Weed out nonbelievers
Once you have a clear purpose and identity, you then have to
align the people.
Newberry and the top eight executives in the company put all of
the new objectives and values together and went through a series
of presentations to the 130 executives at the director level and
above. On top of the presentation series, they also individually met
with executives.
“The first part of the process is you sit down with people and say,
‘OK, this is where we want to go, this is how we want to do it, and
this is what we’re going to need from you in your role,’” Newberry
says.
Then it’s just asking one simple query.
“The first question you ask is, ‘Is this an approach that you could
buy in to and you could support?’ If the person says, ‘No, I don’t
agree with that,’ then you say, ‘OK, you can either resign or we’ll fire
you.’ You can’t change the direction of a company if the leadership
team doesn’t all get on board and start pulling in the same direction.”
After nine months, about 75 percent left on their own or were
asked to leave.
“It’s the last 25 percent that you’re giving people the opportunity
to demonstrate do they have what it takes to really be a part of this
team, and you make a series of decisions at the end of the year,”
he says.
Newberry’s gut told him most of that remaining 25 percent weren’t
going to make it, but he likes to go with the innocent-until-proven-guilty approach.
“The process of allowing people to play out the strengths is important, not only for them, but it’s also important for the other members of the management team to see that the decision-makers —
that the president and the CEO — are really being as fair as possible in terms of deciding who’s going to stay and who’s going to go,”
he says.
During that wait-and-see period, it’s important to measure those
executives.
“You have to remove the subjectivity and the words out of the
equation, and you do that by making sure you define good objectives in terms of how you measure success,” Newberry says.
The key to creating good objective measurements is understanding what’s important to customers and what’s important to the company. He says that leaders often measure activity as opposed to productivity, and he uses training as an example.
“They’ll measure, ‘We had 75 people attend the course,’” he says.
“They’ll measure the fact that everybody went through the training. The definition of success is not that they attended the training,
but that they demonstrated in the course of the training that they
understand it, and now the issue is how well are they applying
what they learned.”
After creating important metrics, you then review the performance
of the organization that falls under the executive’s leadership.
“You eventually look at the speed at which the organization is moving in the right direction, the degree with which the other executives
are getting the leadership they need from this person that you’re
looking for, and you come to the conclusion with discussion with
them in one-on-ones … that if the progress of the group to the objective measurements isn’t occurring, then they’re not the right choice,”
he says.
He says measurements take the blinders off when you can’t or
don’t want to see people’s inabilities.
“Objective measurements become very important because people will try to talk their way through and say all the right things,”
Newberry says. “At the end of the day, a person could be well-intentioned, but they are not able to translate that well-intentioned
effort into results. You have to stay focused on the results orientation.”
At the end of the first year, not only had Newberry swapped his
EVP title for president, but he and Bagley had finally tossed all the
bad apples, and Lam could start moving forward.