Taking People With You: The Only Way to Make Big Things Happen Paperback (19 page)

Exercise

As you look into the future, what stories can you hear yourself or your team telling about why your Big Goal wasn’t well executed? Choose one of these stories and ask yourself the following questions:

•   What is the gap? Is it a resource, organization, or process gap?
  
•   What can I do
  now
  to close that gap and eliminate the story?
  

The final part of your plan is your culture. This is a critical ingredient that many leaders forget to consider. Or they just ignore it. Too many people view culture as one of those “soft” things in business, not nearly as important as hard results like sales figures or financial returns. But having the right culture, one that breeds positive energy and success, is crucial not just to the success of your current goal, but to anything you and your team want to accomplish going forward. A great culture is what will allow you to get those hard results and get them consistently.

What is culture? I don’t really like the word, as it sounds too much like a germ to me, but what I’m really talking about here is the work environment. As a leader, what sort of values are you projecting? What kind of atmosphere do you create for your team? Is it one in which people are excited to go to work every day, feel supported and appreciated, and know they can grow? There is a big difference between people working toward a goal because they are getting paid to do it versus working toward a goal because it is a rewarding experience. That difference shows up in the hard results that we all care about.

As I mentioned before, soon after our spin-off from PepsiCo, we did a best-practices tour of some of the most successful companies around at the time, like Home Depot, Target, and GE. A common thread among all of them, even though some very different industries were represented, was a strong culture that permeated all functions and all
levels of the business. When we asked people at each of these companies what made them successful, they didn’t talk about their operating processes or even much about their products. They talked about their culture and how proud they were to be a part of it. Numbers don’t run a business—people do. And people need the supposedly “soft” things that come from a great culture to succeed. If you build the capability of your people first, then you’ll satisfy more customers, which will make you more money. That’s why culture is the foundation of any
successful business or team. It’s up to you to create a winning esprit de corps. It’s the soft stuff that drives hard results!

One of those early best-practices visits was to Southwest Airlines, and ever since, I’ve been a Southwest Airlines junkie. They were a perfect example of the kind of culture I wanted to create, one that put people first, was high-energy, and invited people to have fun while doing their jobs. The people at Southwest believe “Happy employees = happy customers. Happy customers keep Southwest flying.”

If you’re skeptical about the importance of culture to your business, just look at this one example. Southwest’s culture is their competitive advantage. Consider the hard results in critical areas for business growth, like retention, recruitment, customer satisfaction, and ultimately profits, that stem from it.

RETENTION
: Southwest has the lowest turnover rate in the industry, even though many of its jobs
pay less
than the same jobs at other airlines. That shows that people work there because they want to. Studies have found that two of the biggest reasons why people leave their jobs are because (1) they don’t feel appreciated and (2) they don’t get along with the boss. Those are culture reasons, not financial ones.

RECRUITMENT
: In 2008, the company hired 3,300 new employees and received a whopping 200,000 résumés for those 3,300 spots. That’s
more than sixty candidates for each position. Numbers like that practically ensure that the company will get good people to fill every role.

The only thing we have is one another. The only competitive advantage we have is the culture and values of the company. Anyone can open up a coffee store. We have no technology, we have no patent. All we have is the relationship around the values of the company and what we bring to the customer every day. And we all have to own it.

—
HOWARD SCHULTZ, CHAIRMAN, PRESIDENT AND CEO, STARBUCKS

CUSTOMER SATISFACTION
: Southwest’s customer satisfaction scores beat out every single one of their competitors’ and have done so every year for more than a decade, according to the American Customer Satisfaction Index.

PROFITS
: All this translates into a better bottom line. The company has enjoyed
thirty-six
consecutive years of profit growth.

At Yum!, we are becoming famous for our recognition culture. We regularly and publicly give awards to employees to recognize them for their good work. But our awards are not ordinary things, like a plaque or a fancy pen. Each leader chooses what form his award will take; some of mine have been floppy chickens (which I gave out when I was president of KFC) or cheeseheads (which is what I chose when I was at Pizza Hut). We also have a roving recognition band that plays when someone is being recognized. And those things are just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to how we recognize and appreciate our people. We went on that best-practices tour when we started, to help us learn how to develop the principles we needed to succeed; now companies are best-practicing us because of our recognition culture.

Building a strong culture wasn’t easy, and there were a lot of
naysayers in the beginning. When I first starting talking to people about the kinds of awards I wanted to give out, I was told by an executive in the United Kingdom that they just didn’t do things like that over there. And in China, I was told that their structures were too hierarchical, their people just wouldn’t understand it.

I stuck to my guns because I have always believed that people everywhere are similar in certain ways: They all want credit for their accomplishments; they all want to know that their work is appreciated; and they all like to have fun. I spoke once at Peking University in Beijing in front of a big group of business students, and this one kid stood up and asked me, “What makes you think you can come to China and impose Western culture on us?” I said to him, “I’ve traveled all around the world, and I’ve met a lot of people in China since I started coming here ten years ago. What I’ve found is that people in China like to have fun and be recognized just like everybody else.” I don’t know if he believed me, but I got a standing ovation from all the other Chinese kids.

Our recognition program is one of the things that sets us apart from other companies, and it’s thriving all around the world, even in those places where I was told it wouldn’t work. Shirley Kunamoto, who used to run our corporate restaurant support team, asked a Chinese restaurant general manager, Ying Ling, if she could see the Yum! award I had given her (that’s my Chairman’s Award, which is a set of smiling teeth with legs, for customer maniacs). She told Shirley, no, she couldn’t see it, because it was so important to her she had it at home locked in her father’s safe.

At Yum! we have come up with a list of How We Win Together principles, which are the foundation of our culture. Such principles should always meet certain criteria:

1. Are they relevant to your business?
   
2. Do they help make people feel as though they count?
   
3. Do they make your people happy to be working where they are, enough so that they’ll ask themselves,
   Why would I want to work anywhere else?
   
4. Do they inspire your people to satisfy the customer and achieve results?
   

Read through our How We Win Together cultural principles, which follow, and think about how you might adapt them for your own business or team, or come up with your own that meet the four criteria above. Ask yourself: What am I doing to create a positive environment for my people?

A great culture doesn’t just happen. It must be built deliberately. It’s the job of every single person in the organization to create a positive culture and make it a big idea; it’s the leader’s job to make sure everyone understands that and believes in it.

How do you do this? First, you have to really know what you stand for. Next, you have to make it known. And finally, you have to repeat, repeat, repeat to drive the message home.

Here are some ways you can make your culture come alive:

CREATE SHARED EXPERIENCES
: Everyone at Yum! receives the Achieving Breakthrough Results (ABR) training that I’ve mentioned before. The tools that are utilized throughout this book, courtesy of John O’Keeffe, are taught to every new employee at all our restaurant support centers. It becomes a shared experience for all our people within our very large company to have gone through the same training; a shared knowledge because everyone learns the same material; and a shared language because everyone understands and uses the terms from the program. Things like this are important to make people feel that they’re a part of something. Another thing we do to build this sense of a shared culture is to periodically hold town hall meetings, which are an open forum for people to ask questions or voice their opinions about what’s going on in our company.

KEEP CREATING NEW MEMORIES
: You can’t rely just on the shared experiences of last year. You have to keep it going and really watch out for those “I remember when” moments. When I was at PepsiCo, I paid a visit to a bottling plant that we had bought five years prior, and one of the first things I noticed when I walked in was a trophy case with plaques for Employee of the Month. The most recent one was from 1988. This was 1993. So I said to them, “Has there really been no one you wanted to honor in the past five years? If that’s the case, you should rip out that trophy case, because it’s really depressing.”

If we can compress that space where there seems to be this need for, I’m up here, you’re down there, if we can just evaporate all of that into we, instead of you and me, I think there’s no telling what you can unleash in the force of humanity by tapping into people’s desires. Everybody wants to be a winner. Every one of us wants to have nice things said about us. Every one of us wants to go home and say “I did it.” The challenge to us as leaders is to help people achieve those goals.

—
KEN LANGONE, COFOUNDER OF HOME DEPOT

The more I talked to the people there, the more I understood what had happened. PepsiCo had taken over ownership of the plant in 1988. Before that, there had been family picnics, holiday parties, and so on. People kept saying to me, “I remember when we used to do such and such.” There was so much nostalgia for the old days, it was palpable. And it was a huge problem. These guys had been so much happier working for the previous owners that it affected their performance. And really, who could blame them? To turn things around, I asked the plant’s management to develop a plan for recognizing people every month and bringing back a family atmosphere, which they did.

It’s the leader’s job to make sure those memorable moments happen. For example, in 2007, we took our top three hundred leaders at Yum!, along with their spouses, to Hawaii for a week to celebrate our past
success and to discuss how we’d keep it going in the future. People talked about that trip for years afterward. And so they didn’t have to rely just on memories of good times past, I gave them something to look forward to. I made a promise that we’d come back in five years if we met our performance goals, which we have. We’re currently planning another trip to Hawaii, with the same group of leaders, for 2012. Our theme is going to be Taking People with You to Build the Defining Global Company that Feeds the World.