The great bus ride of 2003

by Dave Anderson

In Jim Collins' book, Good To Great, he relates how Dave Maxwell was hired to turn around Fannie Mae in 1981. At the time, the mortgage giant was losing $1 million per day and had nearly $60 billion in mortgage loans underwater. Naturally, the board was anxious and when they met with Maxwell, asked him about his vision and strategy for the company. 

Maxwell replied that asking where the company was going and how it would get there was the wrong first question; that before he made the journey his first order of business was to get the wrong people off the bus, the right people on the bus and the make sure the right people were sitting in the right seats. Then, he replied, they could focus all their energy on taking the ‘bus’ somewhere great.

Managers spend exhaustive amounts of time devising elaborate goals and strategies without enough regard for whom will be making the trip. Quite frankly, goals are absolutely irrelevant until you have the right people on your bus and get the wrong people off. After all, a great dream with the wrong team is a nightmare; a great dream with mediocre people still equals mediocre results. 

Consider the following to get your bus on track for the year ahead.

Get the wrong people off the bus
Who’s riding on your bus that should have been dropped off long ago? It helps to remember that the old cliché about people being your best asset doesn’t tell the whole story. People are not your greatest asset. The right people are your greatest asset. The wrong people are your greatest catastrophe. Mediocre people are your greatest drain on resources. 

Ditch sentimentalism and tradition and ask yourself when you look at your team if what you see is what you really want or if it is what was easier, safer and less scary than what you really want. 

Have you settled too early, too cheaply? Some people will have to leave your bus in order for it to go forward; you know who they are. Don’t let yourself off the hook by rationalizing you’re hanging on to them out of compassion or because you want to give them one more chance. The reason we normally keep the wrong people on the bus has much more to do with personal convenience than it does compassion. It’s simply more convenient to put up with the ‘devil we know’ than it is to go to the trouble of recruiting, interviewing, hiring and training someone new—the ‘devil we don’t know.’  

As for giving them another chance, who are you kidding? Most of the deadwood in businesses is so consistently bad that if mediocrity were a crime, they’d be on death row. If someone isn’t going to make it on the bus in the long term, why have them suffer with you in the short term? 

As you consider who must depart the bus, remembering the danger of deadwood should make it easier to initiate the exodus. Ridding your business of weak links is like trimming trees. If you don’t cut the deadwood, eventually the whole tree falls. But if you remove the deadwood, the tree becomes healthier, the healthy branches produce more and there’s more room for productive new branches on the tree.

Get the right people on the bus
One key word for building the right team: proactively. You’ll never build a pipeline of talent if the only time you recruit, interview or hire is when you need someone. Great businesses never consider themselves fully staffed, hire year round and create an environment where people enjoy their work. 

Other key strategies to attract and retain top people for your journey include the following.

A. Train your managers to be better leaders. Sitting in an office trying to turn the numbers around is a flawed strategy. Taking the initiative to get in the trenches and turn the people around so they can turn the numbers around is what brings results.

B. Liberate your good people from inane rules; increase their latitude to meet customer needs and don’t burden them with micromanagement. Once you have the right people on the bus you won’t have to spend so much time trying to motivate them because these people are self-motivated. Instead, you should determine how not to de-motivate them.

C. Create an environment that is hostile to mediocrity by realizing that monthly incentive programs should not be designed to get the wrong people to do the right things; they should be designed to attract, reward and retain the right people.

D. Interview rigorously as nothing turns off a top candidate like the all-smiles, slap-on-the-back, can-you-start-tomorrow interview. While interviewing, if in doubt, keep looking.

E. Invest irrational amounts of time and money developing the right people.

If you have good people but are not rigorously investing in them you don’t deserve them; in fact, you deserve to lose them and you probably will because when good people outgrow your organization they will leave it. They won’t hang around and let their potential rot on the vine while you try and get your act together.

F. Focus on quality over quantity. You’re better off to hire five good performers, work them like 10 and pay them like eight than to have ten non-performers stumbling over one another, doing barely enough to keep from being fired, as they abuse your time, energy and resources.

Make sure the people are sitting in the right bus seats
Put your people in positions where they can do what they are wired to do. Don’t dilute their talent by insisting they be a jack-of-all-trades. Job excellence is only possible when they work in an area of strength.

Persisting in non-talented areas is frustrating and resigns them to a game of perpetual catch-up and damage control. If someone has a good attitude, good work ethic and strong character, but is failing in his or her position, quit trying to fix the person and fix the casting error by putting them in a place where they can use their talents. If there is none, then they must part the bus.

Only after these three steps are addressed will you be prepared to take your bus to somewhere great in 2003. Until you do, your ride will be more like a roller coaster -- or worse -- a demolition derby. A great vision for next year without these three factors addressed is hallucination.

Dave Anderson is the author of the book No-Nonsense Leadership. He is a peak performance author, trainer, speaker and an expert on leadership and sales. For more information call or go to: www.LearnToLead.com. 

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