Show why you are the captain
First and foremost, Goldstein doesn’t want to mince words about
the No. 1 thing a leader needs to do to get other leaders behind him
or her.
“If you accept the opportunity to be a senior leader of any
organization, but certainly this one, you have to understand
that you are being evaluated for whether you are exemplifying
the principles that you are communicating out to the work
force,” he says.
The bigger your organization gets, the more eyes you’re going to
have on you in everything that you do. If you have one slip up or
one promise that you’re going to do something that you end up just
forgetting to do, it’s going to be remembered.
“A lot of it is how you conduct yourself every day,” Goldstein
says. “If you do things people perceive as lack of integrity, you
don’t get to erase that with your next nine days of doing the right
thing. It’s irretrievable.”
Since you are the torchbearer, you are also responsible for creating a “wow” moment for your people. That moment is about
making a stance on one of your core values that can resonate
across your entire staff. Often Goldstein says these can take place
when you have to make a change in course or when you’re a new
leader.
“The first day that you’re in the new area, every person in that
area knows more about that area than you do,” Goldstein says. “All
of the sudden, you’re their supervisor and they’re all saying to
themselves, ‘Why does this person who doesn’t know even what I
know, why are they leading me now? I don’t understand this.’ Well,
the way that you combat that is by showing that you are prepared
to deal with issues that have been lingering, in some cases, for
decades in that area without ever being addressed properly or corrected, that you’re willing to take on even the hardest challenges,
and they start to think, ‘Wow, this is different. This might work better.’”
For Goldstein, one of those opportunities came about 10 years
back when he took over hotel operations for Royal Caribbean.
The company was getting ready to unveil its new ship, Voyager Of
The Seas, and was looking to update the systems around compiling guest feedback. A few people had complained that some
guests were being helped toward giving generous feedback by
staff, so Goldstein decided he would tackle that by keeping
employees away from the process entirely — by penalty of termination. The edict was clear and sent a sharp message. It also
earned him a lunch with a director on the management team who
didn’t think he’d have the daring to follow through.
“He said, ‘We don’t have the guts to do that here.’ I said, ‘Watch
me,’” Goldstein says. “And he said, ‘It won’t work,’ and I said, ‘If
you feel that way, probably this is not a good situation for you,’ and
I didn’t fire him because he actually wanted to quit.
“And we never looked back. The ratings today are what the
guests want to rate us, and we changed all kinds of protocols on
the ship to hermetically seal the ratings process. And it’s doing
those things where people say, ‘Whoa, this is really going to be
different.’”
