Leaders Make the Weather

By Jim Shaffer

Everything a leader says and does is scrutinized for meaning because being a leader assumes importance as a form of communication often far beyond what the leader imagines. People watch what leaders say and don't say, what they do and don't do.

We notice where our bosses sit, where they par

• Language: English
• Publisher: South River Publishing
• Release date: Mar 23, 2023
• ISBN: 9798986695525

Book preview

HOW LEADERSHIP TRANSFORMS BUSINESS PERFORMANCE

Educators, consultants, writers and others interested in the elements of effective leadership often pose the question, Give me an example of a truly great leader. Their purpose is to explore and understand essential leadership skills, behaviors and values and thereby to gain—and share— insights that can help aspiring leaders learn and develop.

As a coach, consultant and writer I have posed that question many times. Responses range from the historic (Alexander the Great, Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill), to the military (Boadicea, Napoleon Bonaparte, Genghis Khan), to the personal (parents, spouses and mentors), to those in business (Sheryl Sandberg, Jack Welch, Steve Jobs), to the political (Indira Gandhi, Abraham Lincoln, Jacinda Ardern).

My own response evolves with the times and with my experience and perhaps with the theme of the workshop or consulting process in which I may be engaged. In recent years I keep coming back to someone much closer to home. This man demonstrated for me that great leadership can be exercised and experienced in the most ordinary of places and organizations. His name is David Rabuano. He is literally an exemplary leader. He isn’t historic or political or even famous (at least, not beyond his friends and work colleagues). But I haven’t found a better model of how seemingly ordinary people can transform business performance by exceptional leadership.

Let me introduce you to Dave, a former client and friend in Ohio who called to give me the best news I’d received in more than 30 years of working to improve performance through effective leadership.

The Owens Corning building materials plant in Newark, Ohio had just completed its 100 million hours injury free.

Why was this a big deal?

In March of the previous year, I was in Waxahachie, Texas helping a company’s Texas operation improve product changeover cycle-time. My client, the senior vice president of manufacturing, called. He asked me to drop what I was doing and head to Newark, the site of the company’s largest plant. An employee had died in an accident a few months earlier and another lost an arm in a machine at the plant a week prior to the call.

In the previous five years the same plant had had 370 severe accidents and 1,200 OSHA recordable incidents.¹ Workers’ compensation costs totaled $11 million. My assignment was to work with a new plant leader and the Owens Corning team to turn the operation around with a primary focus on safety. As someone with an operational focus who likes to help people improve what they do—and make the improvements stick—this was exactly the kind of challenge that I relished. And given the appalling recent record this was indeed a big deal.

In my role as consultant I work with client teams to clearly define goals to identify and understand issues, needs, challenges and opportunities to sort through options to define strategy, create plans and to start the process of putting the needed changes into effect. I’m there to suggest, guide and question. The client team does most of the hard work. And if I’ve done my job effectively that work continues when I move out.

An early priority in any consulting intervention is to identify and engage the stakeholders—the individuals and groups who are involved. They deeply understand the concerns and challenges (they live with them every day) and have the knowledge and experience to develop and implement solutions. Employees are of course core stakeholders, along with supervisors, managers and union leaders.

At the plant each of these groups took some sustained work and engagement to buy in to the goals and the process and to get past the skepticism that had developed from years of not being fully engaged. But after some weeks of listening, discussing, analyzing, and planning the union leaders became full partners in launching an intense initiative to create a dramatic improvement in safety.

The transformation we were aiming for required a significant culture shift, changing both what was valued in the workplace and how the work was done. This called for changed leadership behavior, new skills, intense communication, high involvement and a new approach to setting goals and to measuring and recognizing performance.

David Rabuano, then 34, was the new plant manager. He’s one of the finest natural leaders I’ve worked with. At once hard-edged and soft, he is direct, open, decisive and fair. He sets high standards and expects them to be met. But tough though he can be, he cares deeply about his people. He listens to them, encourages them and will do whatever he can to help them grow and succeed.

While my assignment was to advise Dave on the process and management of the needed transformation, I learned about the power of authenticity and vulnerability from him —two classic characteristics of a great leader. We were harnessing the energy of 1,300 people spread over more than 200 acres and helping them go to places they never thought possible.

In less than two years the Newark team cut OSHA recordables by 82% while dramatically improving sales (24%), productivity (11%), cost per pound (8%) and return on net assets (14%). The absolute focus had been on a dramatic improvement in safety but in making progress toward that goal almost all other performance metrics were strengthened.

A huge part of leadership is selecting and grooming your successor. Dave selected Denny Rogers with whom I’ve also had the joy of working. Denny had kept the intense safety focus alive while continuing to improve the other operating and financial numbers.

In the recent announcement of the one-million-hour record, Denny said: In the early 2000s the plant averaged more than 10 recordable injuries per month. During that time the plant team developed a Road to Zero plan and since then we’ve shared a vision that zero is possible in Newark. This accomplishment is a great milestone on our safety journey and shows the tremendous progress we’re making.

The lesson in this story is that great leaders have the ability to help their people achieve results far beyond their expectations. I’ve seen that time and time again. And while there are indeed natural leaders whose education and experience seem to have developed the right mix of behaviors, values and skills those characteristics can also be understood and learned. In this book I will share the elements of great leadership through instructive stories of success and failure. And I’ll demonstrate that anyone who truly understands and embraces this framework can themselves achieve exceptional results through their people.

Here is the framework. In this book I’ll share stories and cases that illuminate these characteristics of great leadership. And throughout I’ll provide ideas and examples and processes to help you become—and succeed as—a great leader.

Of course, trying to capture the essence of leadership in a framework or list or model is—while necessary to understand and learn from good and bad experience—a challenge, to say the least. My intention here is to offer a framework or organizing structure for the real content of stories, case studies and ideas. My hope is that you will draw on this material to build your own model or set of principles for how you lead.

As I think about characterizing leadership style I consider five broad areas of focus:

Alignment: ensuring that work and results are consistent with the organization’s overall vision, strategy and purpose.

Results: using learning, measurement and appropriate data to manage and improve performance.

Communication: the process through which you build and maintain listening, openness and transparency.

Support: providing needed coaching, resources and engagement-building for the people in the organization.

Values: modelling and supporting the right commitments and behaviors through focus, authenticity, and teamwork.

Let’s dig down into those areas of focus and their subsets. And perhaps you will note those that especially resonate with your own approach and style of leadership—or the style you aspire to and that align with the culture of your organization.

¹ ‘Recordables incidents are defined by the Unites States Occupational Safety and Health Administration (OSHA) as any work-related injury or illness that results in loss of consciousness, days away from work, restricted work, or transfer to another job, or any work-related injury or illness requiring medical treatment beyond first aid.

ALIGNMENT

VISION

A vision represents a clear picture of the future— what there looks like. Why we’re doing what we’re doing every day to get there.

Vision First

Kristen and Jason sit at a table with a divider between them. Each has a box containing a 500-piece puzzle. Kristen has the box with its original top. On it there’s a picture of the completed puzzle. Jason’s box has no top, only the puzzle pieces in the bottom half of the box. He doesn’t have a picture of the completed puzzle.

Kristen and Jason are invited to begin assembling their puzzles. Both started spreading out the pieces in front of them.

Kristen studies the picture of the completed puzzle for about 30 seconds and begins creating piles of puzzle pieces that seem to be approximately the same color. She seems tentative but thoughtful.

Jason looks slightly bewildered. He moves the puzzle pieces around aimlessly trying a little of this, a little of that.

Kristen finds a match between two puzzle pieces and her fingers start moving more rapidly, searching for a mate to the coupled pieces. After ten minutes Kristen has assembled approximately 30 pieces and is on a roll. Jason has only just found his first match.

Freeze frame!

To the leader of a $20 billion organization who made more than $5 million last year and asked the question: Why do we need to communicate a vision to our employees?

Do you get it now?

And to all the leaders who need to communicate a vision to your employees have you painted a clear picture of the future to your team? I’m not asking if you have a strategy or a plan. Or if you want to be the biggest or the best, whatever that means. I’m asking if you have communicated to your team—whether it’s three people who work in your retail store or the 20,000 people who work all over the world—what the finished product is supposed to look like– what needs to be different in the way you do things. Is that picture filled with a sense of purpose and meaning—why you must realize that vision and who will be better off when you do?

If this vision talk is too touchy-feely for you, I invite you to think again.

What Does There Look Like?

A client told me her boss claims that the 25,000-employee company didn’t a need a vision.

Everybody knows what they’re supposed to do, the boss told her. Why do they think they have to have a vision?

A corporate vision shouldn’t be what the boss was probably referring to--an alliterative, substance-absent statement tacked up on conference room walls. Today’s visions represent a clear picture of the results an organization is trying to create–-whether it’s a business, a sport or cooking.

In the previous section I told the story of Kristen and Jason at work trying to put together a puzzle. Kristen was shown the cover of the puzzle box that depicts the completed puzzle. Kristen knows what there looks like. Jason is on his own.

Similarly, a corporate vision is a picture of the future we’re trying to create. It’s our destination. It’s what there looks like. It’s why we’re doing what we’re doing every day to get there.

Shake it up, Baby!

Well, shake it up, baby—the opening line of an early Beatles song (Twist and Shout)—is often what leaders need to do to initiate large scale change.

Disruptive innovation isn’t a new phenomenon in the business world. Clayton Christensen, Harvard professor and author of The Innovator’s Dilemma,² popularized disruptive innovation as a force that creates a new market and value network and eventually disrupts an existing market and value network. Simply put, doing things differently to create better results. Or at least that’s the intent.

Across the globe and here in the US, the current political climate is rife with disruptive change. The caveat here is that what works brilliantly in business may not always produce the same positive results when applied to running a governmental body.

Business leaders who shake things up in order to generate better results often deliberately deviate from cultural expectations in ways that inspire others to follow. The way they shake things up initially can make people uncomfortable because they communicate new expected behaviors.

The late Steve Jobs, former chairman, CEO and co-founder of Apple, Inc., was a visionary who made it his mission to humanize personal computing—rewriting the rules of user experience design, hardware design and software design. According to an article in Wired magazine, "His actions reverberated across industry lines. He shook up the music business, dragged the wireless carriers into the ring, changed the way software and hardware are sold and forever altered