Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (16 page)

RAISING THE BAR
When Matt took over as president he had the benefit of a recently rejuvenated product line but the challenge of some sloppy business operations. He saw an opportunity not only to grow sales, but to vastly increase net income per share, which was then at $0.69 per share. Using his deep knowledge of operations and inventory optimization, he estimated the upside opportunity, and then went to the board and told them he believed the company could achieve $1.00 per share. The board members laughed, but Matt remained convinced of the opportunity.

As Matt met with his management team, he explained his rationale for the growth opportunity in both sales and earnings per share. He took them through the calculations for sales and expense optimizations that he had been studying for the last five years and asked if they could indeed be achieved. He then threw out “Mission Impossible”—a net income of $1.00. He asked each member of his management team this question: “What would be your Mission Impossible?” As the management team caught the enthusiasm of this high-bar approach, they began to ask the entire organization to do the same. Soon every person inside this 9,500-person organization had a Mission Impossible goal—a crazy aspiration. It appeared that
being asked to identify their personal Mission Impossible ignited the charge to make it possible.

CLEARING THE BAR
A year later Matt announced to the board, to Wall Street, and to every employee in Gymboree that they had achieved not just the “Mission Impossible” goal of $1.00 per share, but $1.19 per share, which represented a 72 percent improvement over the previous fiscal year.

Fueled by this accomplishment, what did Matt do next? He set the bar higher and suggested to the board that they could achieve $2.00 per share. This time the board thought it was outrageous. But he turned to his organization for support, sharing his Mission Impossible task and once again asking every person to create their personal Mission Impossible needed to achieve $2.00 per share. In fiscal year 2007, they delivered $2.15 per share, an 80 percent improvement.

Again Matt went to the board to suggest $3 per share. One year later he announced $2.67 per share and two years later, in 2008, an incredible $3.21 per share. That is a more than 50 percent increase in earnings per share year over year and an almost fivefold increase in four years.

This young Challenger CEO used his deep knowledge of the business to see both an opportunity and a path for achieving unheard-of levels of business performance. He articulated this opportunity and laid down the challenge for the organization. He then asked each person to join him in attempting the impossible and to analyze how they might achieve it. By setting the bar high, he gave people permission to rethink the business. By asking them to create their personal Mission Impossible, he allowed them to embrace and step into the challenge themselves. And by acknowledging the impossible nature of the mission, he gave people permission to try without fear of failure.

How does a Multiplier achieve this level of stretch without breaking an organization? How do you create intrigue rather than apprehension? In our research, we found that Multipliers achieve this energizing stretch in three ways.

First, they extend a clear and concrete challenge. Then they ask
the hard questions that need to be answered to achieve the challenge, but, most important,
they
don’t answer them. They let others fill in the blanks.

Extend a Concrete Challenge

Sean Mendy works as a director of an after-school program in East Palo Alto, California, a city that in 1992 had the highest per-capita murder rate in the United States and a city where dropping out of high school is a norm. Sean himself faced many challenges growing up, but went on to attend and graduate from Cornell University.

After graduation, Sean decided to spend a year at the Boys and Girls Club of the Peninsula. Four years later, he can’t bring himself to leave. Even now, after being accepted into a graduate program at Stanford, you can find him doing his homework at the club beside youth half his age. With a journey like Sean’s, he has ample reason to tell the teens he works with what they need to do to succeed. But, instead of telling, he challenges.

When Sean first met Tajianna Robinson (or Taji), she was a shy and hesitant twelve-year-old. When she reluctantly shook his outstretched hand, he stopped her and with a big smile said, “You know there are three things you might want to do when you meet someone. First, look them in the eye. Second, give them a firm hand. Third, shake their hand up and down three full times.” Taji was appalled but intrigued.

Sean continued to extend small, specific challenges to her. He asked Taji if she would take a newspaper class. She did. Then he encouraged her to write a main article for the school paper, meet regularly with a writing tutor, and learn how to write a great essay. Again, she did. Next, he encouraged her to raise the bar and compete in her school’s Scholar of the Year competition. She won!

Sean extends these challenges by asking the youth hard questions and then giving them the space to think and respond. As Taji put it, “He taught me to think for myself.” This allows youth like Taji to
strengthen intellectual muscles and build the confidence they need to tackle the hardest challenges.

Early on with Taji, Sean looked her in the eye and asked, “If you could get out of this environment, what would you do?” There was a long silence. Finally Taji said, “I’d go to college.” Sean responded, “What would it take for you to do that?” After several moments of reflection, her eyes lit up, “I’d need to get into the right high school!” They set a goal for Taji to earn a scholarship to one of the top-tier prep schools in the surrounding area. Sean asked, “Where should we start?”

Taji led the process, but together they figured out which schools would be the best fit. They completed applications and prepared for her high school interviews. Then, the night before one of the biggest interviews, Taji’s family left her at home to do her homework while they went out for a drive. As the family pulled up to a stop sign, a gunman approached the car, firing multiple bullets into the vehicle that was transporting three small children. Taji’s older cousin was shot in the back, and her six-year-old sister was shot in the leg. Nobody died, but it was traumatic in every conceivable way.

The next morning Sean suggested Taji might want to reschedule the high school interview they had planned. But through her emotions she yelled, “This is how I am going to get out of here! This is what I need to do to have the kind of life I want. And this is how I can help my family and make sure it doesn’t happen again!” She wiped her tears, went to the interview, and blew away everyone she met. Tajianna was accepted to four competitive preparatory schools, earning full scholarships to each. She now attends Sacred Heart, a private school in Atherton, California, and has flourished into a resilient, motivated, and strikingly bright fourteen-year-old girl.

Out of the seventeen students in Sean’s eighth-grade program, twelve have received scholarships to prestigious prep schools and the other five have entered rigorous college-track programs. Sean served
as a Challenger, helping these youth raise their aspiration level and build the mental agility they would need to get and stay on a course of success.

Whether it is Matt McCauley at Gymboree extending the $2 challenge, or Shai Agassi inviting his team to find a way to change a battery in less than five minutes, or Sean Mendy issuing the college-bound challenge, our research showed that Multipliers use their intelligence to make challenges concrete for others. These challenges become tangible and measurable, allowing people to assess their performance. And by making a challenge real, they allow others to visualize the achievement and communicate the confidence that the organization has the collective brainpower required. This confidence is essential because the challenge will demand the entire organization to extend beyond its current reach and capability.

Ask the Hard Questions

Diminishers give answers. Good leaders ask questions. Multipliers ask the really hard questions. They ask the questions that challenge people not only to think but to rethink. They ask questions so immense that people can’t answer them based on their current knowledge or where they currently stand. To answer these questions, the organization must learn.

Enabled by these big questions, a vacuum is created. It is a vacuum between what people know and what they need to know to answer the question. It also is a vacuum between what they can currently do and what they need to be able to do. This vacuum creates a deep tension in the organization and raises a need to reduce that tension. It is like a rubber band that is stretched to its limit. One side needs to move toward the other to reduce the tension.

Matt McCauley at Gymboree created this forward pull when he asked each member of his organization, “What is your Mission Impossible?” Shai Agassi created this tension at Better Place when he asked,
“How would we build an infrastructure to switch batteries from any electric car anywhere in the world, and do it cheaply?”

Let Others Fill in the Blanks

How do Multipliers get people to step into a challenge? They shift the burden of the thinking to others. Initially, when they establish a concrete challenge, the burden of the thinking sits with them as the leader. But by asking the hard questions and inviting others to fill in the blanks, they are shifting the burden of thinking onto their people. The intellectual onus now sits with their team to understand the challenge and find a solution. It is in this shift that the Multiplier creates intelligence and energy around him or herself.

After assuming leadership of a new division in a large consumer electronics company in Korea, the CEO called his management team together and informed them of his goals to be number one in the market and to become a magnet company attracting top college graduates. He was clear that the trajectory for the organization would not be incremental. He had a vision of something big. He then engaged a broad array of stakeholders in analyzing how to achieve the number one position. The coalition included key executives, founding family members, and outside consultants. Assembling the coalition, he seeded the opportunity and posed the difficult questions such as, “Why are we in this business?” and “Do we deserve to be in this business?” and “What would it take to be better than our competition?”

These questions cut to the bones of the organization and stirred up chaos. Yet he never backed down. The tension forced the team to generate answers. He asked the hard questions and then let the team fill in the blanks. As they did, he maintained a tight time frame. He said, “I don’t need 100 percent answers. I need a 30 percent answer in two days. Give me a 30 percent answer so we can talk about it and decide if it makes sense for you to find a 50 percent answer. And if we get there, we’ll block two months to get a 100 percent answer.”

In the end there were clear answers. The process took months and was scrappy, but it built the intellectual muscle and energy the organization needed for the challenge.

Laying down a challenge means more than directing people to do it. It includes asking the hard questions that no one yet has the answers to and then backing off so that the people within the organization have the space to think through the questions, take ownership, and find the answers.

When a Multiplier has successfully laid down the challenge, people see the stretch, are intrigued, and become intellectually engaged. The burden of thinking has been shifted to the organization. This process of ownership and stretch continues to build energy by creating the intellectual muscle for the challenge.

III. Generate Belief

By seeding the opportunity and laying down a challenge, people are interested in what is possible. But this isn’t enough to create movement. Multipliers generate belief—the belief that the impossible is actually possible. It isn’t enough that people see and understand the stretch; they need to actually stretch themselves.

The following are a few ways we discovered that Multipliers produce this belief in their organizations.

Helicopter Down

One way Multipliers generate belief is by taking the challenge down to the ground level. K.R. Sridhar, CEO of Bloom Energy, whose vision is to produce power generators for homes and businesses at half the carbon emissions of traditional power generators, explained, “The direction needs to be improbable but not impossible. It can’t just exist at 30,000 feet. It has to be at the 1,000 foot level. It is irresponsible to ask your team to do something if the CEO exposure is only at the 30,000 foot level. You have to take it down and show that it can be done. You
have to show them a pathway and show why it can be done. You only need to do this once to create the belief.” By “helicoptering” down to reality, Multipliers create a meaningful proof point that a bold challenge can be successfully met.

Lay Out a Path

Shai Agassi is a master at making the impossible seem possible. When he was leading the technology organization at SAP, he challenged the team to build a rapid deployment package that would allow a mid-size company to install SAP in less than seven days. This was unheard of, as a typical SAP implementation is measured in months, not days. But he didn’t just issue this outrageous challenge, he helped find a path. He and the team analyzed historical implementations and found that 90 percent of the implementations shared the same features, and discovered that this configuration works for most mid-size companies. With this insight, the team could see a path toward a seven-day implementation program, and they proceeded to make it happen.

Co-Create the Plan

When people create the plan that they eventually will implement, belief in its viability will be inherently high. Led by Ray Lane in 1996, Oracle not only built a strategic intent, it also built a deep belief within the organization that Oracle could lead the Internet era. Because 250 senior leaders were given the opportunity to co-create the corporate strategy, they understood the challenge ahead and knew what actions would be necessary to achieve it. They had built the collective will and energy needed to execute. The organization was ready to take the challenge.