Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

William D. Mayo graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a Bachelor of Science degree, completed the executive education program at Tuck Business School, Dartmouth College, and earned a master’s degree in English Studies from Bradley University. He served nine years in the U.S. Navy and retired as a vice president from Caterpillar Inc. after almost thirty years.

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Why Is the Soft Side the Hardest Part?

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Contents

INTRODUCTION...................................................ixChapter 1: We Gotta Get Out of This Place......................1Chapter 2: Cruel To Be Kind....................................11Chapter 3: Elusive Butterfly...................................18Chapter 4: Can't Buy Me Love...................................25Chapter 5: Who'll Stop the Rain?...............................36Chapter 6: Upside Down.........................................46Chapter 7: I Love You Just the Way You Are.....................57Chapter 8: Big Yellow Taxi.....................................67Chapter 9: When You Say Nothing At All.........................78Chapter 10: Fame...............................................90Chapter 11: What's It All About, Alfie?........................100Epilogue: A Final Nugget.......................................110

Chapter One

Watch my daddy in bed a-dyin' Watched his hair been turnin' grey He's been workin' and slavin' his life away Oh yes I know it He's been workin' so hard, yeah I've been workin' too, baby, yeah Every night and day, yeah We gotta get out of this place If it's the last thing we ever do We gotta get out of this place Cause girl, there's a better life for me and you. Words and music by Barry Mann & Cynthia Weil (1965)

The '60s were a time for questioning everything. Religion, war, politics, ethnic equality, patriotism, love, and even business were called into question. It was a time of burgeoning social revolution. Eric Burdon and the Animals recorded "We Gotta Get Out of This Place" in 1965, and it quickly became an anthem for the movement. Popular with armed forces personnel, it also became the theme song for Vietnam and those protesting the war.

Today corporate America is in its own battleground. A lack of confidence in business leaders, contempt for corporate greed, and the perception of ethics lost plagues enterprise today, even to the point of blaming the current economic crisis on these prevalent factors. The Animals' recording is yet today a fitting clarion call for a leadership philosophy focused on the soft side.

We need to win back the hearts of our people. Truly, business needs to get out of the place it is mired in today. But the management thinking that got us into this position won't lead us out. It will take a new approach—one that puts people above revenue targets, stock price, and the incessant counting of the corporate beans. And to that point, remember this little ditty from childhood?

Beans, beans ... the musical fruit. The more you eat, the more you toot. The more you toot, the better you feel. So let's have beans for every meal!

As kids, we'd recite it and laugh at the invariable flatulence that followed a diet of those musical morsels. Many managers I've known are big advocates of beans, or at least bean counting. They apparently have the lyrics committed to memory as their mantra, fervently submitting to the religious dogma of more and more "bean counting." I'm not a numbers zealot. They have their place, but it seems to me that in many businesses today, managers are metric-crazed. Too many metrics merely create clutter and clatter, reminiscent of a runaway train. In my company, we never met a metric we didn't like. The more we had, the better we felt. So we had metrics for everything—a steady diet of metrics. Unfortunately, much like that musical fruit, they tended to be more gaseous than substantive.

During one overseas assignment, I worked for a talented manager who was insatiably hungry for the beans. He actually believed we needed to manage 116 top-tier metrics—116! And those were just the top tier of our runaway metrics train. The monthly staff meetings became a monotonous parade, if not charade, of metrics. So much so that many times, that's all we had time to cover. Numbers. We didn't talk about employees. We didn't talk about customers. We talked about numbers. I found my eyes glazing over as chart after chart of "Red/Yellow/Green" scorecards and the attendant rationalizations droned on. In my mind, those scorecards were an incessant assault against what was important—things like culture, people, and customers.

I would often argue, though unsuccessfully, that the Creator gave me only ten fingers. Perhaps that would be a good maximum number of key metrics to track. However, this manager's need to control—or unfortunately his illusion of control—kept the focus on numbers and incessant metrics. He would always quip, "What gets measured gets done." But guess what? All those metrics did not improve results. As divisions go, his was the poorest performing marketing unit within the firm. I guess what got done was not what got measured, was it? As a European colleague and I would muse, "Ouzan ou gaz"—which literally means—"emitting a gaseous air." It may have been funny, but it's actually more than a little sad; a sad commentary on management's obsession with numbers at the expense of people.

This manager's mantra was trumped by the simple reality that all the scorekeeping in the world wouldn't improve the health of his division. All it did was drive tedious administrivia and score keeping—and it kept our accountants gainfully, if not productively, employed. Furthermore, every staff meeting could devolve into a tense gathering where managers found themselves gloating or sweating. They would sit there, unengaged at best, or gloating at worst—when their metrics were green—while the "red" guys were sweating in the hot seat, hoping for cover from some other poor sot whose red was even redder than his. Talk about a gaseous waste of resources and valuable time together! We could have been talking about the business, but instead we made love to the numbers.

Many managers fall victim to his type of thinking. Rampant metrics mania only creates a cloud of confusion, not clarity. And it also creates a certain "gotcha" culture that causes employees to seek cover from red scores, or worse yet, to become complacent and take solace from those that are green. Think about it this way: The whole red/yellow/green thing implies traffic control. The law. But it's control gone amuck, and it isn't leadership. Although I certainly realize that not all metrics are bad, the trick is to track only the right metrics and not become seduced by all possible measures.

Philosophically, how do metrics relate to the soft side? And what leadership approach should be used to keep score? Here's the deal: philosophically, numbers matter, but people matter more. You can create all kinds of ways to count the score. But leaders avoid the seduction of chasing numbers that seems to entrap many an otherwise good manager. Good leaders learn how to integrate the numbers with the soft side. After all, leaders do know how to count, but they should know that people count more. My philosophy? If we take care of...