Stephen H Baum Leadership

Leaders can succeed with a wide variety of styles as long as they are always authentic, and as we’ve seen, authenticity stems from behavior that reflects values and makes those values obvious to all. Style is an important component of any leader’s arsenal, yet it is secondary to the actual method by which a leader approaches the challenge of motivating a workforce and getting everyone marching in the same direction.

Having witnessed a number of leaders in action, can you perceive an overall pattern in the way they approach the task — a pattern that you can follow that will allow you to emulate them?

In order to supplement my own clients’ instincts for engaging and inspiring their employees, I’ve developed a methodology that helps guide them in their efforts. I call it Signal Acts. Think of it as a howto for moving a workforce or group in the direction you desire — a very potent tool for influencing the thinking and behaviors of the people who report to you.

Here is a brief version of Signal Acts:

1. Define what beliefs the people you lead would need to hold in order to buy into the behaviors and performance that support your agenda.
2. Seek out the people’s current beliefs and the history that shaped them.
3. Design and execute deeds — perform very visible Signal Acts — that will begin to change those beliefs.
4. Identify acts that would reinforce the unproductive beliefs and avoid them.
5. Continue to do this and to monitor the changes in attitudes and beliefs.

Here are a few examples. In each case, the leader is using Signal Acts to battle an entrenched belief that could harm the company. Some of the acts are symbolic. Others involve making substantive changes to the way things are being done:

• Belief: “Headquarters cares only about earnings, not the customer and the salespeople [Sears].” Signal Act: Arthur Martinez took private lessons in using the cash register, then in his first few weeks as CEO he appeared in stores, waited on customers, and rang up the sales himself. Word spread like wildfire.
• Belief: “This bureaucracy rewards tenure and loyalty rather than hard work and achievement [Florida Power & Light].” Signal Act: Jim Broadhead double jump promoted to a senior position a manager who had been held back by the prior management inner circle. It was on the grapevine within hours.
• Belief: “This company doesn’t really care about those of us who work behind the scenes away from the customers [Jet-Blue].” Signal Act: David Neeleman’s phone reps (who work from home) wanted logo wear and a sense of belonging as much as those at the visible customer interface. With a touch of silliness that put smiles on lots of faces, he put the JetBlue logo on house slippers modeled after the Airbus A320.
• Belief: “The CEO doesn’t really mean it when he says we are going to focus on outcome rather than the trappings [Florida Power & Light].” Signal Act: Jim Broadhead suspended the practice of monthly line-item-by-line-item reprojections of financials that had been consuming thousands of management hours and distracting managers from doing their jobs. You could practically hear the cheers from offices all over Florida.

In large companies, it’s a long way from the CEO to the bottom of the organizational totem pole. The vision, values, and inspiration must be clear to the phone-line-repair technician, the shipping clerk, and the forklift driver in the warehouse. Yet these people have the power in their hands to make or break the company reputation — and possibly its finances — and you want them aligned. Though I’ve seen this in many companies, one example from a retailer is startling. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of apparel were about to be shipped from Asia to fifteen hundred stores in America when the merchandise coordinator — lowest position on the merchant team — noticed the manufacturer had altered the design to something that would offend many customers in the United States. He took it upon himself to stop the shipment and get the manufacturer to do right. And told his team later.

We will return in Chapter 8 to the need for the leader to value and respect the contribution of people at all levels in the organization.

Let’s take an in-depth look at a series of Signal Acts Gordon Bethune performed at Continental as he went about engineering the turnaround at the ailing airline. You’ll recall from earlier in the chapter that Continental employees felt used and abused by former administrations. They believed that the executive suite cared only about the financials, that they were in competition with other internal departments and should not trust them, that each of the past nine CEOs (yes, nine, including the feared Frank Lorenzo) had failed them, that Gordon’s administration would be no different, and that becoming a top airline was beyond them.

Gordon translated his own beliefs into quick, highly visible, tangible Signal Acts — some symbolic, some substantive — to change his employees’ set of beliefs:

• Created and publicized a plan for fixing operations that everyone understood, focusing on the basics (customer care, on-time performance, and eliminating waste, for example). Translated the plan into easily understood commonsense approaches to getting results. Instituted employee compensation incentives for achieving those basics (initially $65 for each employee when Continental got to the top half of the metric, raised to $100 for being first).
• Called and chaired numerous meetings to explain the plan, listened with empathy to the skeptics, and made clear the direction and the need to be part of the solution and not part of the problem.
• Removed the security barriers barring entry to the executive suite and invited employees to visit — provided food, a tour of headquarters, and open Q&A sessions about doubts and fears.
• Caused all two hundred airplanes to be repainted — to symbolize the new beginning at Continental — in so short a period that no one believed it possible.
• Sat at the middle and not the head of the conference table in meetings to avoid the historical inquisition setup (CEO and henchmen at one end).
• Burned the employee manual in a highly visible ceremony in the parking lot, replacing it with simple, commonsense guidelines.
• Threw a party for travel agents and corporate clients at his own house, at which he apologized for past sins in the way they had been treated by Continental.
• Wrote former frequent fliers and sent apology letters to corporate customers inviting them to return.

After he performed so many Signal Acts himself, a flood of improvement ideas started to bubble up. People began to believe in him, bought in, and started to take responsibility for their part in the turnaround.