Multipliers: How the Best Leaders Make Everyone Smarter (27 page)

Make the Scoreboard Visible

When the scoreboard is visible, people hold themselves accountable. Whether it is in sports, business, or community service, visible measures of success liberate and focus intelligence and energy.

Jubin Dana is a lawyer by day and a professional soccer coach by night. Perhaps it is his training as a lawyer that shapes his coaching system, which boils down to one simple but powerful technique: He keeps stats. He tracks the players’ sprinting and distance running times. He measures their number of passes and tracks their success rates in soccer team tackle drills and their shots-on-goal. He tracks and posts all these statistics for all the players to see. The players can easily tell where their skills rank and where they need to improve. Armed with this information, they no longer need a coach yelling at them to run faster or try harder. They tend to push themselves to higher levels of performance.

Multipliers have a core belief that
people are smart and will figure things out
. So it makes sense that they operate as Investors, giving ownership that keeps rolling back to other people. They invest the resources they need to grow a business and the people in it. They engage
personally, offering their insight and guidance, but they remember to “give the pen back” when they are done so people remain accountable to deliver on the expected returns.

By playing the role of Investor, Multipliers generate independence. They create organizations that can sustain performance without their direct involvement. When the organization is truly autonomous, they have earned the right to step away. When they leave, they leave a legacy.

THE DIMINISHER’S APPROACH TO EXECUTION

The Diminisher operates from a very different assumption:
People will never be able to figure it out without me
. They believe if they don’t dive into the details and follow up, other people won’t deliver. These assumptions breed dependency as full ownership is never offered up. They assign piecemeal tasks but jump in believing that other people cannot make it work without them.

Unfortunately, in the end, these assumptions are often proven true as people become disabled and dependent on the Diminisher for answers, for approval, and to integrate the pieces together. When this happens, Diminishers look outward, asking themselves only,
Why are people always letting me down?
When Diminishers eventually leave an organization, things fall apart. Things crumble because the leader has held the operation together with micromanagement and sweat equity.

Consider the case of a private equity investor in Brazil who stifled his entire organization with his micromanagement.

Celso is extraordinarily smart and considered by his colleagues to be a financial genius. He was a superior analyst and a rock star of a stock trader. But his control-freak management style hampered his ability to build great companies. Unfortunately, as the head of a private equity firm, his job was exactly that: to build companies.

In staff meetings, his staff rarely got through their reports on prospective investments or portfolio companies. He would interrupt with
his pithy analysis. Sure, he’d make a few great points, but it discouraged other people from thinking. His signature remark was, “I can’t believe you haven’t figured this out.”

Celso tracked performance of their portfolio companies with second-by-second monitoring and arranged to receive all company sales reports on his cell phone. When sales dipped off target, he’d call the CEO at random hours of the night and start screaming. Whatever the situation, Celso was the first to respond. Like Pavlov’s dog, there was no delay between stimulus and response. When he found a problem, he’d jump in immediately and try to fix it himself.

Over time, Celso’s micromanagement created a sharp division inside the organization. Most of his colleagues would lie low, knowing that he eventually would do things himself. As much of the talent retreated, he compensated by hiring aggressive graduates of elite colleges who didn’t have enough experience to expect a different type of leadership. The organization began to look a lot like Celso over time and resembled an alpha-male annual convention. Like many Diminishers, Celso’s micromanagement stifled the intelligence inside of an organization filled with really smart people.

Let’s look at the ways in which these Diminishers cripple the capability of their people and create dependent organizations.

MAINTAIN OWNERSHIP.
The approach of the Micromanager is well captured in a comment made by a staff member of a prominent professor: “I can’t make any decisions. I don’t have lead in my pencil until Dr. Yang says that I do.” Diminishers don’t trust others to figure it out for themselves, so they maintain ownership. When they delegate, they dole out piecemeal tasks but not real responsibility. They give people just a piece of the puzzle. It is no wonder that people have a hard time putting the puzzle together without them.

Eva Wiesel is smart and energetic, but most unfortunately for her team, quite a morning person. She was the operations manager in a manufacturing plant and each day she’d come to work with a fresh set
of ideas for her management team. She would plan out the day on her commute into work, arrive at the plant, walk through the door, and begin dropping by her people’s office to let them know exactly what she wanted them to do that day. Some days it was more of the same, but other days the tasks took them in entirely new directions. Her people noticed the pattern and began a simple coping routine. Every day about 8:00 a.m., they began lining up in the hallway that led from the lobby to their office area. With pads of paper and coffee in hand, they waited for her to burst in and deliver their “marching orders” for the day. It was just easier for everyone to wait to be told what to do.

No doubt, Eva thought she was a great leader who was delegating and communicating clearly to her team. In reality, Eva was a Micromanager who did all the thinking for her team and hoarded the ownership of the work.

JUMP IN AND OUT.
Micromanagers hand over work to others, but they take it back the moment problems arise. They get lured in like a fish to the shiny objects on a fisherman’s line. Emergent problems and big hurdles are irresistible bait for Diminishers. They see these shiny objects and are attracted. They are fascinated by the intellectual challenge to solve the problem. They are lured by the attention and kudos they get for saving the day. And they are hooked on the feeling of importance as people become dependent on them and their brilliance to deliver results. They are lured in, and the diminishing impact on their people is set.

The problem is that they don’t just get lured in and stay there. They come in and out. An issue gets onto the radar screen of senior management, and suddenly they are all over it. They spring in and then when the fun is over, they spring back out. They are the bungee boss.

Garth Yamamoto is the chief marketing officer for a consumer products company. Garth has two modes: One is “all over it” and the other is “completely absent.” When his team is working on an issue with CEO visibility, he jumps in, takes over, and delivers the work straight to his boss, a highly mercurial leader. When the CEO isn’t
involved, Garth is nowhere to be seen. His people struggle to get his attention on the less visible but equally critical projects that form the backbone of the business.

When these leaders bungee in and out of their own organization, they create dependency and disengagement. When they strike at random, they produce disruptive chaos.

TAKE IT BACK.
I was twenty-five years old and six months into my first management job. It was 7:30 p.m., as I sat at my desk at 500 Oracle Parkway, Oracle’s main office tower. The halls were dark and all of my staff had gone home for the night. Everyone was home but me. I was still busy trying to close out my “to dos” for the day, many of which had emerged during the course of the workday as one little crisis after another landed on my desk. I came up from my absorption in my work and thought,
Why am I still doing so much of the work? I’ve delegated. Why does it all come back to me?
People were bringing me their problems, and I would take them back.

At this realization, I became irritated at my team for dumping the problems on me and for not doing their jobs. Then, alone in a dark office, I had the epiphany: I wasn’t doing
my
job. As a manager, my job was no longer about me. It was my responsibility to manage the work, not do the work. I had been solving problems like some overzealous superhero, when I was really supposed to help other people solve problems. My job was to flow the work to my team and keep it there. It is an embarrassingly simple idea, but for me as a newly promoted manager, it was a startling realization.

As I coach executives, I am frequently surprised at how many senior leaders and even executives haven’t discovered this simple lesson. When managers take it back, not only do they end up doing all the work but they rob others of the opportunity to use and extend their own intelligence. They stunt the growth of intelligence around them. They begin to slide down the slippery slope of the Accidental Diminisher.

Whether accidental or not, Diminishers are costly to organizations.
They might be superstars themselves, but they quickly become the gating factor that limits the growth of their organizations. The cost of the Micromanager is that organizations cannot grow beyond them and struggle to leverage the other intellect inside the organization.

LEVERAGING YOUR INVESTMENT

Multipliers don’t act as Investors because it makes people feel good. They invest because they value the return on their investment. They believe that people perform at their best when they have a natural accountability. So they define ownership, invest resources, and hold people accountable.

The following chart illustrates why Micromanagers leave capability on the table while Investors stretch the capability of their resources:

Micromanagers

What They Do:

Manage every detail of the work to ensure it is completed the way they would do it

What They Get:

People who wait to be told what to do

People who hold back because they expect to be interrupted and told what to do instead

Free riders who wait for the boss to swoop in and save them

People who try to “work” their bosses and make sophisticated excuses

Investors

What They Do:

Give other people the ownership for results and invest in their success

What They Get:

People who take initiative and anticipate challenges

People who are fully focused on achieving results

People who can get ahead of the boss in solving problems

People who respond to the natural forces around them

Micromanagers don’t use the full complement of talent, intelligence, and resourcefulness that is available to them. This capacity sits idle in their organizations. To counteract this, they continue to ask the organization for more resources, wondering why people aren’t more productive and are always letting them down.

In contrast to this, Investors not only engage people through clearly delegating responsibilities to them, they extend assignments that stretch the thinking and capability of the individuals and the team. They grow the assets in their portfolio. As a result, they get full leverage out of their current resources and they stretch and increase the capacity of the organization to take on the next responsibility.

The Serial Multiplier

After seven hours of conversation in a studio apartment next to one of Mumbai’s slums, Narayana Murthy and six of his friends agreed to a vision for a software firm in Bangalore that they hoped would do two things. First, persuade their wives to each contribute $250 as seed money. Second, garner respect around the world. They accomplished both.

Their investment of intellectual energy and financial capital turned out to be very sound, as Mr. Murthy led Infosys Technologies from its tiny beginnings to become the first Indian company to be listed on the NASDAQ, with a valuation of $10 billion. Mr. Murthy helped his team reach beyond their dreams, encouraged India’s entrepreneurs to believe in themselves, and gave a face to the new India.

He became a revered name inside and outside the company and could have easily stayed at the top and enjoyed the fame and power of his exalted position.

Instead, on his sixtieth birthday, Mr. Murthy stepped aside as CEO. No crisis triggered the move and there was no power play to topple him. The move was the extension of a deliberate plan. He had spent years investing in the other cofounders so they could operate independently
of him. Consistent with his plan, he handed the role of CEO over to one of the other cofounders, Nandan Nilekani. Mr. Murthy stayed on as nonexecutive chairman and chief mentor of the company.

Asked at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, why he chose that role for himself, he said his primary role as a leader was to ensure successive generations of leaders. When asked what drives him to invest in this way, he said without hesitation, “The reward for winning a pinball game is to get a chance to play the next one.” In other words, he doesn’t crave the spotlight of being a CEO as much as he hungers to freely invest again elsewhere. While some CEOs are addicted to praise, Mr. Murthy is addicted to growing other people. A Multiplier to his core, Mr. Murthy recognized that his greatest value was not in his intelligence, but in how he invested his intelligence in others. And now in his second career, he has again been investing in the growth of others, just with a much broader sphere of influence.

Free from the operational management responsibilities at Infosys, he has gone on to invest in governments and institutions around the world, including Thailand and the United Nations, and educational entities like Cornell University, the Wharton School of Business, and Singapore Management University. He has the ear of the prime minister of India and is making a case to him to invest in the next generation. In his words, “We have to put young people in charge of these massive educational initiatives.” And his investor approach to management has established a pattern at Infosys.