The right environment is one
in which people feel they’ll be treated fairly and like professionals.
Aprofessional is someone who does whatever it takes to get the job
done well. A professional leader trusts people to do their jobs successfully.
Doing the job well requires engagement or commitment,
and that’s why Joe Torre linked the two—trust and commitment.
When you trust, people will commit to your goals.
Jim Fassel mixed the right chemistry on the way to taking his
Giants to Super Bowl XXXV. One of his assistant coaches said, “He
picked the right people around him and the right players. He took
everyone on a golf outing, on boat trips. He brought the team together
and it helped when he stopped being his own offensive coordinator.
You can’t be a bank president and a teller at the same
time.”3 In other words, he focused on creating a friendly social climate
and stopped micromanaging.
Create a chemistry and climate of trust by:
• Picking people who have the experience, skills, motivations,
and values you want while watching out for big egos.
• Starting with the assumption that people will do their jobs
well, or enabling them to do well through education, coaching,
and support.
• Allowing people to do their jobs without overmanaging.
• Putting some fun into the mix.
140 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• Sticking with people, even when they make mistakes or get
into a slump.
• Recognizing that errors and slumps are for learning, not
punishing.
• Taking corrective action if performance is lacking for too
long.
J.T. Snow played first base for the 2002 National League Champion
San Francisco Giants, and like all his teammates, said manager
Dusty Baker was a big reason for the team’s success, “He just lets
you play . . . you show up and play hard. There are not a lot of rules.
We try to have fun and play the game the right way.”4 Earlier, I said
employees define success as feeling trusted to do their jobs well.
That’s what Snow said too.
Baker’s building style leads him to get close to his players and
become a confidant. He was the sounding board for many Giants
and frequently joined them for dinner or socialized with them on
the road. His pitching coach, Dave Righetti said, “A lot of managers
are afraid to get to know their players. . . . But he gets to know them
and tests their personalities a lot . . . though he doesn’t let it affect
his decision making.”5
According to Baker, “You have to be able to analyze personalities
and mood swings to feel comfortable and confident enough to
ask, ‘Hey, what’s wrong?’ Even if a guy says nothing, he might
come back and talk to you about it later because he knows you’re
not going to go around telling.”6
Still, if you don’t take corrective action when needed, you run
the risk of losing the people who are performing. They’ll feel you’re
jeopardizing their futures by staying with someone who isn’t up
to the job. During 2002, when the New York Giants kept playing
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 141
poorly, Jim Fassel took another risk and started calling plays again.
This risk sparked the team like his guarantee in 2000. Players never
comment publicly when someone who deserves it gets cut from the
team. That wouldn’t be right. But people know who wants to win
and has the ability and motivation to help the team. That’s the person
they want on the field with them.
Ultimately, trust comes from dealing with people honestly, particularly
when it comes to making changes, critiquing their performance, or
setting expectations. Look them in the eye and tell them the truth.
TRUST AMONG PEERS
Trust starts when you extend it and communicate openly with
your team. But you also have to make sure trust builds from employee
to employee. You do that by establishing strong social ties
with your employees and initiating connections among them.
Herm Edwards, coach of the New York Jets, said this is one of
the great lessons he learned while playing for Dick Vermeil from
1977 to 1982. Edwards described Vermeil this way, “A lot of coaches
are afraid to get close to players. But Dick proved you can foster a
relationship with players and still make them accountable. That’s
going to be his legacy. It won’t be so much the Super Bowl he won
or the championship games he’s been involved in.”7 Vermeil says
he always treats his teams like family. That’s why “likeability” is
important to him. If he doesn’t like a player, he can’t bring him into
the family, and probably the other players won’t like him either.
Make sure this communication and closeness occurs between
you and your employees and also among your employees. When it
goes away, you’re in trouble. Sean Lowe said one of the reasons his
White Sox team won in 2000 was the bond formed among teammates.
This bond helped them get through their toughest times.
142 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Lowe noted, “We’ve had our horses go down, but this is a team
thing. And there’s nobody tighter than this team. Everybody is
friends. When you’re friends the way we are, you just fight harder
for one another. You bow your back.”8
But the bond wasn’t there in 2001 as the team slumped. Jerry
Manuel said the team had the wrong ingredients in its mix of players.
Sox player Paul Konerko described it this way, “It wasn’t a bad
clubhouse where we were at each others’ throats, but we definitely
didn’t have the chemistry of last year where we had everyone
pulling for each other and rallied around each other. I think the injuries
were a big part of it, but there were many nights where we
had the horses to win the game and maybe that lack of chemistry is
the reason why we came out on the short end.”9 In our win-now
world, chemistry collapses quickly if success doesn’t follow. Sometimes
it lasts only a few weeks.
Dennis Green thought he improved the chemistry on the Vikings
after the 1999 season. He made several changes to get people
to work together better, firing most of his coaches including his offensive
and defensive coordinators, and hiring seven new ones.
Midway through the 2000 season, everything seemed great.
When the Vikings were 7–0, the staff was singing in harmony
and the good feelings flowed to the players in the locker-room.
“Everybody communicates well together,” said new offensive coordinator
Sherman Lewis. “We make sure that everybody’s ideas are
listened to and utilized because we’ve got a lot of experience.”10
Charlie Baggett, the receivers’ coach, added, “I don’t think that
there’s a guy on this staff that you can say has a problem with another
guy. I haven’t been on a staff like that before.”11
However, as the team struggled through the second half of
the season, the chemistry evaporated. Though it won its division
and made it to the NFC championship, the team went 4–5 after its
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 143
7–0 start and then lost big to the Giants, 41–0, in the title game.
Everyone was embarrassed by the lack of effort against the Giants
and the internal sniping started again. Green’s alchemy skills had
evaporated.
Phil Jackson experienced the ephemeral nature of chemistry in
his first two years with the Lakers. When he arrived in 1999, he
spent a lot of time with Shaquille O’Neal understanding him and
building the close relationship O’Neal wanted. What Jackson worked
on most was getting Shaq to accept Kobe Bryant, whom Shaq
seemed to really dislike. All season long, Jackson communicated
with O’Neal about the need to work cooperatively with Kobe and
the contribution Kobe could make to the team and Shaq’s game.
Shaq responded and formed an uneasy truce with Bryant. The relationship
was smoothed over and things worked during the 1999–
2000 season. The Lakers won the NBA title, and the team’s media
guide cover picture for the 2000–2001 season even showed Kobe
and Shaq hugging after they won the championship.
But year two in Los Angeles was much harder, largely due to renewed
fighting between O’Neal and Bryant. By the end of January
2001, the team had lost more games than it did during the entire
1999–2000 season. Bryant felt like he turned his game up a notch in
2000–2001 and wanted the offense to run through him. “Everybody
expected me to come back and do the same things I did last year.
But I’ve improved so much. I have to prove to myself and the
league that I’m a better player.”12 For Bryant, this meant taking
more shots and passing the ball less to O’Neal.
Shaq, however, still thought it was his team, “We’re not an outside
team. We’re an inside-out team. You have to get me into the
game . . . it doesn’t get done if I don’t get it.”13 So the two spent most
of the first part of the season sniping at each other, rather than their
opponents.
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Jackson’s response was to take a tougher tone with his stars and
his team, “the sand box,” as he called it. “This is really why I’m
here, to fix the tussles with the wills of these guys . . . you’ve got
guys willing to do their thing against the will or maybe the good of
the team. What it’s all about is how to corral that and make it into a
community effort.”14 Veteran player Horace Grant had a simpler description
of Jackson’s new tone, “ornery and disappointed.”15 Jackson’s
Zen approach turned into tougher communication to both
players, especially Bryant, to try to restore trust. In my terms, he
had to become more versatile and act like a driver for a while. The
result was the players re-engaged and won another championship.
BIG EGOS DESTROY TRUST
John Wooden, the legendary basketball coach at UCLA, used to
say, “The price of glory is the rest of the team.” Individual egos can
poison positive chemistry and trust. This was the road Bryant traveled
as he tried to show he was the best player in the league. In the process,
he was destroying the trust that had carried the Lakers to the title.
What’s worse, he seemed to know it. He claimed, “I trust the team.
I just trust myself more.”16 But this is the opposite of what engaging
leaders do; they trust the team first. Bryant needed to learn that.
Horace Grant saw this in his years with Michael Jordan. Grant
knew Jackson taught Jordan to reach out to his teammates to build
trust. Bryant had to do the same thing, even if it didn’t come naturally.
Grant noted, “To be a leader, everybody has to respect you on
and off the court. You can’t just be a great player. Every once in a
while, you have to be able to say, ‘I made a mistake. My fault.’”17
Ego caused big problems on the Seattle Mariners, but the team
was able to overcome them. Ken Griffey, Jr. was considered by
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 145
many to be the best all-around player in baseball during the 1990s.
As long as he was smiling and helping lead the team, it was successful,
winning division titles in 1995 and 1997. Then things began
to happen. The team got off to a slow start in 1998 because of injuries,
and star pitcher Randy Johnson was traded during the season
when the team thought he would cost too much to re-sign in
1999. Griffey started worrying about his own future and whether
the team was committed to winning. He lost his focus on the team
and his trust in leadership to fix things.
Junior was scheduled to become a free agent after the 1999 season,
and speculation swirled around him all year. By the middle of
the season, Griffey went into a funk. His mood was bad and detracted
from the team, his contract was not resolved, and the M’s
moved into a new ballpark, Safeco Field, which was a pitcher’s
park. Their old stadium, the Kingdome, had been hitter-friendly. Junior’s
production fell way off, he got surly, and the team couldn’t
recover, finishing third in a four-team division.
At the end of the season, the team tried to re-sign Griffey, but he
wanted out of Seattle to return home to Cincinnati. He used his
leverage to force a trade, even accepting below-market money from
the Reds to go home. Most baseball experts thought the M’s didn’t
get much in return, just a journeyman pitcher, a pretty good centerfielder
to replace Griffey, and two prospects. They predicted the demise
of the Mariners without their star.
But General Manager Pat Gillick proved to be very shrewd
when he let Johnson and Griffey go. For Johnson in 1998, he received
two good young pitchers and a shortstop who blossomed during
2000 and 2001. He used the money he saved by not re-signing Griffey
to get three free agent pitchers, two infielders, and another outfielder,
none of whom were hugely expensive. Now the M’s had a
146 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
completely new mix of talent, heavy on pitching and defense that
was better suited for their big new ballpark.
The reinvented team jelled under Lou Piniella. The chemistry
was great and there were no distracting personality conflicts, despite
star Alex Rodriquez playing out his contract. “We’ve got a nice
combination of personalities,” said outfielder Jay Buhner.18 The
Mariners won the wild card spot to get into the 2000 AL playoffs.
The two pitchers obtained for Johnson started against the White Sox
in the first two games of the playoff series, and the M’s swept the
Sox in three games. They went on to the AL Championship Series
where they gave the Yankees a tough fight before losing.
NO MORE COMMAND, CONTROL,
AND CONSTANT CRITICISM
Another enemy of trust is old style command-and-control leadership.
Usually, this is accompanied by constant criticism. Sometimes it’s
part of micromanaging. Command, control, and criticism helped
cause the failures of Mike Ditka in New Orleans and Rick Pitino in
Boston. Skilled people won’t put up with it anymore. You can’t be
too nice—people want leaders to be strong, principled, and courageous.
But you can’t be too critical and commanding because talented
people will hit the street.
A command-and-control-style leader hasn’t won a single major
sports championship in recent years. The leaders have either been
builders who got tough when he needed to or drivers who toned it
down as required.
The most successful coach in the history of professional hockey
is recently retired Scotty Bowman. Bowman started coaching in the
NHL in 1967, won more games than any other coach, and captured
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 147
nine Stanley Cups—five in Montreal, one in Pittsburgh, and three in
Detroit. He achieved that success by changing with the times. Philadelphia
Coach Ken Hitchcock said, “Most people of his status, like
Woody Hayes and Bobby Knight, who have won on a consistent
basis with old-school techniques, have not adjusted to new school
personalities. Scotty has kept the same ideas and principles, but he
has adjusted to the times.”19
The soap opera in Philadelphia during the 76ers’ breakthrough
2000–2001 season shows just how hard it is for some leaders to
change. This was no secret. Larry Brown publicly acknowledged
several times that he needed to be more careful and upbeat about
what he said and did. Brown went out of his way to praise Iverson
and the team, rather than criticize, and be a more open and positive
leader.
Still, Brown was stressed-out from trying to change. During December
of 2000, he blew up at the team after a bad game and then
realized he needed to take a few days off to regroup. It’s extraordinarily
rare when a pro coach takes a few days off from his team.
Then Sixers’ forward George Lynch said, “This team isn’t good at
talking to each other when we need to talk to each other. You let it
build up, then all of a sudden you have a blowup. It’s one of those
things where Coach Brown needed a break from us, and we probably
needed a break from him.”20 When Brown came back, he said
again he needed to be more positive and trusting.
One coach who hasn’t been able to make the change is Pat Riley.
He tries from time to time, but it doesn’t seem to stick. Before the
2001 season, Riley vowed he would loosen his control, provide
more freedom, and be less critical. But it didn’t last. Ricky Davis, a
young player Riley traded away very early in the year said, “I saw
a few changes, but you can’t keep bad habits away, like working
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guys too hard, not letting you be yourself. It’s back to the same old,
same old. There’s such a thing as constructive criticism.”21
Engaging leaders have to initiate contact and build relationships
in a trusting, positive way. You may want your people to commit
to your goals, but they won’t unless you trust them first.
SUPERB COMMUNICATIONS
You need to become a superb, frequent, and honest communicator
to capture and keep the trust of your employees. That’s one
reason broadcasters are moving directly from announcing to managing.
They hone their communication skills in the booth and then
transfer them to their leadership roles. Larry Dierker made the
jump and enjoyed a successful career with the Houston Astros,
leading them to the NL Central title four out of the five years he
managed them. Unfortunately, he never could get the team past the
first round of the playoffs. That got him fired after 2001. Ironically,
for a former broadcaster, he also hurt his cause by being too curt in
his post-game interviews after the Astros lost big games.
Bob Brenly was incredibly successful right away. A long-time
broadcaster with just a little coaching experience, Brenly went directly
from the booth to the field, managing the Diamondbacks and
winning the World Series in his first year. There he faced off against
Joe Torre, who had a losing record for 14 years as a manager before
becoming a broadcaster himself. Torre went from announcing to
managing the Yankees, where he fixed his won-lost record.
Brenly’s a builder, a free spirit, and a risk taker, in the style of
his mentor, Dusty Baker. “I learned a lot from Dusty, the way he
handled his ball clubs there,” Brenly says. “He does a lot by his
hunches and gut feelings and lives with it. I think players appreci-
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 149
ate it a lot more than if you just sit there and go by the numbers.”22
He supports, even cheerleads for his players. In the World Series,
when he needed to go to the mound to pull Curt Schilling who
didn’t want to come out, Benly took the ball and proclaimed loudly,
“You’re my hero.” How could Schilling argue?
Players describe Brenly as very emotional and usually very positive.
Slugger Luis Gonzalez said, “He’s the first guy at the top of
the steps cheering for guys when they do well. That’s the way he
played. He gets very emotional when something positive happens,
and that fires us up as players.”23 However, his passion and skill at
communicating also led him to do some judicious screaming on occasion.
According to Brenly, “They [the players] just need a little
push in the right direction from time to time.”
Another broadcaster-turned-coach is Doc Rivers, a long-time
NBA player who became a television analyst when he retired from
playing. From there he was hired to coach the Orlando Magic in
1999. Rivers had no coaching experience and no star players, but he
was an instant success, winning coach of the year honors in his first
season.
Maybe the strongest endorsement of Rivers came from his players.
In their next-to-last game of the season, the Magic lost and was
eliminated from the playoffs. With nothing at stake but pride in its
last game, the team pulled together and won for Doc. When it was
over, every player said he couldn’t wait to come back and play for
Rivers again. People who watched Rivers said he succeeded because
he was a great salesman. He pitched his agenda to his players with
great enthusiasm. In addition, he listened, learned, and kept adapting
his approach to fit his team. More than just sales skills, these are
the communication skills of an engaging leader.
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ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE
Trust is the foundation of performance. Trust means people will
think you’re a fair person and buy in to what you’re trying to do.
But they won’t necessarily run through walls for you. Trust is just
the start. You’ve got to go further.
If trust gets you to good, appreciation gets you to great. William
James, the father of American psychology, said appreciation is the
deepest principle in human nature. In the words of Dick Vermeil,
“Be a hugger.”24
Some recent research looked at management behaviors across
many different studies and companies. The conclusion was that a
“female” style of leadership works best today.25 Our most engaging
leaders now show caring, listening, and public expressions of positive
emotions, along with a deeper understanding and acknowledgement
of how others are feeling. These are Dick Vermeil’s
“huggers.” They show their appreciation.
A big company recently asked me to help it become a great employer.
That was one of its goals. When I got there, I saw the opposite.
The company had good financial performance and pretty good
customer satisfaction for its industry, but employees thought it was
a cold and distant place—probably the reason customer service was
just OK. Formal dress was still the rule, and men kept their suit
coats on all the time. A rigid hierarchy was still in place, both in the
organization and in the way people behaved toward each other.
Employees were expected to address their superiors by Mr., Mrs., or
Miss. Just as importantly, employees didn’t see much collaboration
across departments or extra effort by coworkers.
The company asked me to speak to top management at a leadership
meeting at a resort. Despite the location, the group continued
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 151
to be dressed formally. I told them the missing element in their company
was warmth. To be a great employer, they had to loosen up
and warm up the place. I told them what Dick Vermeil said. Then I
asked each of the 150 top executives to take off their coats, loosen
their ties, and hug the person next to them. They did it, but very,
very reluctantly. You would have thought I was making them take
bad tasting medicine. As you can imagine, this was the last time
I spoke to that group.
My request wasn’t so far-fetched. Winning teams in sports and
business always talk about themselves as “families.” No less an authoritarian
than the late Vince Lombardi said that teams don’t win
until the players love each other.26
Brian Billick said he learned this from his Super Bowl winning
Ravens. “This team taught me what the concept of team is about. The
terms team and family are interchangeable. When you go through
what this team has gone through this last year, the sense of family
does come through.”27
Maybe you’re not a hugger, but you can still show appreciation.
Saying thank you gets things started. How often do you thank your
employees for their work, even when it’s something they’re supposed
to do?
Public and private recognition works well too. Everyone loves
to be praised. When I’m coaching executives, a problem I often discover
is that they’re just not positive enough with their people.
They take good works for granted. You can’t build a productive atmosphere
for professionals without being positive. A simple technique
I use to increase the amount of praise they give is to ask them
to carry a 3” × 5” card and make a tic mark every time they say
something nice to someone. You’d be amazed at how fast their
praise goes up and how fast people notice it. Employees talk about
it right away. They thank their leaders for saying thanks. Moreover,
152 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
the buzz is so strong that these executives start doing it at home and
immediately create happier spouses and children.
At the root of appreciation is showing people you care about
their opinions. I’ll never forget what one alienated professional told
me about how his organization should engage him and his peers. It
was so simple and yet so powerful. He said, “Listen to us, value us,
take us seriously.” Listening seriously to someone is the start of
appreciation.
When you show appreciation on a regular basis, you’re able to turn up
the intensity or make big changes when needed. Sometimes that’s lighting
a fire under people. After the Lakers dropped the first game of
the 2001 NBA Finals to Philadelphia, Phil Jackson needed Shaquille
O’Neal to play a lot harder. Just before the next game started, Jackson
chided Shaq, “Don’t be afraid to block a shot tonight.”28 O’Neal
stopped and stared at his coach. Then he took that energy into the
game and blocked eight shots, a championship series record, to lead
the Lakers to the win.
Sometimes you can increase the intensity by turning down the
heat. If you’re loud all the time, silence can be deafening. This is
what Jim O’Brien did when he took over from Rick Pitino in midseason
as coach of the Boston Celtics. The Celtics were 12–22 in
2000–2001 and 99–147 overall under Pitino who tried, with little
success, to coach pros like they were college players. Pitino was constantly
up from the sidelines yelling and glaring at his players, trying
to control them through what he thought was teaching. His
players thought he was just screaming at them and trying to direct
their every move. They tuned him out.
The NBA is a player’s league, and the players saw Pitino as a
distraction—someone who would criticize them publicly while keeping
the attention for himself. “Because of the way things were, very
negative, the first two months of the season, the focus wasn’t on
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 153
us,” said star forward Antoine Walker after Pitino left. “It was obviously
on coach Pitino and whatever he was going to do with his
career. Now, the focus is on us and the guys are just going out there
and playing hard and giving it everything we got.”29
O’Brien changed everything by turning the attention on the
players—easy for him to do because he’s a low-key guy—letting
them play, and praising them publicly whenever he got the chance.
“No matter who’s on the sidelines, it comes down to the players
getting the job done all four quarters. They have got to get the stops.
In the fourth quarter, we’re going to put the ball in their hands, Antoine
Walker and Paul Pierce. You can talk about coaching styles,
but they have got to get the job done,” said O’Brien.30
His methods worked as the Celtics went on a winning streak
and competed for a playoff spot, losing out in the last days. The
next year they made the playoffs and went all the way to the Eastern
Conference finals. Ironically, the Celtics became a much better
defensive team with O’Brien as coach, even though defense was
Pitino’s focus. By laying back, O’Brien was able to get the players to
work harder on defense, which in basketball is mostly effort and
teamwork. “Everybody’s playing with a lot of confidence and believing
in each other,” said Walker. “That’s a credit to coach O’Brien.”31
Failure to appreciate is another thing that tripped Pitino in
Boston. He had the power to pick his team, and he made several
bad draft choices and trades. Then he compounded his mistakes by
saying publicly he wouldn’t have taken the Celtics job if he’d
known he wasn’t going to get Tim Duncan in the NBA draft. This
insulted his current players who felt unappreciated. They were
more than happy to point their fingers at him after he left, even after
he signed them to big contracts. Said guard Randy Brown, “A month
ago [with Pitino], we lose this game by 30 points. . . . We would
have been bickering, finger-pointing, second-guessing, all that stuff.
154 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Right now, we’re much looser and we’re playing with confidence. I
wonder why.”32
NO APPRECIATION, NO TALENT
People perform best when they feel appreciated. People talk all
the time, so a leader’s reputation as a boss who shows appreciation
gets around. Employees say a company’s reputation as a good employer
is very important to whether they’ll come to work or stay
there. Likewise, your reputation as an appreciative supervisor helps
determine whether people want to work for you. News spreads
fast. If you don’t show appreciation, the best people won’t come work for you.
Nowhere has this been truer than with the Chicago Bulls. With
Phil Jackson, Michael Jordan, and company, the team won six NBA
titles during the 1990s. General manager Jerry Krause never thought
he got the credit he deserved for building the team around Jordan.
Jordan was so great, many people thought he could have won those
titles with four guys from the local gym. Krause seethed from this
lack of recognition and never gave any good feeling in return.
Instead, Krause coined the phrase “players don’t win championships,
organizations win championships.”33 Jordan took this as
an insult to him and his teammates. He turned it around and used it
to poke fun at Krause, and their relationship completely deteriorated.
It was no better with Jackson. Krause thought Jackson owed
him complete loyalty because he hired him from the CBA as an
assistant coach and then promoted him to head coach. As Jackson
became more successful, he became more independent of Krause
and increased Krause’s distance from the players. Krause hated this
so much that Jackson was the only member of Bulls management
not invited to Krause’s daughter’s wedding.
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 155
All this bitterness wore everyone down. Krause threatened to
get rid of Jackson, but Jordan said he wouldn’t play for anyone but
Phil. Without Jackson, there would be no Jordan and no title. Phil
had the leverage, but the bad feelings grew.
After the fifth championship, Jackson agreed to come back for
one more year, the “last dance” as he called it. Krause wanted to
make sure Phil wouldn’t reconsider. At the press conference announcing
Jackson’s contract, Krause said publicly it would be the
last. Then he leaned over to Phil and said, “I don’t care if you go
82–0, you’re out of here.”34 After the sixth title, Jackson, Jordan,
Scottie Pippen, Dennis Rodman, and other key players scattered,
leaving the team in shambles.
As the old saying goes, be careful what you wish for because
you may get it. Krause got his. He desperately wanted to build a
winning team without Jordan so he could finally get his due. He
stockpiled his cash and high draft picks to sign top-tier free agents
and great rookies to rebuild. But his dreams were dashed. By the
2000–2001 season, the Bulls were by far the worst team in basketball,
with about half the number of wins as the next worse team and
little hope in sight.
Krause’s main weapon, his cash horde, did him no good. The
NBA approved a new collective bargaining agreement designed to
put in an orderly salary structure. Players’ financial opportunities
were limited by their years of service and existing teams had equal
chances of re-signing their best players to produce more fan loyalty.
In some ways, the impact of the structure made it more like pay
practices in the rest of business where companies can’t wildly overspend
for talent or they’ll go broke. Instead, teams had to recruit
free agents not only with money but also with the type of environment
they could offer.
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Krause had more money to spend than anyone after the 1999–
2000 season, but he couldn’t sign great players. Players remembered
how he treated Jordan and the others and stayed away. Krause could
only attract lesser talents and he was the only one bidding for them.
This continued the following year. Again Krause had the money.
Again all he could attract were the lesser lights among free agents.
The players knew the score. Minnesota all-star Kevin Garnett
said, “It wasn’t like somebody dropped a bomb and all of a sudden
they went from classy to ashy. The management there totally made
all those decisions in which to go and the direction they wanted to
go in.”35
Dallas all-star Michael Finley added, “I’ve met Jerry two times,
once when I played Michael Jordan in one-on-one and he kicked me
out of the gym and the second time when I worked out for the Bulls.
He would have treated me better the second time if he had drafted
me. But he didn’t.”36
More savvy management also understood. Atlanta Hawks general
manager Pete Babcock said, “The reality in today’s NBA is that
players talk, and the way your own players feel about your organization
is the message that’s getting sent out.”37
Mark Cuban bought the Dallas Mavericks in 2000. He made his
money in the dot-com world and may understand our talent-based
economy better than anyone in the league. When asked about resigning
Finley, Cuban replied, “Making Michael Finley happy on a
day-to-day basis before we get to the off-season is my goal. When it
comes down to time to sign him, it’s already too late. If we don’t
communicate now with Mike to know what his goals and desires
are and how he wants to be treated, it’ll be too late.”38 Cuban had
no trouble resigning Finley.
That’s what you need to do as a leader in this economy. Know
and understand the needs and goals of your most talented people
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 157
because they are absolutely crucial to retain. Demonstrate appreciation
to everyone on your team because everyone has a role to play.
If people can’t do what you need them to do, get rid of them and
make room for others who can. When you show appreciation and
build strong relationships, you can push people to the heights of
performance. And they’ll deliver. Huggers win Super Bowls.
T H E H U D D L E
If you’re a builder:
• You’re good at extending trust, but don’t feel hurt if someone
you trust doesn’t come through for you. It’s probably not
personal.
• Don’t confuse liking someone with performance. You must
lead and make decisions based on performance, not how much
you like someone or how you want him or her to feel about
you. Dependability and reliability—your’s and others’—are
essential for nurturing trust on your team.
• You’re good at not micromanaging, but don’t become too lax.
You must hold people accountable for results, and you must
follow up. This will increase trust and good feeling, not detract
from them.
• Do whatever you can to promote strong peer relationships
on your team. Yet when there’s a dispute or egos clash, lay
down the law. Take corrective action as soon as you recognize
the problem.
• Show your appreciation for performance.
158 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
If you’re a driver:
• Work harder at extending trust. If someone fails you, don’t
generalize that failure to others. Keep trying with other people.
• Stick with your people even if they make a few mistakes or
hit a little slump. If they performed before, they’ll perform
again—especially if you give them some extra support, listening,
and a vote of confidence.
• You’re likely to micromanage. Stop it. Set demanding goals
and standards but let people do their work. Show them you
trust them to perform.
• Do whatever you can to promote strong peer relationships on
your team. Let people’s egos come out a bit. Help people
relax, be themselves, and relate to each other without you in
the middle.
• Show your appreciation for who they are.
6 / Chemistry: Trust First 159
160 E N G A G I N G L E A D E R S W I N
7
161
C H A P T E R S E V E N
CHEMISTRY
Structure
“Why didn’t you hit a home run like I told you to? If you’re
not going to do what I tell you, what’s the use of
my being manager?”
—Groucho Marx, managing a celebrity softball team, to one of his players
THE STRUCTURE OF ENGAGEMENT
Think of chemistry as a car you want to drive. Structure is the
engine that motors you to your goals. Trust is the fuel that powers
the engine. Chemistry is the car because cars, like team chemistry,
are more than the sum of their parts. Cars have psychological and
social aspects to them, just like team chemistry. You need enough
car, and enough chemistry, to get you where you want to go. Sometimes
you’ll go in grand style; other times you’ll just barely make it
or break down.
Like fuel, trust enables you to power the structure you want to
implement. This car analogy breaks down, however, because usually
the more successful you become, the more trust you generate.
We’d all love it if gasoline would regenerate as we get closer to our
destinations—well, maybe the oil companies wouldn’t. With more
trust, more people will buy into your plan.
At its most basic, structure is about designing what tasks need
to be done, creating jobs to do them, and assigning them to people.
When people do their jobs dependably and that leads to success,
structure contributes to chemistry. Your organization structure depends
on the work you’re doing, your business strategy, operating
model, underlying systems, and size and customer requirements,
among other things. That’s a lot to consider, and it would take a
whole book to do it, so I’m not going to try. Instead, I’m going to
discuss the four elements of structure that impact most on becoming an
engaging leader: accountability, execution, roles, and rewards.
Sports shines a light on engaging people through structure because,
as I said earlier, the success models in each sport are pretty
much the same and haven’t changed in years. The infinite variety of
ways to succeed that exists in business doesn’t exist in sports. Stout
defense with just enough offense wins in baseball, basketball, hockey,
and football, unless you’re the Rams. So, structure varies by the personal
preferences of the leader and the talent he or she has.
That’s why I’m always fascinated to see coaches in the same
sport take very different approaches to structuring their teams. It reveals
so much about what they think they need to do to engage people
to win. We learn from them whether they’re right or wrong.
It’s well accepted now that your organization should be as flat
as possible. De-layering takes out costs, increases speed of decision
making, promotes communication, and enables more entrepreneurial
behavior. Excess hierarchy leads to unnecessary bureaucracy. In
addition, it conflicts with the values of baby boomers and the generations
that followed. These people increasingly prize meritocracy
and self-direction, so you need to justify every bit of hierarchy you
have. If you don’t, it seems like phony power or status and extra
cost and distance. Simply put, we have millions of people now who
question authority. It isn’t just Allen Iverson.
162 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
For this reason, pay attention to these three principles as you organize
for engagement:
1. Self-organization. The more you support people in creating their
own organizations—whether these are teams, networks, alliances,
processes, etc.—the more they’ll feel in charge of their
futures. When you dictate both the form and functions of your
organization, you take away self-control. High-performing
organizations encourage more self-control than system control.
Again, the absolute amount of self-control you can
allow depends on the work you do—it’s a lot different for a
research scientist than it is for a pilot or a nurse. But the
more, the better. You’ll know you went too far when you lose
consistency or make too many unforced errors.
2. Affinity. Left to their own devices, people will associate and
communicate with people whom they like and are like them.
We see this in the clubhouse or locker room, when pitchers
hang out with other pitchers, Spanish-speaking players hang
out with other Spanish speakers, and offensive lineman communicate
with each other in a language only they can understand.
This isn’t a bad thing. Engaging leaders use this to
their advantage by building on natural affinities to create
strong bonds. You can even challenge these subgroups to rise
to new levels of performance or take on a special assignment,
and they will based on bonding. But you have to make
sure these groups integrate with each other. In high-performing
organizations, subsystems talk to each other. If you
lose that, you just have a bunch of cliques.
3. Loose-tight. Whatever structure you create, leave room for
freedom inside it. The more structure you create, the more
7 / Chemistry: Structure 163
freedom you should have. Ideally, you should build a structure
that enables you to manage flexibility. Then you can really
master change. This is what Phil Jackson says he loves
about the triangle offense in basketball. It’s a highly systematized
way to create free-flowing shooting opportunities for
players. In some types of businesses, you can structure your
organization on values and leave room for individual decision
making within those values. In others, you may have
tight process control over service delivery or production but
establish other paths for people to suggest ways to change
and improve basic processes. High-performing organizations
balance structure and freedom.
ACCOUNTABILITY—DON’T GET
TOO COMFORTABLE
In the short-term world of business and sports, you have to win
right away. Accountability for instant success is everywhere (unless
you coach the Chicago Bulls). Pat Burns, a three-time NHL coach of
the year, found that out.
Burns, the coach of the Boston Bruins, was fired just eight games
into the 2000–2001 hockey season. The Bruins missed the playoffs
the year before, so Burns was on a short leash. Boston started by
winning three and tying one of its first four games. Then it went on
a western road trip and lost all four games. That was the end of
Burns. Mike Keenan, the ultimate “win at all costs” coach and an intimidating
driver, replaced him.
Keenan had coached many teams in the league and was successful
at all his stops. He also developed a well-deserved reputation
for fighting with team executives for more power. Seeing what
164 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
was coming, Harry Sinden, the long-time president of the Bruins,
retired the next week. Keenan’s Bruins didn’t make the playoffs
either, and, appropriately enough, he was fired immediately after
the season.
Fifteen games into the 2000–2001 NBA season, with a record of
six wins and nine losses, the Seattle SuperSonics fired Coach Paul
Westphal. Westphal had a successful history as a pro coach, leading
the Phoenix Suns to the NBA finals in 1993 and the Sonics into the
playoffs in 1999–2000. However, the team got off to a poor start
amid internal fighting and insubordination.
Westphal actually offered to resign after four games, but the team
refused him. During the 12th game of the season, the coach got into
an on-court argument with star guard Gary Payton and suspended
him. The team president, Wally Walker, retracted the suspension
after Payton apologized. Usurped and under attack, the Sonics let
Westphal out of his misery a week later.1
Stories like this go on and on, and not just in sports. CEO turnover
is at an all-time high, despite a shortage of people to fill those
jobs. There even may be a shortage of people who want those jobs.
Just one year after taking over Coca-Cola and instituting huge
changes to get the soft drink giant back in a growth mode, Chairman
and CEO Douglas Daft found himself the subject of a Business
Week story2 questioning whether he was changing enough things as
quickly as necessary. With pressure like this, you have to be extraordinarily
strong-willed just to aspire to leadership.
It’s not just leaders who are under this intense pressure; everyone
feels it. For 13 years, Mark Grace played first base for the Cubs.
Though he didn’t hit with much power, he had more hits than anyone
in baseball during the 1990s and was a terrific fielder. Grace
loved the Cubs and the fans loved Grace. Still, after the Cubs had
two more dismal seasons in 1999 and 2000, the team decided it
7 / Chemistry: Structure 165
needed someone else. It also didn’t want to pay Grace what he
would have commanded to stay in Chicago for 2001.
Of course, the move backfired on the Cubs. They struggled at first
base all year and were forced to trade for Fred McGriff, who cost a
lot more than Grace. Grace went on to have a solid year for Arizona
and starred in the World Series. He got the first hit in the bottom of the
9th inning of game seven to start the Diamondbacks’ victory rally.
Things like this happen all the time in sports; that’s why athletes
have such good unions. Another Chicago athlete, former Bears
defensive tackle Mike Wells, summed it up nicely when he quoted
what one of his coaches told the team, “You will be tolerated as long
as it takes to replace you.” Wells said, “They’re always looking to
replace everybody. It would be silly to ever get comfortable.”3 After
a few good seasons with the Bears, Wells was replaced too.
There’s no evidence this kind of fear motivates large numbers
of employees. It sure hasn’t helped the Bears or Cubs for most of the
last century. Employees are no different than highly paid athletes
in this regard. Your people need to feel some level of personal security,
especially with all the pressure on them to perform. The most engaging
leaders demonstrate that mistakes are for learning, not for
punishing or avoiding. Once you start penalizing people for mistakes
or managing them so they don’t take risks, you drive innovation
out of your business. That’s a huge blunder.
On the other hand, you can’t allow mistakes to keep recurring.
Nor can you allow discipline to slip. When it comes to setting accountabilities
and executing against them, engaging leaders:
• Set a clear direction—your big goal
• Break the goal down into measurable results and then set
performance targets at excellence to get stretch results
166 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
• Assign individual or team accountabilities for these results
• Push hard to get the needed outcomes and reward success as
you get them
• Maintain firm discipline that sets an example so people learn
to discipline themselves
• Ease up as people show they’re meeting your standards
This instills the toughness in teams and people that winning requires.
It works in all performance endeavors, business as well as
sports, though how heavy-handed you can be in the way you do it
depends on the business you’re leading. In professional services
and other places with highly paid knowledge workers, you have to
take a lighter approach or your intellectual capital will walk out the
door. In manufacturing, sales, and distribution businesses, successful
CEOs often insist on more conformity and are quicker to address
people who don’t toe the line, though they can’t get away with the
way they managed ten years ago.
EXECUTE WITH EXCELLENCE
Executing with excellence takes three things: appropriate discipline,
attention to the right details, and a simple plan. These are the
basics. Winning requires you to be world class at doing the basics. When
you’re not, you won’t meet your goals and standards.
Stay Disciplined
Larry Robinson turned around the New Jersey Devils and led
them to the 2000 Stanley Cup by instilling a stronger sense of order
7 / Chemistry: Structure 167
and teamwork. Scott Stevens, the team captain, said, “The biggest
thing Larry brought is discipline. He got everyone playing as a
team, not individuals.”4
Robinson approached this in a calm, building style and the immediacy
of the playoffs created urgency to right things quickly. He
ran tough practices and focused on winning through outstanding
defense. He worked with players individually, helping them focus
on their strengths. These methods earned everyone’s trust. However,
when the situation called for it, Robinson raised his voice to
previously unheard volumes.
During a crucial loss in the Eastern Conference finals, Robinson
saw the team “dogging it,” playing lazily and letting victory slip
away. In the locker-room after the game, the mild-mannered Robinson
started screaming so loudly people could hear him across the
building. “It was just something I felt had to be done. I would’ve
hated to have that series end knowing they had not given their
best,” said Robinson.5
Apparently it worked. The players described it as “shocking but
effective,” and they went on to win the Cup.
This is a great example of appropriate discipline, especially for
a builder—setting the tone and enforcing rules with composure and
intensity, while letting loose with genuine anger when people cross
critical boundaries. Of course, the emotion should be celebration
when things go right, just as easily as it could be scolding when
things go wrong. People respect genuine displays of feeling as long
as you’re not constantly criticizing them or flashing your ego. If you
do that, people will tune you out.
It is possible to keep your emotions at a high pitch all the time
and be a successful leader, but it’s much harder to do. The few executives
I’ve seen succeed with this style show far more raging enthusiasm
and love than disparagement or disapproval. This allows
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them to be critical when they need to be. But most people aren’t
built this way. The natural tendency for more people seems to be
quieter or more negative, with not enough caring and optimism.
Negativity discourages people and saps their motivation.
Details,Details,Details
Attention to details is the second part of proper execution, as
well as a characteristic of outstanding leadership. Even “big picture”
leaders have to watch the details. If they don’t, details will destroy
them. Which details you attend to is a function of the system
or model you use to run your business. Don’t micromanage, delegate.
But keep a close eye on what counts.
Bill Belichick led the surprising New England Patriots to the
Super Bowl with a fanatical eye on defensive details. His team entered
the game as huge underdogs to the offensive juggernaut
known as the St. Louis Rams. It emerged victorious by doing what
very few teams had done all season, stopping the Rams score-atwill
offense.
Belichick has a huge reputation as a defensive genius, built on a
foundation of creativity and detailed preparation. He programs defensive
schemes the way most teams diagram offensive plays. He
shows opposing offenses vastly different looks depending on how
the offense lines up, trying to confuse them. His teams learn many
more defenses per game than most football teams to achieve his
goal of disrupting the competition.
Yet through all of this complexity, Belichick keeps simplicity and
focus uppermost. “You have to have enough so you can counter
your opponent, but keep it simple enough so your players can execute.”
6 After putting in all these plays, Belichick then “compresses”
7 / Chemistry: Structure 169
them by grouping them and making them easy to remember. One
of his players, Terrell Buckley, said, “It’s a common sense defense
that uses lots of groupings, and they get it across and make you feel
like it’s not on you but you are involved. We get to suggest things.
We retain it.”7
Contrast this with the playbook Miami Heat players get every
year from Pat Riley. Before the 2000–2001 season Riley presented his
team with a 257-page-playbook—in a league where some teams
don’t even have one. It’s so big, some of the players couldn’t understand
or remember it. A star player, Eddie Jones, said, “I’ve had
some textbooks that long in college. But I don’t think the ones [playbooks]
I’ve had every year could amount to that.”8 It didn’t help
much. The Heat flamed out early in the playoffs that year. Details
for details’ sake just weigh too heavily on people. Figure out what
your critical success factors are, pay close attention to them and do
what it takes to get your team to execute them. Leave the minutiae
alone to be handled by others.
Keep It Simple
The last part of execution is simplicity. Simple is best. When Jim
O’Brien took over the Celtics and started them winning, he made
things easier on the players. One of his star players, Paul Pierce,
said, “He simplified our scheme. He’s not playing as many people
as before, he’s not pressing as much, and sticks to one game plan.
That makes us execute better rotations because we keep fewer
things in mind.”9
The Utah Jazz has taken this philosophy to extremes—with
tremendous success. Jerry Sloan has run the same, simple pick-androll
offense since he took over as coach in 1988. The pick-and-roll is
170 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
a basketball play you teach kids in junior high school. Using this
constant scheme and strong defense, Sloan has won nearly 64 percent
of his games and made the playoffs every year. He reached the
NBA finals in 1997 and 1998, only to lose to Michael Jordan and the
Bulls.
Sloan has the longest tenure with the same team of any coach in
any pro sport. Because the NBA averages more than ten coaching
changes a year, this is more than remarkable. It’s also a tribute to
how simplicity and consistency enables you to execute superbly
and win.
It helps Sloan and Utah that the cornerstones of the team, Karl
Malone and John Stockton, have been together since 1985. Continuity
makes everything easier. That’s why a leader who churns personnel
has so much difficulty getting people to execute consistently.
Stockton is the NBA’s all-time assists leader, and he starts the pickand-
roll on offense. Usually, the ball ends up with Malone, who has
become the second leading scorer in NBA history by completing the
play for a basket. One reason the Jazz have this consistency is because
Malone and Stockton love playing for Sloan.
On the other hand, trying to do too much almost always gets
you in trouble. The Cleveland Browns and Chicago Bears suffered
from the same disease of trying to do too much on offense during
the 2000 season. Coaches Chris Palmer of the Browns and Dick Jauron
of the Bears both came from the Jacksonville Jaguars who ran a
complex passing scheme. The scheme depended on the quarterback
and the receivers making adjustments while they ran their routes,
depending on how the receivers were covered by the defense. The
Jags had enough good talent at quarterback and wide receiver to
make it work for a while. The Browns and Bears put in similar
plans, but neither team had the players to execute this scheme and
lost most of their games.
7 / Chemistry: Structure 171
Palmer was fired after the 2000 season. His replacement, Butch
Davis, brought in a new offensive coordinator whose first pronouncement
was, “The Browns’ offense will be going from French
to Spanish.”10 He was trying to say his receivers were going to have
defined routes, instead of choices to make while the play was happening.
This simplified and improved the offense.
Fortunately, the Bears came to the same conclusion. Near the
end of another disastrous season, the offensive coordinator left,
much to the relief of Bears’ players and fans. His replacement also
simplified the passing schemes and the Bears improved right away
Superior execution starts with a simple plan that you keep trying
to outperform. As one of my clients likes to say, “Success means
never being satisfied.” Keep it simple and stay hungry to do better.
ROLES: SHINING STARS
Face it, not everyone on your team is a star. There are only so
many Michael Jordans or Derek Jeters. This doesn’t diminish your
team or you. It doesn’t mean you’re less effective as a builder or a
driver. No matter how carefully you select or how skillfully you develop
people, they will perform differently at various times.
You are far better off if your team is comprised of the necessary number
of stars and complementary role players who know their jobs, do them
well, and step up their performance from time to time. You can tailor
your performance demands and your development plans accordingly.
Your stars are the 10 to 20 percent who really shine, and your
role players are the other 70 to 80 percent who are solid citizens. Just
make sure the 10 percent at the bottom don’t drag people down
with them. As Casey Stengel said, “The secret of managing is to keep
the guys who hate you away from the guys who are undecided.”11
172 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
It’s pretty clear that the great teams of the last several years had
the requisite number of stars—two or three in basketball, six to eight
in baseball, and 12 to 15 in football—supported by very competent
teammates. If your stars are up to the challenge, and if one of them
is a great closer, this is a winning formula and a great way to think
about the roles on your team.
Leading this way requires you to:
• Build the right relationships with the right stars and expect
them to be peer leaders
• Get rid of a star that doesn’t fit the position or get him or her
out of the leader’s role
• Make sure everyone knows their roles and accountabilities
and embraces them
• Get rid of people who won’t accept their roles
People crave role clarity, and engaging leaders provide it. At the
same time, if someone only wants to perform to the limits of his or
her role and won’t reach out to accept other responsibilities, that’s
a danger sign. This person probably is of limited use because you
have to continually upgrade your team’s performance. You need
people who accept the ambiguity that goes with doing business and
will raise their efforts to meet increased demands. This is a sign
they’re fully engaged.
You also need the stars on your team to be peer leaders. Peer leaders
set the example for your team regarding work ethic, taking direction,
pushing for excellence, remaining calm under pressure, and
getting things done. With an effective peer leader, you can commu-
7 / Chemistry: Structure 173
nicate your goals, set standards, get buy-in, and execute. They also
help you build trust and chemistry.
Larry Brown believed Allan Iverson’s emergence as the team
leader was why the Sixers became the best team in the NBA’s Eastern
Conference in 2000–2001. “He’s accepted his responsibility.
That’s the only way a coach can succeed in this league—if your best
players set the standards.”12 Your stars help set the tone for whether
others will follow you. If you don’t have that kind of peer leader,
you had better get one.
Brown probably went a bit too far in his description. You have
to set the standards, but if you can do that together with your stars,
you’ll get higher performance. When they’re not interested in that,
you’ll lose.
Shaquille O’Neal knew this too. During the Lakers’ troubles
in 2000–2001, he said, “You can’t be a good leader if you don’t
have good listeners.”13 O’Neal was frustrated trying to get Kobe
Bryant to play Phil Jackson’s system. To O’Neal, Bryant was a “lone
ranger” who didn’t want to follow and had a destructive impact on
the team.
Some critics felt Cubs’ star Sammy Sosa seemed more interested
in his own statistics, fame, and contract than leading the team to
victory in 1999 and 2000. It didn’t help Don Baylor to start his
tenure as Cubs manager in 2000 by insulting Sosa’s fielding. Sosa’s
very proud and thought Baylor was blaming him for the Cubs’
problems. He didn’t help Baylor assume team leadership, and by
2002 Baylor was fired.
If your star performer isn’t the right type of leader, you’re in
trouble. This was the Seattle SuperSonics’ problem in 2000–2001.
Despite a change of coaches and a new approach, the volatile Gary
Payton created problems for the team all season. Even with a lot of
talent, the Sonics missed the playoffs in 2000–2001.
174 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Nate McMillan, a friend and former teammate of Payton’s, tried
being positive when he took over for Paul Westphal. While Westphal
was highly critical of some of the players—he spoke publicly
of trading Payton and said coaching Vin Baker was like root
canal14—McMillan took the opposite approach. When asked about
trading Payton, McMillan said, “Why would you want to move a
guy who is the top guard in the league? I know he loves Seattle and
wants to be part of the organization.”15
The players responded by going 38–29 under McMillan but there
still were plenty of problems with Payton. McMillan suspended
Payton after a fight with a teammate, and this time the team let it
stick. Payton’s behavior set the tone for the rest of the team and the
in-fighting continued for most of the season. It didn’t seem to ebb
until the Sonics gave McMillan a four-year contract that established
his authority. After that, even Payton seemed to settle down and
take a more positive peer leadership role, at least for a while.
Your peer leaders have to be positive role models. If not, get rid
of them. At the very least, move them out of leadership roles if you
can. This isn’t easy to do because whether it’s your smartest engineer,
most creative marketer, or strongest litigator, your team will
suffer a short-term performance drop. Then it will reorganize around
other people. In the long term, if you help the right people move
into peer leader roles, you’ll be able to impose your standards, other
team members will become more positive, chemistry will improve,
and results will increase.
Peer leaders arise on every team. You’d be hard pressed to reach
long-term success without good ones. Find the right people and
help them become peer leaders. It will enable you to engage everyone.
As former baseball manager Sparky Anderson, who won World
Series titles in both leagues, said when his team just traded for a
new star player, “I just got a whole lot smarter.”
7 / Chemistry: Structure 175
WHAT DOES MONEY HAVE TO DO WITH IT?
There’s no simple answer to how money affects talent and how
you should use it to motivate and reward people. To some people,
it’s everything; to others, it’s only one factor, although a very critical
one, in where and how they choose to work. Former baseball
owner Bill Veeck, who last owned a team at the beginning of the
free agency era in baseball, thought it was all-important, probably
because he never had very much of it. Once he was asked if free
agents leaned toward playing in big cities. He replied, “Not really.
They lean toward cash.”16
Many years later Kendall Gill once again confirmed Veeck’s
judgement. Before the 2000–2001 season, the veteran guard/forward
had a chance to sign with the Lakers and compete for a championship
for $2.5 million, or stay with the losing New Jersey Nets for $7
million. “My ego was telling me championship, but in the end, I
made a sound financial decision,” said Gill.17 Gill got his money, but
the Lakers beat the Nets again. Gill played in only 31 games after
suffering a knee injury early in the year.
On the other hand, some stars take less to play for a particular
team. In 2001, Mark McGwire re-signed with the Cardinals for two
years and $30 million, considered well below his market value, because
he loved the fans, the team, and playing for Tony LaRussa.
McGwire said, “I don’t want to be anywhere else.”18 McGwire then
retired halfway through the contract because he was hurt, couldn’t
perform up to his standards, and didn’t want to take money he didn’t
deserve. Ken Griffey, Jr. also signed for less than market value to return
to his hometown of Cincinnati and his beloved Reds.
Though you’re unlikely to offer anyone $30 million for two
years, here are some lessons about money and motivation as you
try to engage talent in this mobile economy.
176 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
First, understand what motivates people. You can only do that by
listening to them and hearing what’s in their hearts. McGwire didn’t
even want to talk to other teams. Griffey had only one objective—
to get back home. In contrast, Alex Rodriguez signed with the Texas
Rangers in 2001, a bad team he had never considered joining, because
they overwhelmed him with money.
Second, remember everyone’s different. People do things for their
own reasons, not for anyone else’s; so pay attention to their reasons.
Greed drives a lot of behavior, but so do other things. Stephon Marbury
left the winning Timberwolves for the Nets for the same
amount of money the T’Wolves offered. Marbury couldn’t stand the
thought of not being “the man” in Minnesota—the highest paid
player. That designation would always belong to Kevin Garnett,
whose $126 million contract led to the NBA lockout and new, reduced
salary structure.
Third, listen to Bill Veeck. “It isn’t the high price of stars that is
expensive, it’s the high price of mediocrity.”19 Pay your stars a lot but
don’t overpay the rest. Pay your best performers as much as you can.
It won’t hurt you; even Garnett’s giant contract turned out to be a
pretty good deal for his team because he’s worth it. You get into trouble
when you shell out too much for people who can’t drive results.
No one yet has figured out a foolproof way to pay for performance,
but several companies have figured out smart approaches.
One of my favorites is a company that every year identifies its top
30 percent of employees. It makes sure these people are well paid
and cared for and that they know it. If they hear someone in this 30
percent group is unhappy or looking around for a new job, they
speak with the person right away about what’s necessary to keep
him or her. They simply try to stay market competitive with the
other 70 percent. If these people get better offers, the company usually
lets them go rather than overpay.
7 / Chemistry: Structure 177
Fourth, have somebody ready to take over just in case you can’t
come to an agreement. Successful companies, like winning teams,
almost always have somebody prepared and waiting to replace
someone who wants to move on. Most of the best employers do
their promoting from within the ranks. Engaging leaders make a
heavy investment in and have effective processes for selection
and development—the keys to talent management. Otherwise,
you’re always scrambling to plug holes, and that’s no way to get
ahead.
IT’S MONEY THAT MATTERS
There’s an acronym in the compensation consulting business:
GOOBER. It means Greed Obscures Other Believable Executive Rationale.
After what we’ve seen with Enron, Tyco, WorldCom, and
other companies, who could disagree? In fact, corporate executives
and professional athletes like to use each other as justification for
their high salaries. CEOs try to say their skills are unique, like pro
stars, so they should be paid more or they can’t do a good job. Of
course, when you ask them if they’ll work harder or smarter if you
pay them more, they say they’re already working as hard and as
smart as they can. Athletes like to take the big money from their
bosses, many of whom run or used to run corporations, and then
say no one pays to watch the bosses play.
Financial largess only causes a problem when it gets in the way of
winning. Alex Rodriquez signed the largest contract in baseball history
with Texas before the 2001 season and his contract caused lots
of problems for other teams. Maybe that was another plus for the
Rangers. Surprisingly, nobody on the Rangers complained, probably
figuring they’d get theirs some day.
178 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
Gary Sheffield of the Dodgers screamed loudly. He insisted it
wasn’t the money; of course, no one believed him. He wanted a big
contract extension from the Dodgers or he wanted to be traded.
Sheffield had a contract for three more years at $10 million a year,
but with Rodriquez at $25 million, Sheffield thought he was getting
cheated. Sheffield said, “It isn’t about money, it’s about the disrespect
I’ve had to deal with since I came here.”20
The Dodgers were astounded. They passed on chasing Rodriquez
thinking Sheffield was happy—he had a fabulous year in 2000—
and spent a lot of money on pitching instead. The Dodgers said
they were in a state of shock over Sheffield and tried hard to move
him. They wanted equal value, but other teams figured he wasn’t
worth the trouble. This wasn’t the first time he’d acted out. Seattle
Mariners’ chairman Howard Lincoln called him “a mean-spirited
man who has trouble understanding contractual obligation.”21
Sheffield’s act disrupted the Dodgers’ spring training. Once he
realized no one wanted him, he retracted his demands and apologized
to the team.
Sheffield wasn’t alone in whining over Rodriquez’s money.
White Sox star Frank Thomas, runner-up as AL MVP in 2000, also
pouted and left camp in an ill-advised holdout. Thomas wanted
long-term security, so in 1997 he signed a seven-year deal worth up
to a possible $85 million with options and incentives. His salary for
2001 was “only” about $8 million, and he claimed he was “embarrassed”
to be paid so little.22
Thomas’s walkout was so ill conceived two of his veteran teammates
tried to convince him to stay. Thomas didn’t get his contract
revised and came back to camp a few days later. In what may have
been a first in sports, Thomas’s agents resigned after the episode,
saying they couldn’t deal with someone like him.
7 / Chemistry: Structure 179
Jealousy is part of human nature, but a big cause of these problems
is that there doesn’t seem to be much rhyme or reason to how
teams spend. Many companies do such a bad job of communicating
how and why they pay people, employees get jealous of one another,
and I’m not talking about multimillion dollar salaries. Most
surveys suggest that less than half of employees think they’re paid
appropriately for what they contribute to their companies. Less
than half also think their companies do a good job of explaining
how pay is determined.23
In fact, it’s often not the amount of pay that bothers people but
how pay decisions are made and how little we know about them.
Think about golf. No one seems to complain about what golfers earn
because they’re out there making it by themselves, based solely on
what they accomplish. Even those who get hefty endorsements,
corporate outings, and appearance fees only receive them because
of what they’ve achieved. It’s pure pay for performance.
That’s the secret of any good pay plan. But it’s easier said than
done. Like your own golf game, you’ll spend a lot of time trying to
get pay right, but it will never be perfect. Still, keep at it. Four more
things you should do to engage people through pay are:
1. Don’t overpay. It’ll put you out of business, or at least force
you to get rid of people as a way of cutting costs. Some of
these people likely will be ones you really need. Make sure
you select for fit. That’s key to getting outstanding performance
in the first place.
2. Avoid gross inequities in pay on your team. Unless someone
stands way above all the rest in performance, so much so
that everyone else recognizes it, keep pay levels within a
close range for similar responsibilities. Don’t pay everyone
180 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
the same, but pay is no longer a secret; people talk about it
all the time. If one person gets a lot more without being a
much bigger contributor, you’ll have problems.
3. Explain your pay process. Surveys repeatedly show people
don’t understand why they’re paid what they’re paid. This
causes lots of dissatisfaction, even when people are happy
with pay levels. This is one area where you can’t communicate
too much. Satisfaction with pay goes up with more communication
about the pay process, even when you don’t pay
people more. Also, it’s a lot cheaper than raising pay.
4. Keep pay from being a distraction. You want people to understand
why they’re getting what they’re getting, but don’t
overemphasize it. If you do, you increase the chances that
people will lose focus on what they’re supposed to be doing.
At times, companies raise pay issues when they don’t have
to, or even use pay as the main management tool. Then it’s
all anyone wants to think about.
WINNING OVER WHINING
In my experience, a climate of trust and people of strong character
win out over money every time. Some companies feel if they pay
everybody near the top of the market, then they shouldn’t have
to deal with the human side of the business. Leaders may think
they’re doing a great job if they fight hard to get every penny they
can for their people and blame the company publicly if they don’t
get all they want. These companies and leaders are wrong.
You can win for years with average pay if you have strong leadership
and chemistry. Powerful chemistry and good relationships
7 / Chemistry: Structure 181
will keep talented people who want to win. If you really engage
them, people will go out of their way to perform because of their
loyalty to you. If people want to work for you, they’ll factor this into
their thinking about whether to come to work or stay. This is a
dollars-and-cents reason why your reputation as a leader and an
employer is so crucial. You can determine how much your reputation
is worth by how much it saves you in compensation.
A great example of this is the 2001 World Champion Diamondbacks.
To bring a winner to Arizona quickly, owner Jerry Colangelo
spent a lot of money on talent in the team’s first years. The D’Backs
won the NLWest title in 1999, their second season, but fell to third
place in 2000. Attendance dropped and cash flow became so tight
Colangelo had to take out loans from baseball and do cash calls on
his partners.
The players have genuine fondness for Colangelo and talk about
what a great person he is to work for and be around. When Colangelo’s
financial problems mounted, he approached several players
and asked for help in deferring large amounts of their salaries for
2001. Ten of the highest-paid players quickly agreed. “This is so far
different from the norm,” said Colangelo. “I think it goes back to the
players we selected. We really did try to pick some people with
character.”24 Pitcher Brian Anderson, one of the ten, added, “You
can talk about how much you love the team, but you’re in a situation
where you put up or shut up. Are you a team guy?”25
The number one pay issue for employees is fairness. This doesn’t
mean you should pay everyone equally. It means people should understand
how your pay system works and feel rewarded for their
contributions. Moreover, remember not all rewards are financial. A
great work environment is fabulously enriching to many people.
You can’t buy trust and appreciation, but if you build them, they’ll
get you outstanding talent and probably save you some money.
182 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
T H E H U D D L E
If you’re a builder:
• You’re more likely to enable self-organization, affinity, and
loose-tight structures. Be sure to have enough structure so
you can organize work and work processes, control variance,
and create efficiency.
• You have more difficulty with accountability than drivers do.
Set high standards, stick to them, and don’t shrink from providing
timely consequences—positive and negative—as
appropriate.
• Stay disciplined and don’t be afraid to show some strong
emotions as the situation and your feelings call for them.
Often, a display of genuine anger by a builder shocks employees
into higher performance.
• You tend to encourage peer leaders. This is great, but take decisive
action with them when they aren’t performing. You
tend to worry too much about their feelings.
• Use pay to distinguish rewards for performance. Paying
everyone about the same sends all the wrong messages unless
your performance data support it.
If you’re a driver:
• You like structure but don’t overdo it. Give people the autonomy
they need to perform. Remember, ultimately, it’s people’s
behaviors, not your structure, that creates high
performance.
7 / Chemistry: Structure 183
• You may be very good at execution—setting a plan and performing
against it—but you tend to get too far down into the
details and insist to a fault that people do things a certain
way. Before you do that, make sure it’s necessary. Otherwise,
you won’t get the ingenuity you need for innovation.
• Watch out for building too much fear into the work atmosphere.
Your intense drive for results can lead people to high
performance but it can also lead people to focus too much on
what the negative consequences might be for failure. “Trying
easier” usually gets better results.
• You may need to do a more effective job of encouraging peer
leaders, especially among people who are different from you.
You’ll benefit by getting input and influence from a more diverse
group of thinkers.
• Explain your pay decisions. Make sure people know why
they’re getting what they’re getting and how to improve their
performance and increase their rewards.
184 T H E E N G A G I N G L E A D E R
185
C O N C L U S I O N
THE IMPORTANCE OF
BEING ENGAGING
I started this book in early 2001, put it aside for a while to concentrate
on client work, and finished the first draft in late fall. Like
all Americans, and many people throughout the world, 9/11
changed my perspective. I wondered whether a book on leadership
that relied on sports was very relevant; it’s certainly not the most
serious book you can read. Then a few things happened. I saw the
torrent of layoffs after the terrorist attack and I watched people rallying
around sports to raise their spirits, particularly the brilliant
2001 World Series. I realized these ideas still could be worthwhile.
In the talent shortage of 2000, companies were scrambling to become
better places to work. CEOs called me every day to ask how
to change their organizations. I told them my research and experience
said there were several key factors in becoming a great employer.
By far, the most crucial one is leadership. Engaging leaders
create terrific places for people, even when the compensation, benefits,
training, or workplace amenities are just OK. Then the recession
came and it was business as usual at most places. It seemed
like companies were fighting to get to the head of the line to see
who could lay off the most people first.
Layoffs crush people and are self-defeating, especially during
recession and war. What better way to slow the economy down and
keep it there than to cut thousands of jobs? It’s the ultimate selffulfilling
prophecy: business is off so we get rid of people who then
can no longer buy our stuff leading business to fall even further.
Unfortunately, by 2002, whole industries had shrunk to where they
were back in 1997. Many companies had to get smaller and maybe
layoffs were unavoidable in certain instances—even a few of the
most enlightened leaders turned to them as a last resort.
Still, my unyielding admiration goes to those brave executives
who avoid layoffs, sometimes to the point of great personal loss.
These are the most engaging leaders of all. Far too many companies
resort to mass firings, not only when things go bad, but when
there’s a hint that they won’t be able to keep increasing their profits.
These leaders never get it, or don’t care. They think they can win
without their players.
Of course, in America, the “what have you done for me lately?”
economy is here to stay. It cuts both ways—for employees and companies.
Even during the 2002 recession, unemployment never got
close to the high levels we usually see. Leaders who laid off scores
of people are going to have to change how they manage and do a
lot of repair work to their reputations as businesses start to grow
again. Talented people will be harder to get and keep than ever. The
majority of managers don’t know how to create conditions that
inspire people to commit to their work and their goals. Few employees
feel real loyalty. There’s enormous opportunity to build
workplaces where people can feel alive and joyful, learn new skills
and grow, and make significant contributions to business results.
186 C O N C L U S I O N
With this challenge ahead, executives need new information
and proven ideas presented in new ways to help them become better
leaders. Engaging leadership is vital. You engage people by
adopting leadership behaviors that reconcile, or at least balance,
your natural style with its opposite. I know you’re not going to
change your total approach; I don’t want you to even try. But most
of us can broaden our behaviors somewhat to be much more effective.
If you can’t, stop trying to lead people.
Now, at the end of 2002, as I put the finishing touches on this
book, I continue to see the immense value of engaging leadership.
In a tougher business environment, leaders who can’t engage their
followers and lead them to success are falling hard and fast. In
Chicago, where I live, two of the city’s most famous companies are
paying the price for disengaged leadership. United Airlines, once
the largest airline in the world, plunged into bankruptcy after years
of management mistakes, lack of focus, poor service, and alienated
workers. An employee stock ownership plan, designed to save the
company, failed miserably when leaders didn’t involve employeeowners
in the business, even though they held the majority of the
stock. Near the end, key groups of employees were so angry that
they refused to make further concessions to stave off bankruptcy. At
the same time, the chairman of McDonald’s was forced to resign
years ahead of schedule. He couldn’t deliver reliable profits while
leaping from strategy to strategy and avoiding tough decisions. His
consensus-building style and lack of versatility prevented him from
taking strong actions quickly enough, though his board and franchisees
demanded them. To win in every business, leaders must
engage through versatility, assemble great talent, create focus and
direction, and build chemistry through trust and structure. With
new, more effective leadership, these two huge organizations should
survive and move forward. Their underlying assets have great
C O N C L U S I O N 187
value, demand for their products is still robust, and the right leaders
will get employees, customers, and shareholders smiling again.
But the greatest test of engaging leadership still lies ahead. Recently,
Dusty Baker, one of the most engaging leaders in sports, signed on
to manage the Cubs. If Baker can turn around an almost century-old
culture of losing, then we’ll see the unstoppable power of engaging
leadership. Engaging your team should be easy compared to that.
188 C O N C L U S I O N
189
A P P E N D I X A
HOW ENGAGING
ARE YOU?
The Engaging Leader Index
© Gubman Consulting
This short inventory is designed to help you understand your
leadership tendencies toward the driver or builder style and how
engaging you are. Please circle the item in each pair that is most like
you or most appeals to you. Some items may seem similar, but it’s
usually best to go with the first thing that comes to mind. Instructions
for calculating your score follow this section.
1A. Answers
1B. Solutions
2A. Systematic
2B. Swift
3A. Insightful
3B. Decisive
4A. Calm
4B. Controlled
5A. Aggressive
5B. Assertive
6A. Determined
6B. Tolerant
7A. Numbers
7B. Reasons
8A. Diligent
8B. Firm
9A. Relationships
9B. Facts
10A. Future
10B. Now
11A. Restrained
11B. Easy-going
12A. Diplomatic
12B. Disciplined
13A. Talkative
13B. Responsive
14A. Competitive
14B. Obliging
15A. Efficient
15B. Adaptable
16A. Persistent
16B. Eager
17A. Adaptable
17B. Goal-driven
18A. Persuasive
18B. Humble
19A. Principles
19B. Decisions
20A. Respect
20B. Victory
21A. What
21B. Why
22A. How
22B. When
23A. Rules
23B. Freedom
24A. Investments
24B. Returns
25A. Direction
25B. Guidance
26A. Progress
26B. People
27A. Motivations
27B. Incentives
28A. Philosophical
28B. Pragmatic
29A. Planful
29B. Improvisational
30A. Learning
30B. Doing
190 A P P E N D I X A
191
A P P E N D I X B
YOUR ENGAGING
LEADER SCORE
© Gubman Consulting
This score sheet will tell you how you described yourself on the
Engaging Leader Index. You can see how much you prefer the
driver or builder style. You also can see how engaging you are.
Circle each item that you selected on the Engaging Leader
Index. Be careful because the A’s and B’s change columns as you
move down the sheet. Next, count the number of items you circled
in each column. The column with the higher score is your primary
style. Subtract the lower score from the higher score. If you have a
difference of ten or more between your higher score and lower
score, you probably rely on that style to the exclusion of the other.
If the difference between the scores is between five and nine, you
can be engaging when you want to be. If the difference score is four
or less, you may be quite engaging.
1A 1B
2B 2A
3B 3A
4B 4A
5A 5B
6A 6B
7A 7B
8B 8A
9B 9A
10B 10A
11A 11B
12B 12A
13A 13B
14A 14B
15A 15B
16B 16A
17B 17A
18A 18B
19B 19A
20B 20A
21A 21B
22B 22A
23A 23B
24B 24A
25A 25B
26A 26B
27B 27A
28B 28A
29A 29B
30B 30A
Driver= Builder=
High score − Low score = How engaging you are:____
(The lower the difference, the more engaging you are.)
192 A P P E N D I X B
193
N O T E S
Chapter 1
1. David Halberstam, Playing for Keeps (New York: Random House,
1999), 250.
2. Paul Dickson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations (New York: Harper
Collins, 1991), 417.
3. Halberstam, Playing for Keeps.
4. Douglas McGregor, Human Side of Enterprise (New York: McGraw-
Hill, 1960).
5. “The Clock Is Ticking on the Basketball Life of Riley,” Chicago Tribune,
January 14, 2001.
6. “Vikings’ Captain Survives Storms,” Chicago Tribune, August 22,
2000.
7. “Angry Moss Says Vikings Unprepared,” The New York Times,
January 15, 2001.
8. “How Bryant and O’Neal Put Teamwork Ahead of Feuding,”
The New York Times, June 5, 2001.
9. “Mellowed Piniella Seeks Second Title,” USA Today, October 9,
2001.
10. “Mariners Are Quick to Credit Piniella,” The New York Times,
October 8, 2000.
11. Kansas City Chiefs team page, TheSportingNews.com, October 9,
2001.
12. Leadershipnow.com, M2 Communications.
13. Center for Creative Leadership, Leadership in Action, Vol. 18,
1998.
14. “Manager’s Food Supply Energizes the Giants,” The New York
Times, July 15, 2000.
15. Ibid.
16. “Unlikely Leader,” Chicago Tribune, January 31, 2001.
17. Advertisement, The New York Times, September 16, 2001.
18. Newsroom, Clevelandbrowns.com, January 12, 2001.
19. “More Teachers, Fewer Screamers among NFL’s Coaches,” The
New York Times, August 19, 2001.
20. Portland Trail Blazers team page, The SportingNews.com, October
19, 2001.
21. “Mariners Are Quick to Credit Piniella.”
22. “Bulls Notes,” Chicago Tribune, November 20, 2000.
23. “A Changed Dr. Doom Returns,” The New York Times, September
15, 2002.
Chapter 2
1. “Playoff Payoff,” Chicago Tribune, March 12, 2001.
2. Peter Drucker, Management Challenges for the 21st Century (New
York: HarperBusiness, 2001).
3. Employment Policy Foundation, The American Workplace Report
2001: Building America’s Workforce for the 21st Century, Washington, D.C.,
August 29, 2001.
4. Department of Labor, “A Century of Change: The U.S. Labor
Force, 1950–2050” Monthly Labor Review, May, 2002, Vol. 125, No. 5.
5. “The 100 Best Companies to Work For,” Fortune, February 4,
2002, Vol. 145, No. 3.
6. “Most American Workers Satisfied with Their Job,” Gallup Poll
Analyses, August 31, 2001.
7. “Effective Managers Must Evolve Their Generational Stereotypes,”
Findings from the 2001 Randstad North American Employee Review,
September 2001.
8. “The Towers Perrin Talent Report,” Towers Perrin, August 31,
2001.
9. “Brenly’s Gambles Help Propel Arizona to NLCS,” USA Today,
October 16, 2001.
10. “The Tough Work of Turning a Team Around,” Harvard Business
Review, November-December, 2000, Vol. 78, No. 6.
194 N O T E S
Chapter 3
1. “Giants Step to the Top of the NL,” USA Today, September 27,
2000.
2. “Good Managing Makes Player Deals Pay Off,” The New York
Times, October 22, 2000.
3. “One-Year Wonders,” Chicago Tribune, January 18, 2001.
4. Michael Treacy and Fred Wiersema, The Discipline of Market Leaders
(Boston: Addison-Wesley, 1992).
5. “Strong Pitching Pushes Cardinals,” USA Today, September 13,
2000.
6. Speech to Marathon Ashland Petroleum dealers, Grosse Pointe,
MI, September 11, 2000.
7. “In the Oakland A’s, Some Lessons for Silicon Valley,” The New
York Times, October 1, 2000.
8. “High Roller,” ESPN, The Magazine, April 2, 2001.
9. “The A’s Front Office Makes Grade with Trades,” The Sporting
News, August 6, 2001.
10. Yankees-Mariners game report, ESPN.com, October 22, 2001.
11. “Yankees Know How to Play the Game off the Field, Too,” The
New York Times, November 30, 2000.
12. “Gannon Finds Home with Once-Hated Raiders,” USA Today,
December 14, 2000.
13. “49ers’ Renaissance Gathers Steam,” Chicago Tribune, October
25, 2001.
14. Ibid.
15. “Vikings Draft Tendencies: Hits on Offense, Misses on Defense,”
Minneapolis StarTribune, April 16, 2001.
16. “Black Cloud Blankets Bengals,” USA Today, November 8, 2000.
17. “Can Jackson Get Lakers to Rebound?” USA Today, February 12,
2001.
18. “Iverson a Brand New Man,” USA Today, November 22, 2000.
19. “Lakers Not Ready for Second Run at Title,” USA Today, January
18, 2001.
20. “Ex-Bulls No Longer Producing,” Chicago Tribune, January 24,
2001.
N O T E S 195
21. “The Golf Digest Interview: Phil Mickelson,” Golf Digest, January,
2001, Vol. 52, No. 1.
22. “The Golf Digest Interview: Vijay Singh,” Golf Digest, April,
2001, Vol. 52, No. 4.
23. “Basketball Notes,” Chicago Tribune, April 4, 2001.
24. Speech to Marathon Ashland Petroleum dealers.
25. “Haslett Is Saints Keystone,” USA Today, January 3, 2001.
26. Ibid.
27. “Perceived Lack of Communication Dooms Mueller,”
ESPN.com, May 12, 2002.
28. “The Odd Couple,” Chicago Tribune, January 25, 2001.
29. “Ravens Talk Talk, Walk Walk,” USA Today, January 8, 2001.
30. “From the Beginning, Pitino Was Blinded by His Ego,” The
Sporting News, January 8, 2001.
31. “Ravens Talk Talk, Walk Walk.”
32. Three Bears radio show, WGN Radio 720, September 29, 2001.
33. “The Odd Couple.”
34. Sign outside Michael Jordan store, United Airlines Terminal,
O’Hare Field
35. “New York Capitalizes on Oakland’s Mistake, Moves on to
ALCS,” TheSportingNews.com, October 16, 2001.
Chapter 4
1. Halberstam, Playing for Keeps, 259.
2. “The Odd Couple.”
3. “Turnover at the Top,” DBM, Inc., June, 2002.
4. “There’s Method to Draft Savvy,” Chicago Tribune, June 22, 2001.
5. “Shrewd Trading Has Mariners on Verge of Wins Record,”
NBCSports.com, October 5, 2001.
6. “From the Super Bowl to Super Startups,” Leaders Online, Heidrick
and Struggles, 2001.
7. Ibid.
8. “Riding the Wave: The New Global Career Culture,” Career Innovation,
June 1999.
9. “Chicago Clippers,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 2001.
196 N O T E S
10. Ibid.
11. “Work, Family Pressures Undercut Job Satisfaction,” Life Today,
National Institute of Business Management, April 2002.
12. “Breaking the Glass Ceiling: The Effects of Sex Ratios and Work-
Family Human Resource Practices,” Unpublished research manuscript,
Prof. George F. Dreher, Indiana University, 2001.
13. “Iverson a Brand New Man.”
14. Ibid.
15. “QB Bias Falls,” Chicago Tribune, December 22, 2000.
16. “Alou Says He Hasn’t Received Any Recent Offers,” ESPN.com
October 13, 2002.
17. “Agent for Marvin Lewis Accuses the Bills of Bias in Coach’s
Hiring,” The New York Times, January 24, 2001.
18. “Cochran Says Black Coaches Held to Different Standard,”
ESPN.com, September 30, 2002.
19. “Best Practices in Diversity: Corporate and Candidates Perspectives,”
Korn Ferry, December 2001.
20. “Thrill Is Gone,” Chicago Tribune, November 3, 2000.
21. “Piniella Won’t Be Back in Seattle Next Season,” ESPN.com, October
14, 2002.
22. “Mickelson Staying with Family after Birth of Daughter,”
ESPN.com, October 24, 2001.
23. “A Hectic Schedule Par for the Course,” Chicago Tribune, July 16,
2000.
24. “Bruce Lietzke Watching Son Play in Abilene,” Dallas Morning
News, July 28, 1998.
25. “Family Company Relies on Employee Feedback to Shape Positive
Culture,” Winningworkplaces.org.
Chapter 5
1. “What I’ve Learned,” Esquire, December, 2000, Vol. 137, No. 6.
2. “Some Things Borrowed, All Things Yankee Blue,” The New York
Times, October 29, 2000.
3. Dickson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, 423.
N O T E S 197
4. Jim Collins and Jerry Porras, Built to Last (New York: Harper-
Collins, 1997).
5. “Time for Cubs to Step Up—Or Else,” Chicago Tribune, October
13, 2000.
6. “Hockey Notes,” Chicago Tribune, December 26, 2000.
7. “The Ryder Cup Rumpus,” Golf Digest, December, 1999, Vol. 50,
No. 12.
8. Ibid.
9. “Bears Notes,” Chicago Tribune, November 6, 2000.
10. “Baseball Preview 2002,” Chicago Tribune, April 1, 2002.
11. “My Putting Musts,” Golf Magazine, April, 2000, Vol. 42, No. 4.
12. Sports Illustrated Tribute to Mickey Mantle, August 21, 1995.
13. “Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson,” Bergen Record, December 19,
2000.
14. “Rams Come Up with Another Big Play in Biggest Game of the
Season,” CBS.sportsline.com, January 30, 2000.
15. “Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson.”
16. “From the Super Bowl to Super Startups.”
17. Halberstam, Playing for Keeps, 281.
18. “Manuel’s Plan Pans Out Just as He Envisioned,” Chicago Tribune,
September 25, 2000.
19. “High Marks in Chemistry,” Minneapolis StarTribune, October
27, 2000.
20. Ibid.
21. “Viking Notes,” Minneapolis StarTribune, October 25, 2001.
22. “Pitchers Put Sox in Good Position to Battle Twins,” Chicago Tribune,
June 26, 2001.
23. Dickson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, 357.
24. “Fassel Foretells Playoffs for Giants,” The New York Times, November
23, 2000.
25. Ibid.
26. “Fassel’s Guarantee Has Giants on Verge of Playoffs,” The Sporting
News, December 18, 2000.
27. “Face-Lift Is in Order for NFC East Champion Giants Come
Playoff Time,” CBS.sportsline.com, December 18, 2000.
198 N O T E S
Chapter 6
1. Fastscripts at asapsports.com, October 9, 2000.
2. “WorkUSA 2002: Weathering the Storm,” Watson Wyatt Worldwide,
2002.
3. “Giants Follow the Lead of Fassel,” The New York Times, January
15, 2001.
4. “Dusty’s Roads,” Chicago Tribune, October 19, 2002.
5. “Baker Understands the Recipe,” Chicago Tribune, September 9,
2000.
6. Ibid.
7. “A Mad, Mad League,” Chicago Tribune, November 11, 2001.
8. “Versatility Gives Lowe Edge for Playoffs,” Chicago Tribune, October
2, 2000.
9. “Wrong Ingredients Spoil 2 Seasons,” Chicago Tribune, October 8,
2001.
10. “High Marks in Chemistry.”
11. Ibid.
12. “The One,” ESPN, The Magazine January 22, 2001.
13. Ibid.
14. “Jackson Plans to Clamp Down on Lakers,” Yahoo! Sports, January
12, 2001.
15. “The One.”
16. Ibid.
17. Ibid.
18. “Mariners Are Quick to Credit Piniella.”
19. “Bowman Stands Test of Time,” Chicago Tribune, November 8,
2000.
20. “Brown Mysteriously Absent from Practice,” USA Today, December
19, 2000.
21. “Riley Still Living off His Magic-Laker Days,” ESPN.com, November
7, 2001.
22. “Brenly’s Gambles Help Propel Arizona to NLCS.”
23. Ibid.
24. Speech to Marathon Ashland Petroleum dealers.
25. “As Leaders, Women Rule,” Business Week, November 20, 2000.
26. vincelombardi.com.
N O T E S 199
27. “Ravens Talk Talk, Walk Walk.”
28. “Why We Love Phil Jackson,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, October 3,
2001.
29. “The Celtics Are Glad Rick Pitino Has Departed and They’re
Showing It,” ESPN.com, Feburary 15, 2001.
30. “Small Ego, Big Results,” MSNBCsports.com, February 7, 2001.
31. “The Celtics Are Glad Rick Pitino Has Departed.”
32. “NBA Notes,” Chicago Tribune, March 11, 2001.
33. Halberstam, Playing for Keeps, 38.
34. Ibid., 41.
35. “Bulls Notes,” Chicago Tribune, December 6, 2000.
36. “Inside the Bulls,” Chicago Tribune, January 9, 2000.
37. “NBA Notes,” Chicago Tribune, March 5, 2001.
38. “Inside the Bulls.”
Chapter 7
1. “Sonics Fire Westphal,” Yahoo! Sports, November 27, 2000.
2. “Repairing the Coke Machine,” Business Week, November 19,
2001.
3. “Jauron’s Message a Simple One,” Chicago Tribune, August 25,
2000.
4. “Here’s to You, Mr. Robinson.”
5. Ibid.
6. “A Changed Dr. Doom Returns.”
7. Ibid.
8. “Players Get 257-Page Playbook at Start of Camp,” Sportingnews
.com, October 7, 2000.
9. “Celtics Execute under O’Brien,” ESPN.com, March 3, 2001.
10. “Arians and Fazio News Conference,” Clevelandbrowns.com, February
5, 2001.
11. Dickson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, 424.
12. “Iverson a Brand New Man.”
13. “Can Jackson Get Lakers to Rebound?”
14. “Sonics Fire Westphal.”
200 N O T E S
15. “With New Direction, Sonics Wallop Lakers,” USA Today, December
1, 2000.
16. Dickson, Baseball’s Greatest Quotations, 453.
17. “Gill Follows the Money, Stays with Nets,” Yahoo! Sports, November
22, 2000.
18. “Baseball Report,” Chicago Tribune, March 11, 2001.
19. Ibid.
20. “Dodgers Thrown a Curve as Sheffield Seeks Trade,” Chicago
Tribune, February 20, 2001.
21. “Waveland and Sheffield Has a Cub Ring to It,” Chicago Tribune,
March 11, 2001.
22. “Craving Star Bucks,” Chicago Tribune, February 22, 2001.
23. “WorkUSA 2002: Weathering the Storm.”
24. “Ten Diamondbacks Defer Salaries to Help Cash-Poor Team,”
ESPN.com, February 20, 2001.
25. Ibid.
N O T E S 201
202 N O T E S
203
I N D E X
A
Aaron, Hank, 18
Accorsi, Ernie, 49, 131
Accountability, 6, 24,
36, 164–67, 183
Admiration, 19–20
Affinity, 163
Agents, 43
Alou, Felipe, 94–95
American culture, 19
Anderson, Brian, 182
Anderson, Sparky, 175
Appreciation, 17, 151–58
Arizona Cardinals, 53
Arizona Diamondbacks,
39, 149, 166, 182
Ashe, Arthur, 19
Atlanta Braves, 128
Atlanta Falcons, 125
Attitudes, 32–34, 47
Auerbach, Red, 71, 105
Authenticity, 17
B
Babcock, Pete, 157
Baby boomers, 31–32,
35–36
Baggett, Charlie, 143
Baker, Dusty, 18, 95,
141, 149–50, 188
Baker, Vin, 175
Balance, 14, 24–25
Ballesteros, Seve,
111–12
Baltimore Orioles, 84,
135
Baltimore Ravens,
50–51, 67–69, 78–79,
83, 108
Barber, Tiki, 132
Baseball, 22, 50. See also
specific coaches;
players; teams
Basketball, 22. See also
specific coaches;
players; teams
Baylor, Don, 174
Beane, Billy, 56–57
Belichick, Bill, 10,
25–26, 169–70
Berra, Yogi, 72
Bethune, Gordon, 16
Billick, Brian, 21, 67–69,
70, 71, 78–79, 152
BMW, 51
Bonds, Barry, 18
Boston Bruins, 164
Boston Celtics, 69, 71,
153, 170
Bowman, Scotty, 147–48
Bradley, Bill, 1, 4
Brand, Elton, 85
Brenly, Bob, 39, 149
Briscoe, Marlin, 93
Brock, Lou, 52
Brooks, Aaron, 67
Brosius, Scott, 72
Brown, Larry, 62, 63,
89–90, 148, 174
Brown, Lomas, 131
Brown, Mike, 60
Brown, Randy, 154
Bruce, Isaac, 121
Bryant, Kobe, 2, 11, 62,
64, 144, 174
Buckley, Terrell, 25–26,
170
Buffalo Bills, 95
Buhner, Jay, 11–12, 87,
147
Builders, 5, 6–10
goals and, 132. See
also Goals
individuals and, 89
mental toughness
and, 70
recognizing/
building on
strength, 73
structure and, 183
talent and, 82,
101–2
trust and, 158
Built to Last (Collins),
110
Bureaucracy, 162
Burnett, Rob, 78
Burns, Pat, 120, 164
Business model, 105
Business/sports
analogy, 41–44
Business Week, 165
C
Canseco, Jose, 58
Caring, 36–37, 138
Carter, Chris, 68, 126
Cashman, Brian, 58, 107
CDW Computer
Centers, 65–66, 138
Center for Creative
Leadership, 17
Change, 124–25
Charisma, 19, 112
Charlton, Norm, 81
Chemistry, 45, 81. See
also under Trust
Chicago Bears, 114–17,
171
Chicago Bulls, 155–57
Chicago Cubs, 18, 84,
110–11, 118–19,
165–66, 174, 188
Chicago White Sox, 95,
97–98, 124–25, 127,
142–43
Choice, 37
Cincinnati Bengals, 60
Cincinnati Reds, 11
Clarity, 173
Clark, Will, 98
Clemons, Roger, 87
Cleveland Browns, 21,
171
Coca-Cola, 106, 165
Cochran, Johnnie, 96
Colangelo, Jerry, 182
College athletics, 46
College education, 32
Collins, Jim, 110
Collins, Kerry, 92–93
Colorado Avalanche, 80
Command-and-control
leadership, 147–49
Commitment, 124–26,
132
Communication
as leadership skill,
8
of passion, 23
pay process and,
181, 184
trust and, 137,
149–50
Community service,
139
Compensation, 42–43,
44, 176–81
communication
and, 181, 184
engaging people
through, 178–81
fairness and, 182
Competitive advantage,
109
Computers, 32
Confrontation, 6
Constantine, Kevin, 120
Continental Airlines, 16
Control, over work,
35–36
Cottrell, Ted, 95
Courage, 114
Cox, Bobby, 128–29
Crenshaw, Ben, 112–13
Criticism, 6, 147–49
Cuban, Mark, 157
Culpepper, Daunte, 126
Culture, 54–61
American, 19
chemistry and,
135–36
Cunningham, Randall,
125
Customer service
companies, 22
D
Daft, Douglas, 165
Dallas Mavericks, 157
Dallas Stars, 111
Daneyko, Ken, 122
Davis, Butch, 21, 172
Davis, Ricky, 148–49
Decision-making, 6, 13
Delegation, 133, 169
Del Greco, Al, 91
Demographics, and
skills, 31–32
Denver Broncos, 50
Department of Labor,
31, 33
Details, attention to,
169–70, 184
Development mandate,
83–86
Dierker, Larry, 149
Discipline, 24–26,
167–69, 183
Ditka, Mike, 22, 66, 71,
93, 147
Diversity, 102–3
balance and, 88–90
increase of talent
and, 90–94
in life, 97–101
management and,
94–96
showing
importance of,
78
talent and, 90–94
Dominant value
proposition, 51
Dreher, George, 89
Drivers, 5–6, 7–10
fit vs. talent and, 63
goals and, 132–33.
See also Goals
individuals and, 89
mental toughness
and, 70
recognizing/
building on
strength, 74–75
selecting
employees for
cultural fit, 55
structure and,
183–84
talent and, 82,
102–3
trust and, 159
Drucker, Peter, 31
Duncan, Tim, 154
Dungy, Tony, 93, 95, 96
Duval, David, 65
Dynasty-building,
79–83
E
Economic value, stress
on, 6
Edmonds, Jim, 53,
87–88
Education, trust and,
138
Edwards, Herman, 95,
142
204 I N D E X
Edwardson, John, 66
Egos, 61, 145–47
Eisenhower, Dwight, 38
Elway, John, 50
Emotions, expressing,
14
Employees
admiration/
integrity and,
19–20
attitudes and
values of, 47
development and,
83–86
discipline/
participation,
24–26
engagement of,
15–26
exposure and
knowledge,
15–17
inspiring, 105–6.
See also Goals
passion/intensity,
10–14
relationship
building/caring,
17–18
selecting for fit to
values/beliefs,
54–61
Employment
relationships
describing, 46
market-driven,
29–30
Empowerment, 133
Engagement,
importance of,
185–88
Enron, 20, 44
Ethics, 20
Ewing, Patrick, 65
Executive search firms,
43
Exposure, 15–17
F
Fairness, 138
Fassel, Jim, 131–32, 140,
142
Fear, 184
Finley, Michael, 157
Flexibility, 34
Floyd, Tim, 25
Focus, 102, 106–9
long-term, 7
short-term, 6
Football
see also specific
coaches; players;
teams
black quarterbacks
and, 93
season, 21–22
Fortune magazine’s best
workplaces, 33, 40,
54, 83
Fours Seasons Hotel, 51
Free agency, 42, 58
Freedom, 35, 163–64
Ftorek, Robbie, 120
G
Gannon, Rich, 58–59
Garland, Jon, 118
Garnett, Kevin, 157, 177
Gasol, Pau, 91
General Electric, 82, 86
Generation X, 31, 36,
37
Generation Y, 32, 36
Genius, vs. talent, 63–65
Gentry, Alvin, 85
George, Jeff, 125
Gibson, Bob, 52
Gill, Kendall, 176
Gilliam, Frank, 93–94
Gillick, Pat, 57, 118–19,
146
Giuliani, Rudy, 20
Glanville, Doug, 118
Goals, 4–5, 45, 105–33
accountability and,
166–67
enemies of, 113–19
focus and, 106–9
risk and, 119–32.
See also Risk
value of big,
109–13
Golf, 111–13, 180
Gonzalez, Luis, 150
GOOBER, 178
Grace, Mark, 165–66
Grainger, David, 16
Grant, Horace, 64, 145
Green, A.C., 6, 8–10
Green, Dennis, 7, 21,
54–55, 60, 95, 124,
125–26, 143
Green, Trent, 14–15
Griffey, Ken Jr., 2,
145–46, 176–77
Gross domestic
product, 31
Gruden, Jon, 58–59
Guzman, Christian, 87
H
Hampton, Dan, 71
Hansen, Jason, 91
Harley Davidson, 81
Harris, James, 93
Harvard Business
Review, 43
Harvard Business
School, 5
Haslett, Jim, 66–67, 69
Hayes, Woody, 148
Heroism, 19
Hewitt Associates, 40,
65–66, 77–78, 106
Hidalgo, Richard, 91
Hierarchy, 162
Hill, Glenallen, 87
Hitchcock, Ken, 111,
148
I N D E X 205
Honesty, 20, 82, 138,
142
Houston Astros, 149
I
IBM, 42
Identity, 111
Income, 42–43
Individualism, 4–5, 19,
22, 77–79
Information industry,
41–42
Inkster, Juli, 98, 99
Innovation, 122, 166,
184
Inspiration, 111
Integrity, 19–20, 138
Intellectually
challenging work, 22
Intensity, 20–24
Intervention, 13
Iverson, Allen, 62, 63,
89–90, 174
J
Jabbar, Kareem Abdul,
38
Jackson, Phil
Bill Bradley on, 1, 4
Chicago Bulls and,
3, 61, 71, 123,
155–56
leadership style,
10, 11, 12, 18,
54–55
Los Angeles
Lakers and, 2,
25, 29, 40, 62,
144–45, 153
Tex Winter and, 5,
129
triangle offense
and, 164
James, William, 151
Jauron, Dick, 116–17,
171
Jealousy, 180
Jeter, Derek, 3, 87
Job searches, 34
Job security, 33
Jocketty, Walt, 52–53
Johnson, Magic, 38
Johnson, Randy, 2, 91,
146
Jones, Eddie, 170
Jones, Michael, 121
Jordan, Michael, 3, 61,
64, 70, 72, 77, 123,
145, 155–57
Justice, David, 87
K
Keenan, Mike, 164
Kennedy, Adam, 87
Kerr, Steve, 22, 123
King, Stacy, 18
Kite, Tom, 112
Knight, Bobby, 148
Knoblauch, Chuck, 87
Knowledge, 15–17
Konerko, Paul, 143
Korn Ferry, 96
Kraft Foods, 86
Krasny, Michael, 66
Krause, Jerry, 129,
155–57
L
Labor market, volatility
and, 29–30
Lamoriello, Lou, 80, 82,
120, 122
LaRussa, Tony, 52, 176
Law firms, as agents, 43
Layoffs, 30, 32, 42, 186
Leadership
big goals and,
109–13
command-andcontrol,
147–49
employee trust in,
137–38
engaging for
success, 3–4
goals and, 4–5
styles. See
Leadership
style(s)
womens, minorities
and, 96
Leadership style(s), 6–10
builders, 5, 6–10
determining, 26
diversity and, 89
drivers, 5–6, 7–10
and engaging
employees,
15–26
ineffective, 9–10
modifying, 47
quiz, 26–27
versatility and,
10–15
Lehman, Tom, 112
Lewis, Marvin, 68, 95,
96
Lewis, Ray, 46
Lewis, Sherman, 143
Lietzke, Bruce, 98,
99–100
Lietzke, Rosemarie, 100
Lilly, Ted, 87
Lincoln, Howard, 179
Lombardi, Vince, 152
Longley, Luc, 64
Los Angeles Clippers,
84–85
Los Angeles Lakers, 2,
11, 18, 25, 62, 64,
72–73, 129, 153, 174
Lowe, Sean, 142–43
Loyalty, 29, 32–33, 42,
97, 186
Lynch, Ed, 118, 129–30
Lynch, George, 148
206 I N D E X
M
McDonald’s, 187
McGregor, Douglas, 5
McGriff, Fred, 166
McGwire, Mark, 52, 53,
98, 176–77
McMillan, Nate, 175
McNair, Steve, 121
McNown, Cade, 114–16
MacPhail, Andy, 110,
118, 130
Maggette, Corey, 85
Malone, Karl, 65, 171
Mantle, Mickey, 119
Manuel, Jerry, 124–25,
126–27, 143
Manufacturing
companies, 22
Marbury, Stephon, 177
Mariucci, Steve, 21–22
Market-driven
employment
relationships, 29–30
Market leaders, 51
Martin, Billy, 71, 77
Martinez, Edgar, 3
Martz, Mike, 121
Marx, Groucho, 161
Matthews, Shane,
114–16
Mazzone, Leo, 128–29
Meaningfulness, 111,
138
Mendoza, Romero, 87
Mental toughness, 69–73
Miami Heat, 6, 8–9, 170
Mickelson, Phil, 65, 98
Micromanaging, 139–40
Microsoft, 106–7
Miles, Darius, 85
Miller, Jim, 114–16
Milton, Eric, 87
Milwaukee Brewers, 84,
95
Minnesota Vikings, 7, 8,
9, 60, 95, 125–26,
143–44
Mission, 106
Mixed messages,
114–17
Montreal Expos, 95
Moon, Warren, 93
Moss, Randy, 7, 9
Motivation, 177
Mueller, Randy, 66–67
Mussina, Mike, 58
N
Neagle, Denny, 87
New England Patriots,
10, 25, 50–51, 108, 169
New Jersey Devils, 80,
119–20, 122, 167–68
New Orleans Saints,
66–67, 83
Newscome, Ozzie, 95
New York Giants,
92–93, 131, 141
New York Mets, 1–2
New York Yankees, 1–2,
58, 72, 79, 84, 87,
107–8, 129
Nextel, 51
Nicklaus, Jack, 119
O
Oakland A’s, 56–57
Oakland Raiders, 58–59
O’Brien, Jim, 153–54,
170
O’Dowd, Dan, 57
O’Neal, Shaquille, 2, 11,
18, 29, 40, 62, 64, 144,
153, 174
100 Best Places to Work
(Fortune), 33, 40, 54,
83
O’Neil, Paul, 87
Opinions, valuing, 153
Organizational
capabilities, 7
Organizational
structure. See
Structure
Orlando Magic, 65, 150
P
Palmer, Chris, 21,
171–72
Parcells, Bill, 22, 43
Parnevik, Jasper, 98
Participation, 24–26
Passion, 20–24, 114
Paxson, John, 123
Pay, competitive, 42.
See also
Compensation
Payton, Gary, 165,
174–75
Peer leaders, 173–74,
183, 184
PepsiCo, 82
Pettite, Andy, 87
Philadelphia Eagles,
131
Philadelphia 76ers, 62,
89–90, 174
Phoenix Suns, 165
Pierce, Paul, 170
Piniella, Lou, 2, 3, 10,
11–12, 23, 25, 98, 147
Pippen, Scottie, 3, 73,
156
Pitino, Rick, 69, 147,
153–54
Policy, Carmen, 21
Portland Trail Blazers,
72–73, 108
Posada, Jorge, 87
Positive attitude, 7
Powell, Colin, 17
Pressure, 6
Pride, 111
Process-driven
companies, 22
Professional treatment,
140
I N D E X 207
R
Recognition, 152–53
Recruiting, 42
Relationships, 6, 17–18,
36–37
Restructuring, 32, 42
Richardson, Quentin,
85
Rickey, Branch, 130
Rider, J.R., 62
Righetti, Dave, 141
Riley, Pat, 6, 8–10,
38–39, 148–49, 170
Risk, 119–32
anticipation and,
122
employee
energizing and,
123–27
innovation and, 122
payoff of, 130–32
requirements for,
121–23
sacrifice and, 123
support for risk
takers, 128–30
Rivera, Mariano, 87
Rivers, Doc, 65, 150
Robinson, Larry, 120,
122, 167–68
Rodman, Dennis, 61,
156
Rodriguez, Alex, 2, 147,
177, 178–79
Roles, 172–75
Ryder Cups, 111–13
S
S.C. Johnson, 100–101
Sabean, Brian, 49, 59, 87
Sacramento Kings, 92
Sacrifice, 123
Safin, Marat, 90
San Francisco 49ers, 21,
59
San Francisco Giants,
141
Schilling, Curt, 150
Schuler, Ron, 97
Seattle Mariners, 2–3,
11, 25, 92, 98, 145–47
Seattle SuperSonics,
165, 174
Security, 166
Seinfeld, Jerry, 42
Self-confidence, 114
Self-employed, 33
Self-expression, 35
Self-organization, 163
Self-preservation, 34
Self-reliance, 37, 88
Selig, Bud, 95
Selig-Prieb, Wendy, 95
Service industry, 41–42
Sheffield, Gary, 179
Short-term results, 43
Showalter, Buck, 39
Signs, 109
Simplicity, 170–72
Sinden, Harry, 165
Singh, Vijay, 65
Skills, demographics
and, 31–32
Sloan, Jerry, 170–71
Slogans, 109
Smith, Ozzie, 52
Snow, J.T., 141
Social values, 138
Sojo, Luis, 72
Sosa, Sammy, 91,
129–30, 174
Southwest Airlines, 51,
66, 81, 138
Sports, college, 46
Sports, professional
problems with,
45–46
sports/business
analogy, 41–44
Sports Illustrated, 119
St. Louis Cardinals, 52,
87–88, 98
St. Louis Rams, 50, 66,
108, 121, 169
Stengel, Casey, 3, 107,
172
Stevens, Scott, 168
Stockton, John, 65, 171
Strategy, 105
Strength, building on,
49–54
Structure, 162–84
accountability and,
164–67
affinity, 163
chemistry and,
135–36
details, 169–70
discipline, 167–69
of engagement,
161–64
loose-tight, 163–64
money and, 176–81
roles, 172–75
self-organization,
163
simplicity, 170–72
trust over money
and, 181
Success, measurement
of, 44
Supply and demand, 30
Suzuki, Ichiro, 3, 92
Symbols, 109
T
Talent, 45
accountability and,
36
adaptation and,
65–69
career/life balance,
97–101
caring and, 36–37
closing gaps, 86–88
coming shortage
of, 30–34
control and, 35–36
208 I N D E X
development
mandate, 83–86
diversity and,
90–94
dynasty-building,
79–83
engaging
leadership and,
3, 39–41
evaluating, 49,
81–82
vs. fit, 61–63
freedom and, 35
vs. genius, 63–65
individuals and,
77–79
management and
diversity, 94–96
merge of balance/
diversity, 88–90
money and, 176–81
opportunities for,
39–40
racism and, 93–96
responding to
values of, 37–39
shortage of, 46
Tampa Bay Devil Rays,
84
Temporary workers, 33
Tennessee Titans, 121
Tension, 23
Thomas, Frank, 124,
127, 179
Tice, Mike, 60
Torre, Joe, 1–2, 3, 10, 12,
39, 49, 58, 72, 128,
135, 140, 149
Training, 83
Trust, 123
appreciation and,
151–58
chemistry and,
135–59
communications
and, 149–50
concept of trust,
136–42
criticism as threat
to, 147–49
egos as threat to,
145–47
meeting
expectations
and, 137
trust among peers,
142–45
Tyco, 44
U
Unemployement, 30
Unions, 43
United Airlines, 187
U.S. workforce, 31–32
“Us against the world”
mentality, 71
Utah Jazz, 170–71
V
Value creation, 41–42
Values, 32–34, 35, 47
Veeck, Bill, 176, 177
Vermeil, Dick, 14–15,
21, 56, 66, 69, 82, 121,
122–23, 143, 151
Versatility, 10–15, 26, 122
Vina, Fernando, 53
Vision, 106, 117–19
Vision statements, 117
Volatility, in labor
market, 29–30
Volunteering, 139
Votaw, Ty, 99
W
Walker, Antoine, 154
Walker, Wally, 165
Wal-Mart, 51, 110
Walsh, Bill, 59, 67–68
Warner, Kurt, 92, 121,
122–23
Washington Redskins,
108
Weaver, Earl, 135
Welch, Jack, 82
Wells, David, 127
Wells, Mike, 166
Westphal, Paul, 165, 175
Williams, Bernie, 3, 87
Williams, Doug, 93
Williams, Venus, 90
Williams, Woody, 53
Winter, Tex, 5, 129
Wooden, John, 145
Woods, Tiger, 64–65, 91
Workforce, in U.S.,
31–32
Work-life balance, 103
WorldCom, 44
World Series, 50
World Trade Center
crisis, 20
W.W. Grainger, 16
Y
Yao Ming, 92
Z
Zimmer, Don, 49, 128
I N D E X 209
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