Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (31 page)

Discipline
: Debate Maker

Diminisher Assumption
:
There are only a few people worth listening to.

Multiplier Assumption
:
With enough minds, we can figure it out.

Discipline
: Investor

Diminisher Assumption
:
People are smart and will figure things out.

Multiplier Assumption
:
People will never be able to figure it out without me.

Accelerator #3
:
Take a 30-Day Multiplier Challenge

The most effective and enduring learning involves small, successive experimentation with new approaches. When these small experiments produce successful outcomes, the resulting energy fuels the next, slightly bigger experiment. Over time, these experiments form new patterns of behavior that establish a new baseline. One technique to catalyze this cycle of experimentation is to take a 30-Day Multiplier Challenge and focus your efforts on a single discipline for thirty days. Why thirty days? Research shows that it takes approximately thirty days of concentrated effort to form a new habit. Like any good researcher, you should record your experiences in a journal, learning from what works and what doesn’t.

Here’s a glimpse into what happened when five different leaders, and in some cases their management team, took the 30-Day Challenge. We’ve highlighted one for each of the five disciplines (and we’ve changed several names).

LABELING TALENT
Jack Bossidy
³
was the team leader in a manufacturing plant. He could see some members of his team dominated meetings
while others withdrew. Curiously, the one person who spoke most in the meetings was the one person who felt most underutilized and undervalued.

Jack decided to take a 30-Day Challenge and began by genius watching. He took note of the native genius of each member of his team. In his next staff meeting, he spoke of each person, why they were needed on the team, and the unique capabilities they brought. He went beyond labeling each person’s genius one-on-one and labeled it in front of the whole group. The team then reviewed the work that needed to get done over the next quarter and determined assignments. Although not explicitly asked of them, the team naturally ensured each person had an assignment that demanded one or more of his or her unique capabilities.

What do you suppose happened to the undervalued but overly dominating team member? He actually talked less, listened more, and began to draw out the capabilities of the others. Under the leadership of an aspiring Multiplier, he went from dominating to multiplying. He told Jack, “It feels like we are really working as a team now.”

LIBERATING LOKESH
Christine faced a common management challenge: how to get the most out of a smart but timid colleague. Lokesh always showed deference to other people’s ideas. Instead of offering his own opinion, he would just go with what other people recommended. It gave the impression that he didn’t have any ideas. Christine found that it was easy to dominate meetings with Lokesh. Without meaning to, she would end up overexpressing her views and speaking 80 percent of the time. The more she tried to rescue him, the worse things seemed to be. The more she “mentored” Lokesh, the less he seemed to contribute.

Christine took the 30-Day Challenge and focused on being a Liberator to Lokesh by making more space for him. She began by asking, “How is Lokesh smart?” The question snapped her out of her more judgmental Diminisher assumptions and put her on a safari. As his
abilities came into focus for her (his years of experience and his ability to break complex activities into actionable plans), she found it easier to ask him questions and to give him space to answer them.

Christine noticed an immediate change. Lokesh started to offer opinions. He spoke 50 percent or more in their interactions. He volunteered for the majority of the action items. He stepped into the role of a creator. And within days, one of the clients had commented to Christine about the difference. Christine summarized her learning by saying, “The silence creates the space. The space creates results. The results are valuable. And I have already seen a payoff!”

CHALLENGING STUDENTS
Meredith Byrne
⁴
was in her second year of teaching high school. The class was a specialized topic, which meant four grade levels were in the same class. She was overwhelmed with the enormous range of abilities in her class (one student was taking exams two years ahead of schedule while another was two years behind) and there was no foreseeable way to reduce her class size.

Meredith took the 30-Day Challenge. As she put on her Multiplier glasses, she suddenly saw how underutilized many of her students were. She selected her top all-around student, Bryan, and asked him to assume the role of student leader for the class. She confessed that the role was new and did not yet have clear goals. She seeded some ideas for goals and extended a concrete challenge to him: Define and fulfill this role in a way that next semester the class would continue the tradition.

Bryan went from being a solid student to being an active leader in the class. He selected several other students to work with him, and together they organized academic competitions between their class and other classes in the district—all on their own time. When Meredith asked Bryan how fully he was being engaged, he said that he probably went from 60 to 110 percent. That’s an almost two times increase from the person who was already a high performing student. And he increased the engagement of the rest of the class in the process.

DEBATE IN DODGEVILLE
Roughly every six months, the inventory management division at Lands End, based in Dodgeville, Wisconsin, would get an urgent request from the executive management team for a new approach to forecasting. When this request comes in, the senior inventory managers typically lock themselves in a room and find a Band-Aid tool that satisfies the immediate request. Inevitably, the Band-Aid comes loose and those people uninvolved and underutilized in the decision-making process were then overworked trying to force the plan to work.

But this time it was different. The entire inventory management team had just signed up for the 30-Day Challenge and selected the Debate Maker discipline for their work. This time, when the urgent request came from senior management, the group prepared for a thorough debate to find a sustainable solution. They brought in senior planners and the IT group (who usually had to scramble after the fact), who could give practical input to the feasibility of any suggested solution. They framed the issues and set ground rules for debate, including no barriers to the thinking. The team challenged their assumptions and in the end developed a means of in-season forecasting that served the new demands. The solution they arrived at started as a wild idea, but with input from IT, it became a plausible reality.

INVESTING IN RENEWABLE ENERGY
Gregory Pal is a thoughtful and intense MIT graduate with an MBA from Harvard who works as a manager in an alternative energy start-up. Gregory is known for his ability to solve complex problems. As a reviewer of the early versions of this book, he admitted to feeling torn between his growing desire to lead like a Multiplier and the mounting pressures he faced at work. He found a way through his dilemma by taking on the 30-Day Challenge with a clear and focused target in mind.

Gregory had recently hired Michael, a talented individual with rich experience as an employee of the Brazilian embassy, but wasn’t fully utilizing him. Michael was the only team member working remotely
and was often “out of sight, out of mind.” Michael estimated he was being utilized at the 20 to 25 percent mark.

Gregory began the challenge by making a few simple investments. He gave Michael full ownership for capturing their Brazilian partnership strategy on paper for a critical board meeting. He then integrated Michael virtually into company-wide meetings so his ideas could be heard. He touched base with him often, but didn’t take over his work. Within just a couple of weeks, Michael said he felt like he was being utilized at 75 to 80 percent. This represents a threefold utilization gain!

Yet the real gain, according to Gregory, came from a slight change in perspective. Once he started looking at the people around him through the lens of a Multiplier, he said that opportunities started presenting themselves. Instead of feeling frustrated at having to step in and redo work, he found ways to help other people take their thinking to the next level. He could take charge without taking over. He began to do things differently because he began to see his role differently.

Greg McKeown and I have been inspired as we have witnessed senior leaders and front-line managers taking the 30-Day Challenge. It has been interesting to read their journals as they documented their struggles and successes. In many cases these leaders have been generously willing to publish their experiences here and online at www.MultipliersBook.com. Here you can check out their stories, download tools to take the 30-Day Challenge yourself, and share your success. Join the community of leaders taking the Multiplier Challenge.

SUSTAINING MOMENTUM

Taking a 30-Day Challenge will put you on the Multiplier path and will produce initial traction and momentum. But it takes more than
a quick win to truly become a Multiplier. Sustaining the momentum takes repetition, time, and reinforcement.

1. BUILD IT LAYER BY LAYER.
I remember exactly where I was the first time I heard
Boléro
, the classical music composition by Maurice Ravel. Its stark simplicity and powerful conclusion made a lasting impression on me. The piece, which Ravel himself described as containing almost “no music,” is an exploration of repetition and crescendo. It consists of a simple two-part melody repeated eighteen times over the course of fifteen minutes. In each repetition, a new instrument is added as the orchestra plays with increased energy, growing more insistent and louder.
⁵
It opens simply with two flutes. Then in comes a bassoon. Then another layer is added with a clarinet and then an oboe and next a trumpet. Soon there are strings, woodwinds, and brass to vary the texture of the music. With each new layer of instruments, momentum and energy build. The piece, which began softly with only the sound of a flute, culminates as the entire orchestra sounds the simple theme and ends with a booming crescendo as the last of the 4,037 drumbeats is heard.

Mastery of skills like those of the Multiplier is developed in much the same way that
Boléro
unfolds: a layer at a time, building on a simple tune. A leader begins with a simple assumption and a singular idea, that
people are smart and the job of the leader is to draw out the intelligence of others.
With this simple idea, leaders might begin by restraining themselves more and listening to others. They then might start asking more questions. They become skilled in the art of asking the right questions and begin posing the most difficult questions that challenge the underlying assumptions of the organization. They then use these questions to seed and establish challenges for the organization. Next they bring this sense of challenge and inquiry into key decisions and become masterful Debate Makers. Like the instruments in
Boléro
, by adding these skills a layer at a time, they achieve mastery and have a powerful effect on others.

Becoming a Multiplier is achieved with a single idea, repeated over and over, while new skills are introduced and orchestrated into a leadership gestalt.

2. STAY WITH IT FOR A YEAR.
Momentum can be built quickly. Mastery takes time. In his book
Outliers
, Malcolm Gladwell introduces the “10,000-Hour Rule” citing the research of Anders Ericsson and others that claims that the development of expertise or greatness is a function of practice and time—about 10,000 hours of practice, to be exact. While true mastery indeed develops over years of regular practice, a foundation or baseline of capability can be established in one year of consistent, purposeful effort.

An insightful colleague, Dinesh Chandra, once observed that the best work is done when one can hold a single question for a long time. Dinesh is known for asking, “What is the question that you are asking yourself this year?” Each year, he carries with him a question that challenges his thinking and sparks learning. Inspired by Dinesh a couple of years ago, I adopted an intriguing question for myself:
How is what I know getting in the way of what I don’t know?
By simply asking this question, I was compelled to venture beyond the realm of my own understanding. Holding this question for a year (actually, I’m still working on it) and asking it in numerous settings has helped me transcend the limitations of my own knowledge and find ways to better see and access the intelligence of others.

In the spirit of the Multiplier, one might adopt an annual question, such as:

• What would cause other people to become smarter and more capable around me?
  
• What could people figure out on their own if I just gave them more space?
  
• How can I get the full brainpower of my team or organization?