Set metrics
With people on board and strategies set, then he had to find a way to make sure things got carried out.
“The key to making those initiatives into a reality is they have to be measurable — you can’t just say, ‘I want to go from A to B.’ I want to go from A to B, and I want to have these milestones that tell me I’m on the right path, I’m on the right timetable, and that I have people who are accountable that are going to make sure it gets done.
“Sometimes people have a vision or a goal that is not measurable, and I tell my people, ‘If you can’t measure it, you’re not going to be very effective in getting it done.’”
To do that, de la Vega instituted two mechanisms to measure people by. The first is the “Four R’s.” These break down the success rate into four indicators: rate of penetration — how many customers use your services?; revenue intensity — what revenue do those customers generate?; return on operations — are you making margins or not?; and reputation — how is the customer satisfaction?
When talking to employees, progress on these four R’s is always communicated so it’s ingrained in them that these are important.
“It’s keeping the metrics simple, keeping them consistent, keeping them so that people know exactly where you stand,” de la Vega says.
Then he breaks things down even more. For each individual initiative in those categories, he uses a color-coding system: red for missing goals, yellow for near misses, green for hitting goals.
“If you’re not doing well, you’re going to have a lot of reds next to your name,” he says. “Everybody knows if you’re doing well or not and that increases the accountability. Nobody can say, ‘We don’t know how we’re doing.’ Typically, if you challenge people with a goal and you give them a good plan and good goals, they will strive to achieve them. But if they don’t know the goals or the goals are unclear and there isn’t the plan, that’s when bad things will happen.”
Having this kind of accountability system allows you to see high-achievers and celebrate successes with your people. On the other end, it also helps you see where there may be problems so you can address them.
“The first thing, when something goes in the red, that I look for is an outlier — is it some specific event in that week or that month that caused that to happen, and if that’s what it was, just a one-time event, and we don’t expect that to happen again in the future, then it’s a short conversation,” de la Vega says. “Then I’ll look the next month to see if it was a one-time event. If you see a particular thing begin to get off track consistently for several periods, you need to have a call with that leader to find out what is going on — do they know what’s going on; do they have a plan for fixing it? And that’s how you can get a pretty good read on whether the leaders you have really know what’s going on. And the good ones always know.
“The more difficult situations are when something happens and they don’t know what caused it to go wrong and they don’t have a plan to fix it and you may need to get more involved, watch that person closely, coach them or get them the help that they need to be successful.”
Eventually his BellSouth division went on to be profitable which led to a series of business transactions and career moves that landed him at AT&T. Today, de la Vega is president and CEO of AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, a $49 billion division of the telecommunications giant.
“The best measure of a good leader is when he or she can make people do things that they were thinking is impossible to do,” he says. “When you, as a leader, have a group of people do something they thought was impossible to do, I would say that you have reached a pinnacle of leadership.”
How to reach: AT&T Mobility and Consumer Markets, www.wireless.att.com
