Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Jeff Grimshaw, a partner in the firm MGStrategy,is an expert on accelerating accountabilityand alignment. Over two decades, he’shelped hundreds of leaders deliver the resultson which they’ve staked their reputations.Grimshaw serves as senior advisor, LeadershipSolutions, at stickK.com, helping leadersapply powerful insights from behavioraleconomics to improve performance. WithPOW/MIA activist Paul Pinkerton, he cofoundedPaul’s Kids Vietnam Children’sCharity. Visit Jeff at mgstrat.com.
Gregg Baron is president of Success Sciences,a research-based performance improvementfirm that focuses on the points of customercontact (sales, service, collections, and technicalservice quality). As a certified managementconsultant, Gregg has more than two decadesof experience helping senior leaders enhancetheir practices for leading change. Gregg is alsoa founding principal in The Institute forOrganizational Effectiveness. Visit Gregg at success-sciences.com.

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LEADERSHIP WITHOUT EXCUSES

The McGraw-Hill Companies, Inc.

Contents

Chapter One

In a famous study conducted some years ago at Princeton Theological Seminary, researchers recruited a group of young seminarians and prepared them to give a talk on the Parable of the Good Samaritan. In this parable, you may recall, a traveler on the road to Jericho is robbed and beaten by thieves who leave him half-dead. A priest comes, sees the beaten traveler, and passes by. And then an assistant priest does the same. Finally, a Samaritan arrives on the scene, bandages the man's wounds, brings him to an inn, and takes care of him.

After the researchers prepared the seminarians to give a talk on the story and its implications, they sent students off, one by one, to fulfill their assignment. Some were directed to move very quickly and told, "You're a few minutes late. They were expecting you a few minutes ago." Members of the second, "medium hurry" group were told, "The assistant is ready. Please go right over." But there was no rush for the members of third group, who were told, "It will be a few minutes before they need you, but you might as well head on over."

On the way to their assignment, each seminarian encountered a man on the sidewalk, slumped over, coughing and moaning. Unbeknownst to the seminarians, this man was a confederate—an actor who was part of the experiment.

Of the seminarians instructed to rush to their assignment to talk about the Parable of the Good Samaritan, only 10 percent stopped to help the man. The others walked past him—or over him. The seminarians in the second group, who'd been told merely to "go right over," fared better: Nearly half of them stopped to help the man—but the other half did not. Meanwhile, a majority of the seminarians in the third group, who weren't in any rush, stopped on their way to speaking about the Good Samaritan to act like one.

What's true of many of the seminarians in this study is also true of many employees in the organizations where we've worked. They know what it means to do the right thing. In fact, like the seminarians, they know it well enough that they can explain it to others, at least in theory. But when they encounter high-pressure "moments of truth and tradeoff" where "doing the right thing" and completing an assigned task (or otherwise "getting results" or pursuing other selfinterests) seem to them mutually exclusive options, they often make the wrong choice. Part of the challenge is that most organizations do a lousy job of preparing their employees for these moments.

Some years ago the chief executive officer (CEO) and chief operations officer (COO) of one of the most admired companies in the United States sat down to make a video the company planned to distribute to all employees. The idea was to convey four values that the leaders said should govern everything that happened in the organization. The four values? Respect, communication, excellence, and integrity. In the video, the CEO was especially emphatic about that last value:

[We are] a company that deals with everyone with absolute integrity. We play by all the rules; we stand by our word. We mean what we say; we say what we mean. We want people to leave a transaction with [us] thinking that they've been dealt with in the highest possible way as far as integrity and truthfulness, and really doing our business right.

As you might have guessed, the CEO and COO were Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling, and the company was Enron. This example underscores the timelessness of the observation that theologian Reinhold Niebuhr made over 70 years ago when he spoke of the human tendency to express our values "most pretentiously ... most convincingly ... at the very moment when the decay which leads to death has already begun."

Now, we're not suggesting that when you communicate one-word values such as respect and excellence to your team or organization that you're as cynical or duplicitous as Lay and Skilling. However, if your organization is like most, its stated values (and the posters and plaques on which they're emblazoned) are equally worthless.

The problem starts at the source: Pronouncements of "Our values" often emerge from an executive retreat where a facilitator has led the senior team through the narcissistic ritual of identifying the concepts with which they'd like to imagine themselves associated ("commitment," "fun," "teamwork," etc.). In moments of truth and tradeoff, however, these lists do little to help employees who need to distill a set of acceptable options and make a wise selection from among the alternatives. This is why employees hate it when you come down from the mountaintop to share the contents of those self-indulgent lists; it compels them to pretend for a time that you've actually given them something useful and something instructive. You haven't.

If you're serious about equipping employees for moments of truth and tradeoff, we know three things that work:

• Clear boundaries—enforced consistently

• Practical rules of thumb

• Realistic scenarios

Bright Lines and Well-Defined Boundaries—Enforced Consistently

Perhaps we're too hard on Enron. After all, Lay and Skilling really did believe in their four stated values—respect, communication, excellence, and integrity—as long as none of those things ever got in the way of making money hand over fist. Of course, making money and delivering results are important in any organization. If that's not happening, you're not going to stay in business. The real question is: Are there any caveats or constraints? Like Enron, you can create an environment where the de facto value is "anything goes ... whatever it takes ... as long as you are delivering results." Or you can communicate what Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling calls "bright lines" and "well- defined boundaries" so that in their pursuit of results and (individual or organizational) self- interests, your employees clearly understand "the things you can never, ever do." The stuff that's off the table.

To deliver the "out of bounds" message with maximum credibility and impact, you can't delegate the responsibility to the human resources (HR) or compliance departments. The medium is the message, which means that employees need to hear it from their leadership.

Nobody does this better than Vanguard, one of the world's largest investment management companies. If you're one of Vanguard's 12,500 employees, you've very clear about what's out of bounds—the stuff you can never do. You learned it in your first week of work, possibly in a face-to-face setting from the CEO himself. Before he stepped down as CEO in 2008, Jack Brennan (who remains the firm's chairman) frequently showed up at "new crew orientation" to deliver a message.

"We make mistakes all the time," he'd tell them. "You can make mistakes at Vanguard. But you can never make an ethical mistake, period. You violate our sense of the right thing, and I am personally going to run you over in the parking lot. If that makes you uncomfortable, there is a break coming up, and you should leave then. But you can't say you didn't hear it." And then, with their full attention, he recited a list of boundaries: "Violate client confidentiality,...