Know where you’re going
The first thing Bouts did was look toward the horizon to figure out where he wanted the company to go.
“It all starts, in my view, with envisioning the future,” he says. “What is it that you want to be? It sounds like an open door, but that’s not so easy to formulate. It’s back to the journey — you start somewhere, and you want to go to an endpoint, but you have to define the endpoint. If you don’t know where you want to go, you can’t map out what you have to do to get there.”
This was a little bit of a challenge for Bouts because he had to figure out how his division would fit into the overall global organization.
“I have my own ideas, and if you’re not careful, you start to believe your own BS, your own visions, and you think you know it all,” he says. “My experience is I don’t know anything. … The higher you get in the organization, the less you know, and you have to realize that. The true knowledge, the true know-how, the true capabilities in an organization are way deeper than in the boardroom.”
Instead of relying on his judgment, Bouts involves three key constituencies.
“Listen to your customers, to your employees, to your suppliers — it’s key,” he says.
With Glidden being one of the oldest paint companies in the country and with thousands of employees, there’s a ton of experience about how to make and sell paint. The same is true of the customer base. Through a variety of outlets — big box retailers, such as Home Depot, as well as company-owned stores and 4,000 independent retailers — they all have an opinion because their profits depend on the overall success of Glidden, as well. And the same goes for the suppliers.
But with all of these constituencies having their own interests, you have to be able to clearly listen to what they say.
“The ability to listen for what people really want to say is important,” he says. “You need to have the ability to read between the lines. It’s not always what people directly say to you — it’s what they intend to say. It’s a skill. It’s an art.”
For example, if someone comes to Bouts and says that Glidden is a great brand, but he or she doesn’t think it’s growing fast enough, what Bouts thinks that person is really saying is that the company needs to invest more in the brand and spend more money on advertising and product innovations and new pricing strategies.
“They will never come to me and say, ‘Well, I need you to up your advertising investment from X to three-X,’” he says. “No, they will say it in much more political, neutral terms that they’re looking for stronger growth or a more dominant brand.”
Or his suppliers may say that they have A, B, C and D as raw materials for the company, and what that really translates to is that Bouts could be innovating more than he currently is.
A final example is your employees, who may tell you that they’re not exactly sure what’s going on in the company.
“Basically they’re saying, ‘We have no clue what you’re talking about,’” he says. “Back to being humble and listening — people are not always upfront. … That’s why it’s so important that you have the ability to listen to what people are really trying to say because they’re always a little nervous talking to the leadership team or the CEO.”
Once you read between the lines of what people are saying from all sides, then you can put together a clear endpoint to help start your change.
“If you combine all of those insights from employees, suppliers and customers, certainly you get a lot of input in carving out that picture for the future,” Bouts says. “If you combine that with analytics — what is happening in the market, we have many statistics on demand, supply and competitor dynamics — and you put a little bit of fantasy and dreaming to that, suddenly, I think you get a few options of what that future could be, and that’s an interesting piece of change process, the envisioning part.”