Motivation Requires Consequences

Every time you avoid addressing an issue with someone who is not delivering or missing a schedule, you destroy some trust, especially with your high performers. In addition to degrading trust, an environment with no consequences offers no motivation or reward for performing well. People think: Why bother? Nothing happens if you don't deliver on time, so why knock yourself out?

Lack of consequences is actually de-motivating because people need their work to matter, as we talked about in Chapter 15: Getting People to Actually Care. A good leader will use every tool in the box to get people to personally care.

Without measures and consequences, anything else you do for motivation becomes hollow and pointless. The work has to matter. If failing to get it done on time doesn't matter, by definition, the work doesn't matter.

What Do You Say?

Many managers get uncomfortable with enforcing consequences because they don't know what the appropriate “punishment” should be. When someone does something wrong, what do you do? Do you fire someone for missing a deadline? Do you fire someone for being late to a meeting?

Have the Valor to Have the Difficult Conversation

You don't need to fire people every time something goes wrong. But you do need to address it. Don't just accept this behavior. I see leaders think, Well this isn't enough of a problem to fire the person…, but because they are not comfortable having a difficult conversation, they do nothing.

You don't need to fire the person, but you do need to confront the poor behavior. Acknowledge it. Have the conversation. There are so many options between termination and nothing! You don't need to be a tyrant. But you do need to have a conversation. No matter how small a deadline seems, if it is missed, it should be addressed. Here is a script for the conversation:

This is unacceptable. You did not deliver. What happened? Do you realize the downstream problems this causes? What is your proposal to recover? How do you propose we now get this finished and address the customer/sales/market issue this has created? How will you ensure this does not happen again?

Even if the end result seems the same, that the new date has still slipped two weeks out, the fact that you had the conversation will resonate far beyond this one deadline.

If you always have the conversation, it will help your organization see and feel that you are serious about execution, and that schedules and commitments really do matter. If you always ask, “What happened? How to do you intend to recover?” the act of having this conversation sends the message that it is not okay to miss a deadline.

And then the next time people will think, If I miss a deadline, something uncomfortable is going to happen.

Sure, it can be uncomfortable to have a conversation about missed goals and consequences, but if you miss a goal, it should be uncomfortable! That's the point.

You missed a deadline. That should not be pleasant, comfortable news for anyone. It's not about coming down extra hard on someone or being disrespectful or nasty. It's about moving the business forward. Also, I find that strong performers take a lot of ownership in these conversations and put even more pain on themselves than they get from you. And, in general, people will start self-managing, and delivering on time, to avoid those conversations. Everyone needs to have the Valor to own it and address it when a goal is missed.

Will You Become a Tyrant?

I have had kind managers who were tough with consequences, and I have had managers who were bullies. These are completely different things. You do not need to worry about becoming a bad person by calling out poor performance. As long as you put the business outcome as the motivation for the conversation, you are not attacking the person as a bully would. As long as you can ask yourself, “Is this conversation moving the business forward?” you are on the high ground.

You can be kind to people and tough on results.

Avoiding the conversation does not move the business forward.

Having the conversation does move the business forward.

A good leader will realize that addressing missed deadlines and failures will create an organization that:

1. Builds trust, especially with high performers
2. Can learn from its mistakes
3. Will deliver on time, more predictably
4. Develops higher performing individuals
5. Creates products and services that hit market needs better and sooner

This form of productive persistence is what lets your organization know you are serious, and that what they are doing really matters. When an organization is having trouble executing, I often find that underneath it is a lack of the sort of Valor that is required to enforce consequences.

Late to Meetings

Being late to meetings may not seem like a big deal; in fact, most organizations laugh it off: “Yeah, we're really bad about that around here.” But tolerating chronic lateness and just accepting it as an amusing part of the culture is sending a subtle but strong message: Commitments don't matter here. So you are undermining your ability to achieve your long-term goals.

When everyone is chronically late to meetings and you don't address it, you are sending a cultural signal: we are not serious about what we say we are going to do.

If, instead, you set and enforce an expectation that meetings will start and end on time, and then do it—not only do you get the huge benefit of cost and time savings from more productive meetings, you get the additional, even-bigger benefit of an expectation in your organization that it matters what we say and commit to. You get a higher performing culture that more naturally embraces commitments and deadlines. If we are this serious about managing meetings, we are also serious about managing our schedules, commitments, and business.

One of the fascinating things is that this is so very easy to turn around. You don't have to fire someone for being late to a meeting to change the culture; you just have to say something. When the person walks in late you simply say:

What part of “this meeting starts at 8 am” did you not understand? This meeting starts at 8 am, and I expect you to be here at 8 am. It's 8:04. What makes you think it's okay for you to come at 8:04?

Believe me, you only need to say this one or maybe two times. Everyone in the room will be cringing, and no one in the room will want to hear it again. Your meetings will start on time.

(You need to be on time too.) Leaders who want their teams to deliver on time, but who don't show up on time for their own meetings, frankly drive me crazy. By not showing up on time, yet demanding excellent execution, they are sending a mixed message about the importance of commitments and the standards of execution they personally find acceptable.

How I Narrowly Escaped Disaster

When I got my first big job, managing a group of about 200 people with multiple layers of management beneath me, I did not have experience getting things done leading an organization of this size. This was the software development job to implement the SEI process and improve quality I talked about in Chapter 17: Burn the Ships at the Beach.

The Gap Between Assigning and Doing

I am really good at translating high-level strategy into super-clear actions with owners and measures. I see the big picture, I see the opportunity for how to win, I see what is in the way, and I can prioritize the right concrete tasks that will ensure we make strategic progress. So with my staff, we quickly got to the point where we had a strategy and we had owners and tasks agreed. Everyone was clear about what we needed to do and why. And we had a schedule with control point measures and deadlines. Commence head nodding.

But then…

Everyone left the room and went back to work. Because the assignments were so clear and committed and resourced, I assumed the new work was being worked on. What I didn't know was that there was a whole other body of work to be done to ensure that everyone actually did those tasks. There was tracking and pestering and reporting and review necessary. Not only did I not know that this had to be done, this was not a type of work I was personally good at. And I was too busy doing other work to be able to do a good job at this part, even if I could have.

This is where my hero, the process manager Scott Jordan who was on my staff, saved the day. This was a true gift. I did not know what a process manager did. I did not know that I needed a process manager. I did not personally hire Scott. But even though I didn't know it, or appreciate it at the beginning, I had someone on my team who was brilliant at tracking execution progress and did it without my direction—thank God! Here's what he did:

1. Capture: He would sit in those staff meetings and take all the notes about what was decided and committed and he would write it up, distribute it, and turn it into a project plan with dependencies and timelines.
2. Daily Follow-Up: Then he would go around to every task owner, every week, and say, “How are you doing on this?” He would exert regular, personal visibility and pressure on what was committed.
3. Reporting: Then he would create a report and bring it into our staff meeting every week and let us know what was getting done on schedule and what (and who) was slipping.

With that steady effort, he enabled us to make sure we all got done what we committed to. He made it easy for me to have the discussion and enforce consequences for being late, because what was supposed to happen was spelled out so very clearly.

This was invaluable. Without this process, we would have failed to get stuff done on time. There is no question in my mind about this.

I really can't emphasize this enough. As the leader, I was feeling pretty good about my strategic thinking and my ability to translate the high-level goals into specific, concrete actions to get there. But as the leader, I was also too busy with strategy, financial planning, communications, customers, traveling to multiple sites, and general corporate stuff to be the one to personally go around and get updates from everyone, and create reports to track it all.

I can say without a doubt, without my process manager, I would have failed.

My good luck to have Scott on my team, who knew what to do before I knew it, was for certain a turning point in my career. If I would have failed to deliver, I would have failed in my job. I would have failed to advance.

I always describe myself as a leader who builds teams that can execute. While that is true, I would not have turned into that type of leader without Scott, and I would not have known to recruit someone like him, who had the natural strengths, skills, and energy to do this type of work. I have recruited someone to play this role on my team forever after.

I also want to mention here that Scott's work kept us all out of the details. He turned all the details into insights that we could review in a productive manner. Our control points were described in the form of phases. If we cleared the phase, that meant a zillion things went right, but we did not all spend time reviewing all the details. Scott created the framework that turned details into insights like I discussed in Chapter 19: Detail.

Hard, Boring, and Required (But Worth It)

A big part of managing execution is paying attention to deadlines and doing something about it when they are not met.

A mentor of mine describes this as “doing the hard, boring, and required.” Once again, it requires Valor to keep doing hard, boring, and required stuff throughout the long Middle.

Perhaps this is not the most fun and exciting part of your leadership job—keeping track of commitments and following through when things go wrong. But I have found that it actually doesn't take a lot of “enforcement” to create better habits and move the culture in the right direction. You need to always address the things that have established commitments. If you tolerate chronic poor performance on small things, it's much harder to achieve good performance on big things.