walking leadership
Joseph Solymossy is a hard-minded man with a soft heart. That doesn’t mean he’s maudlin. A Naval Academy graduate and retired Navy Captain, Joe has spent several decades in the nuclear power business. He today he is an executive of a large corporation that manages nuclear power plants. It’s about getting results.
Joe is a smart guy. He knows that everyone in his industry has the same good technology. So the performance differentiator is people: the men and women the public trusts to operate nuclear plants so they are safe and reliable.
Joe knows that getting “people things” right is always critical, especially in an environment where the margin for error is somewhere south of zero. Therefore, he works hard to stay close to his people and to make sure that they, in turn, stay close to theirs.
In a recent meeting with his senior staff, Joe taught a principle that is relevant to any leader anywhere. He used a parable, a kind of modern version of one of Aesop’s fables. This is the story that Joe told people about him:
A farmer who had been losing money year after year went to a banker. He took out a loan to keep the farm open for another year. The banker reluctantly agreed, saying, “I can no longer afford to lose money to you. Either show a profit this year or we’ll get the property back.”
Leaving the bank with a new loan, the farmer was confronted by a beggar who asked the farmer if he needed help. The farmer said that he needed a lot of luck to get through the next year. The beggar offered the farmer a lucky stone for a small price, payable at the end of the year. The beggar said that payment was only required if the farm was actually making a profit. The farmer, seeing that he could not lose, asked about the terms of the agreement. The beggar said that the stone is effective only if the farmer walked on his property every day with the stone in his pocket. The farmer, willing to try anything, took the stone and went to his house.
The next morning, the farmer walked the fence and noticed that ten of his cattle had broken through a broken fence. He rounded up the cattle, herded them back into the field, and repaired the fence.
The next morning he found a fox hole and set a trap for it. The fox was caught. That night the farmer and his wife enjoyed a fine meal of fox stew.
On the third day he found a hole in the coop and repaired it to keep his chickens inside.
The next day, he detected some soil erosion and placed rocks near the area to keep the soil from wearing away.
Day after day, he walked his property with the stone in his pocket and, day after day, corrected what needed to be corrected.
At the end of the year, the farmer went to the banker and reported that it had been the most profitable year in history. The banker, pleased by the farmer’s new prosperity, asked him how he had done it. “I didn’t do anything,” said the farmer. “He had a magic rock.”
Leaving the bank, the beggar asked the farmer how the year had gone. The farmer told him that it was the best year he had ever had. The farmer paid the beggar for the lucky stone and said that he would carry the stone with him every day until he died. The beggar confessed that the rock had no luck, it was simply that the farmer was finally doing the things he should have been doing all along: inspecting his workspaces.
What is the moral of the story? To be profitable, you must inspect your spaces. This means prioritizing inspections over some of the other fun things you love to do (like meetings and paperwork). It means being where the workers are and observing not only what they do but how they do it. It also means that you must correct and train people on the spot and help them develop ways to do their stewardship better. If you don’t, your people will keep making the same costly mistakes over and over again.
Once people understand that they will be inspected frequently, they will perform better and your organization will prosper. While some organizations have developed formal inspection programs, these programs often use an administrative requirement to conduct the assessment. Inspection becomes ineffective when the priority of performing the assessment (checking off items on a checklist) seems more important than the quality of the inspection. Only when managers and supervisors actually make it a practice to regularly check the quality of work will quality be maintained.
Genuine quality cannot be forced or managed. It must come from an internal desire to improve the performance of your workers.
First, can you see the wisdom in using that parable? You can teach practices throughout the day, but they will rarely stick until people understand the underlying principles. A parable or story is a great way to teach principles in a humane and memorable way.
And what about this particular story? It underscores the critical importance of what some may call wandering leadership. This, of course, is not pointless wandering. It is wandering with a purpose.
Years ago I worked closely with Gordon McGovern. Gordon was the new president and CEO of the Campbell Soup Company. In those days, as now, Campbell was much more than a soup maker. Its hundreds of brands ranged from Prego spaghetti sauce and Pepperidge Farm baked goods to Vlasic pickles and Godiva chocolates. The competition was fierce and Campbell needed strong leadership. Gordon provided it.
Unlike his predecessor, whose style was formal to the point of being imperial, Gordon was determined to stay close to his people. This was definitely not the perfunctory “Hi, how are you?” kind of light-hearted treatment that we see in political campaign commercials. Gordon was real, and when he talked to people (the accounts receivable clerk, the shift foreman at the food plant, the assistant brand manager fresh out of college, the “food stylist” in the test kitchen) his approach was genuine. People felt comfortable with Gordon because he asked good questions and listened carefully (what a concept!) to what they had to say.
The leadership’s intention in wandering is not to usurp the authority or position of middle managers or supervisors. The point, in fact, is that middle managers and supervisors should do it themselves! Cascading sponsorship and cascading leadership are necessary for organizational effectiveness. The idea is to simply “walk the fences” so you can keep a first-hand sense of what people are thinking, which processes are helping and which are getting in the way, and how the organization’s key leadership messages emerge. after being filtered through several layers of bureaucracy.
These are just four of the many advantages of walking leadership:
It keeps you in tune. There’s a lot going on in his organization, and you certainly won’t learn everything in his routine staff meetings and email exchanges. A great way to stay in tune with the “frequency” of your people is to go where they are. If you want to know what’s really going on in the customer service department, don’t just invite the department head into your office for an explanation. Walk up to the customer service department and ask for a tour and a chance to see for yourself.
Increase communication. When your motive is pure, people will quickly discover that your purpose is to learn and train rather than trap and criticize. They will then see your “walk” as a safe opportunity to discuss things that are genuinely relevant to their performance. You won’t look like a threat. You will be considered a useful resource. Remember: open communication is the lubricant that keeps your organization running smoothly.
It gives serendipity a chance to work. Has she ever read a book or wandered into a store or engaged in casual conversation and discovered something useful that she wasn’t even looking for? That is serendipity. Serendipity can’t work if you’re not there. Also, people seem to be more comfortable in their own territory. And when they feel comfortable, they are more likely to share information and insights that will contribute to their own big picture.
Provides teaching and learning moments. There are few things more powerful than catching your people doing good. When you see someone performing a task well, praise them on the spot. Be specific. Don’t just tell them they are doing a good job. Point out specifically what they are doing well and remind them of important links to other people’s work. And when you notice an error, whether by omission or commission, correct it on the spot, too. (If you’re the “big boss,” it’s usually best to bring the matter up in private with the employee’s immediate manager to avoid undermining the manager’s authority.)
Working with management teams in a wide range of organizations, I am frequently amazed at how otherwise capable people often neglect the easy and smart practice of leading by walking. Somehow, they believe they can keep an accurate pulse on their organizations by limiting their intelligence gathering to spreadsheets, staff meetings, and PowerPoint presentations. Those sources can help track trends, but they lack the living, breathing data that comes just from talking to people in the trenches.
My friend Tim Bays, a singer/songwriter from Nashville, has a ditty that goes like this:
The important part of fishing is not the fish, it is the fishing,
The important part of loving is love.
The important part of doing just about anything you’re doing
It’s doing it with all your heart.
You’ve heard it from me before: you can hire a person’s back and hands, but you have to win their head and heart.
Joe Solymossy, Gordon McGovern and other good leaders understand what that means. It means supplementing the hard data of numbers and graphs with the soft data of people’s feelings and opinions. It means leaving the comfort of your swivel chair and going out among the people who know things about your organization that you may never have dreamed of. It means creating an atmosphere where people feel safe asking questions that you might not even think to ask.
Leadership is not about the title on your business card. True leadership is about how you connect with real people doing real work. It’s about how you provide the resources needed to get the job done. It’s about removing roadblocks and speed bumps so your people can use the ingenuity and skill they were hired to do.
Walking leadership is a great way to add value to the value of your people.
