ENGAGING LEADERSHIP

“He thinks group, but he always sees individuals.”

—Former Senator Bill Bradley, describing his friend Phil Jackson’s coaching style1

THE THRILL OF VICTORY

Ever wonder why some teams just keep winning? Consider this:

• In October 2000, the majestic New York Yankees won the World Series against their hated crosstown rivals, the Mets. This was the Yanks’ 26th championship, far more than any other baseball team, and more than any pro team in any sport. It was also the 4th time in five years that the Yankees won the Series, all under the calm and responsive leadership of manager Joe Torre. In 2001, an aging Yankees team made it to the World Series again, defeating powerful Oakland and Seattle teams before falling to a tremendously tough Arizona team in seven incredible games. The Yankees had the best record in baseball and made the playoffs again in 2002, losing in the first round. Torre’s streak ranked with the best of the great New York teams throughout baseball history.

• In 1999, Phil Jackson took over the talented but troubled Los Angeles Lakers. Built around stars Shaquille O’Neal and Kobe Bryant since the 1996–1997 season, the team never meshed. It collapsed in the conference semifinals the season before Jackson arrived. Jackson brought his Zen persona, triangle offense, and coaching assistants with him to Los Angeles and won the NBA championship in his first year with essentially the same team. Even though O’Neal and Bryant fought for team leadership most of Jackson’s second season, the coach righted things by the end. The Lakers won their division and went on a 15–1 run through the playoffs, the best in NBA history, to repeat as champions. The next year Jackson added his third straight championship with the Lakers to the six titles he won in Chicago.

• At the end of the 2000 baseball season, the Seattle Mariners said good-bye to free agent all-star shortstop Alex Rodriquez, who went to the Texas Rangers for the biggest contract in baseball history. It was the third year in a row Seattle lost an all-star and likely future hall-of-famer. Pitcher Randy Johnson left in 1998, and outfielder Ken Griffey, Jr. left after the 1999 season. Yet in 2001, a rebuilt Mariners team tied an 83-year-old major league record with 116 wins. Under wily manager Lou Piniella, the M’s reinvented themselves to become a team of great speed, pitching, and defense. In recognition for his work, Piniella was voted AL Manager of the Year for the second time. Ultimately the M’s lost to the Yankees in the American League Championship Series, but given the New Yorkers’ remarkable run, that’s no disgrace.

Still wondering why some keep winning? It’s leadership. Of course, Torre, Jackson, and Piniella would be the first to tell you it’s not all about them. They’d say it’s about the players the talent, and they’d be right. As Casey Stengel said when asked about his remarkable World Series winning streak with the Yankees, “I could’ done it without my players.”2 Torre doesn’t win without Derek Jeter, Bernie Williams, and their talented teammates. Jackson won with Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen in Chicago the best duo to play together until O’Neal and Bryant came along. Piniella had Edgar Martinez, Ichiro Suzuki, and other stars on the Mariners.

But winning is about how leaders engage the talent on their teams to perform to its maximum capabilities. Torre won four World Series, including three in a row, in an era when players change teams constantly, and every year teams spent just about as much as theYankees. The Lakers had the same players the year before Jackson arrived and couldn’t get it done. Very few baseball experts picked Piniella’s Mariners to win their division in 2001, let alone tie the mark for all-time wins. Talent is wasted when it’s not engaged. In fact, the ability to engage talent is the main ingredient of skillful leadership today. This is true in sports and business, and it has never been as critical a success factor as it is now.

ENGAGING FOR SUCCESS

Aleader is someone who can engage people for success. Engaged people are passionately committed. If you are a leader who engages your employees, your people have strong psychological, social, and intellectual connections to their work, your organization, and its goals.

When people are engaged, they love what they do and what you’re trying to achieve. They feel valued and the workday goes by quickly for them. They’ll gladly put in extra hours and effort to help you get where you want to go. They’ll soar “above and beyond” to create greater quality and service. They’ll brag about you and your organization to others they’re your best salespeople. And they’ll commit to stay with you. It would take enormous offers to get them to leave, and even then they may not do it.

Think about the enthusiasm and commitment you feel when you’re most engaged in your work. What could your team accomplish if everyone felt that way?

Engaged followers should be your goal, and the goal of every leader. Engaged people are more productive, produce higher quality, and show higher rates of retention. They display more pride in their companies and share that pride with others. They build customer loyalty. They attract other high-caliber people. You need all of these things to win. So that’s your target engaging your people and this article will help you hit it.

WHAT ENGAGING LEADERS DO

Is there a single secret to becoming an engaging leader? I don’t think so. You have to do lots of things to engage people, and to make sure you have the right talent to engage. The closest I’ve seen to a good prescription for engagement is the quote from Bill Bradley about his friend Jackson that starts this chapter. “He thinks group, but he always sees individuals.”3 This is an apt description of the way to engage people today. Point the group toward the goals you want to achieve, but spend a lot of your time catering to the unique needs of individuals in your group, particularly the most talented ones. For years, this didn’t matter so much because there were more than enough skilled people to go around. If a talented person didn’t work out you could replace him or her without too much trouble. Not so today. If you don’t spend time caring for your talented people, they’ll leave, you won’t be able to replace them quickly or cheaply, and you’ll miss out on significant opportunities.

To describe engaging leadership in detail, let’s look more closely at leadership styles.

DRIVERS AND BUILDERS

A friend and colleague of mine, another sports fan who makes his living as a management consultant, once told me about something Tex Winter said. Winter, a legendary basketball coach and close colleague of Phil Jackson’s, noted that there are two kinds of coaches drivers and builders. Though they might make strange bedfellows, Winter’s description is just like that of Douglas McGregor.

More than 40 years ago, McGregor, the well-known MIT management professor and business author, wrote his classic book about Theory X (drivers) and Theory Y (builders) managers.4 Some very recent work at the Harvard Business School used quite similar types to describe companies, based on how they were led.

There are many more sophisticated ways to describe leaders, but this one is simple and has passed the test of time. Leaders do fall into these two categories pretty naturally, and their followers talk about them this way. It’s often the first thing I see in a new client situation when I’m working with executives and their teams.

Most leaders aren’t “pure” types, but some are.

Drivers:

• Put results first. They want things done their way, and they want them done now.

• Stress economic value above everything else. Financial results top their lists.

• Make the decisions. They like being decisive and in control so they set the agenda and make as many decisions as possible.

• “Crack the whip.” They keep the pressure on for accountability and come down hard when goals aren’t met.

• Focus on “what” and “when.” They want to know what have you done for me lately and when can I expect those results on my desk.

• Take a short-term focus. The day’s, week’s, or quarter’s results are what matter.

• Get “in your face” a lot. They thrive on confrontation and let you know right away when you aren’t performing.

• Are more critical than positive. They’re hard to please and take delight in pushing you for more all the time; you can never do enough.

Pat Riley, coach of the Miami Heat, is a notorious driver. He pushes himself and his players hard, nonstop. That’s the only way he believes in coaching. When forward A.C. Green played for the Heat, he said of Riley, “You never satisfy coach.”5 Builders are the opposite of drivers.

Builders:

• Put people and processes first. It’s crucial to them that relationships, are good and people feel involved. They believe this leads to results.

• Stress organizational capabilities. They want to build systems and talent and will sacrifice some financial gain to do it.

• Get others involved. They seek lots of input into decisions and delegate them as much as possible because they think that makes better decisions.

• Let solutions emerge. They don’t try to tackle every problem right away. They believe the best solutions arise naturally and some problems solve themselves or go away.

• Focus on “who” and “how.” The want to know who is affected or should be involved in a situation and how the issue was resolved in the proper way.

• Take a long-term focus. They’re concerned about positioning their teams for success a year or two down the road.

• Stay “behind the scenes” more. They let their employees take center stage.

• Are more positive than critical. They practice the old saying of “you catch more flies with honey than with a fly swatter.”

A classic builder is a “player’s coach.” Dennis Green, formerly of the Minnesota Vikings, is the perfect example. He let his players do their thing, and that’s how he got them to buy into his agenda.

They loved it, and it worked for years. Before he resigned, when there was talk of firing him, his temperamental star receiver Randy Moss said, “I can tell you that, straight up, if there were another coach, I probably wouldn’t want to play here.”6 When Green left on his own terms, Moss reconsidered.

You can be quite successful as a driver or a builder, as long as you do it well and communicate effectively. Communication is the, fundamental leadership skill for everyone now. But you won’t be a consistent champion today if you just stay within your style. Both Riley and Green are winners—Riley has championship rings, and Green’s teams got to the playoffs almost every year. They have records other coaches envy. Yet since they rely too heavily on their primary styles, they don’t win it all anymore. They limit themselves by not expanding their behaviors.

Riley hasn’t won a conference or NBA championship since the 1987–1988 season, when he worked with a whole different generation of players. For the last several seasons, Miami has been beaten early in the playoffs by lower ranked teams. After the Charlotte Hornets swept his higher seeded Heat in the first round of the 2000–2001 playoffs, he said he probably should be fired. Lucky for him, he was president and coach of the team, and the president didn’t feel like firing the coach. In 2002, the Heat didn’t even make the playoffs.

Green took the Vikings to the playoffs in eight of his first nine years as coach. He won four Central Division titles and in 1998 and 2000 coached heavily favored teams in the NFC Championship game, only to lose them both. The 2000 team lost the title in one of the most lopsided games ever, 41–0, to an unknown and underdog New York Giants team. The team was emotionally devastated afterwards, and it never recovered.

My lesson for leaders here is that neither Riley nor Green is versatile enough. Riley doesn’t stop driving long enough to let his players catch their breaths and enjoy their achievements. Constant driving just grinds people down. It doesn’t engage them. No wonder Riley’s teams run out of energy at the end of the long NBA season.

He pushes them so hard all year that they can’t regroup, renew, and refocus to be successful in the playoffs. Because he’s concentrating so heavily on short-term success, his playoff defeats have driven him to make big changes in team personnel every year.

Under Riley, the Heat has to rekindle its chemistry annually. There’s not enough continuity.

Green’s teams had the opposite problem. The Vikings had trouble turning up the intensity for big games. Green took the same steady approach all the time and expected the players to motivate themselves. After all, isn’t that the definition of a professional?

Green rarely, if ever, “cracked the whip” so when the Vikings ran into a team that was really psyched, like the Giants in the championship game, they were overwhelmed right from the start. The Giants won that game in the first quarter. Randy Moss, Green’s devoted fan, said even before kickoff he could tell the team wasn’t ready, “I think all of our losses this year [2000] were because we were either too cocky or not up for the challenge. Nobody talked about coming out and smacking them in the mouth.”7 After the debacle of that game and the death of a key player the next season, Green simply lost control of some of his stars and, ultimately, the team.

Of course, you can find other faults in these cases, like Riley’s complicated, slow-motion offensive style or Green’s inability to build a strong defense. But if we stay focused on their leadership styles, we can see these coaches are limited because they rely too heavily on one approach. Strengths taken too far always result in weakness.

You also can find people who are ineffective with their styles: A driver who doesn’t push hard enough for results but gets overly obsessed with details; a builder who is inclined to create strong relationships but lacks the emotional intelligence or interpersonal skills to make it happen. If you know what your style is, the first thing you need to do is develop it into a strength. You can discover your style by taking the quick, self-scoring inventory at the end of this book. Then, by using what’s in this book, you can take the necessary steps to become more versatile. You may think drivers are more talkative and builders are more reserved. Sometimes that’s true, but loud or quiet can go with either style. Success comes when you’re communicating, whatever the volume. Torre and Jackson are quieter builders, while Green is more talkative. Piniella and Riley are extroverted drivers, but Bill Belichick of the New England Patriots is a more introverted driver who won the Super Bowl. You have to look across the range of behaviors I listed earlier to come to a correct categorization.

So, there are drivers and there are builders. Most people can’t and don’t change their basic leadership styles. Change happens very rarely and only after people go through some significant life event, like a great trauma, from which they learn a significant lesson.

Even then, it’s pretty unusual to change styles, and leaders really don’t have to change to win.

ENGAGING LEADERS ARE VERSATILE

If overreliance on your basic style is a limitation, and people generally don’t change, then what’s a driver or builder to do? You could hire a second-in-command who complements your style, but that has its own set of issues. Instead, you need to become more versatile.

You need to understand versatility, recognize situations where a departure from your usual approach will be more successful, and act accordingly. When you do this, you are better able to engage a broader variety of talents. You’ll be able to guide a wider range of people and situations. This will make you more effective and successful.

You won’t change your basic style, but you will use some of the best behaviors of the opposite style more often. This isn’t easy, but engaging leadership isn’t supposed to be easy. That’s why there are so few consistent winners among leaders.

Phil Jackson showed this versatility in bringing the Lakers together during the 2000–2001 season, but it was hard. For much of the year, O’Neal and Bryant fought each other over who was the team leader and Los Angeles played way below its potential. The infighting threatened to sink the entire season. Jackson tried to let them work it out by themselves. But even then, he scolded the two of them publicly and privately for their childlike behavior, calling it “silly” and likening it to a “sandbox fight.” He also took Bryant aside to talk about trading him, while making it known that Shaq wasn’t going anywhere.

Eventually, his comments got through to Bryant, who saw the team win without him while he was injured. Jackson thought the squabble forced a change in his coaching, “I’m much firmer with these guys. I was more lenient and patient last year than this year.”8

He didn’t want to be. His inclinations as a builder were to let the two of them work it out, but he recognized he had to do something. Moreover, comments from the other Lakers showed they wanted Jackson to take control and solve the problem. They wanted him to lead.

In 2001, throughout baseball’s long season, Lou Piniella showed a level of versatility that had been growing for several years. Afiery, hard-driving guy, Piniella was known early in his playing career for his temper and his toughness. Even as a manager in the late 1980s and early 1990s, he kicked his hat at umpires and trashed water coolers in the dugout. He pushed and prodded the 1990 Cincinnati Reds, with their “nasty boy” pitchers, to a surprising World Series victory. But age, maturity, and wisdom combined to calm him down. “I’ve really learned to manage since I’ve been here in Seattle,” he says. “I manage myself and I manage my team better.”9 Jay Buhner played for Piniella with both the Yankees and the Mariners. “We can remember his tirades, him kicking his hat and pulling up bases, and then, the next day, him coming in and he can’t bend over because he pulled his back out trying to get the base out.

He’s still a very emotional guy. He wears his emotions on his sleeve. But he realizes he doesn’t have to kick some of these guys in the butt. He’s an absolute pleasure to work for and I would run through

a wall for that guy.”10 Drivers and builders become more engaging when they become more versatile and flexible in their approaches by adapting the best behaviors of the other style. Engaging leadership is not a third style.

You’re either a driver or a builder, and you’re unlikely to change. But you become an engaging driver or an engaging builder when you learn to take on some good habits of the other style when it’s necessary. The more you’re able to do this, the more engaging you become. And the more engaging you become, the more you win.

As with Piniella, engaging leadership usually is learned through experience.

Your natural inclination will be toward driving or building, but engaging people takes time and the wisdom you acquire by trying out different leadership approaches. Torre managed three different teams over 14 years and had a lifetime losing record before he got to the Yankees. Jackson was a player-coach, minor league coach, and assistant coach before taking over the Bulls. Some things take time and experience, and becoming an engaging leader is one of them.

What does versatility look like? We’ll explore this throughout the book, but briefly:

• Drivers become more engaging when they become more patient, positive, and responsive to individual needs. They need to listen more and show greater concern for people, relationships, and processes. They become more engaging when they “dial down” the control, treat people like individuals, and trust them to do the right things.

• Builders become more engaging when they become more demanding for results and accountability. They need to increase the pressure to get results and the appropriate consequences when the results are not met. They become more engaging when they insist people get with the program by putting aside their own agendas, and trust that people can handle the heightened demands.

As a result of being more versatile, engaging leaders in business:

• Get their results through people. They know that’s how to win consistently.

• Stress results and reinvestment. They push hard for profitability and growth, in part so they can make sizeable reinvestments in developing people and organizational systems that enable people to work better.

• Make the big decisions. They make the big or tough decisions on a timely basis with a useful amount of input. They know followers expect them to lead. They also leave decisions about execution to the people closest to the work.

• Intervene when appropriate. They develop a feel for stepping in at the right times, not too often or too seldom. They know when to press hard to solve a problem or demand greater performance, and they know when to let people work things out on their own.

• Focus on the head, hands, and heart. They understand that getting work done requires head and hands, but more gets done when it is fueled by a love of the work. They make sure that people enjoy what they do and feel respected. This often involves finding out what the person wants to do and enabling them to do it.

• Balance the short term and long term. They keep one eye on the present and one on the future. They’re quick to take action to address what’s necessary for today while continuing to build for tomorrow.

• Are “in the moment.” They vary between stepping front and center and hanging back, depending upon the situation. They’ll shield their team if necessary or encourage team members to take the stage and the credit.

• Show their feelings. They express their emotions in an authentic and respectful way. Some leaders show a lot of emotion, others show less because of their personalities. But engaging leaders know the value of displaying their feelings. Your people learn to understand and expect your rhythms because they’re real and out in the open. Engaging leaders are much more positive than negative because people respond better to that. They know the most important emotion is hope—hope is the wellspring of motivation. Still, they recognize they have to be realistic too. They can be effective when they’re angry or critical as long as it’s genuine and happens less frequently than joy, optimism, and praise.

Quarterback Trent Green summed up the description of an engaging leader when he described his coach in St. Louis and Kansas City, Dick Vermeil. Said Green, “Dick is such a positive and upbeat [person], always finding the best in a certain situation and always trying to stay real positive. He’s not afraid to scream and yell, don’t get me wrong, but for the most part he tries to keep everything positive. He’s very demanding in terms of the amount of hours we have to spend and as much work as we do on the field.”11

ENGAGING IMPACTS

When you display these behaviors, you engage your employees in several ways.

• You enable them to get to know you.

• You show them that you care about them.

• You help them admire you and want to work for you.

• You show them you’re intensely passionate and optimistic about your work and your goals.

• You help them understand the value of taking a disciplined approach to performing.

Exposure and Knowledge

Today, you have to expose yourself to your people in ways leaders never had to before. The old, formal, distant, hierarchical-based idea of leadership is dying. Your talented people expect to relate to you in a more informal, egalitarian way, even if you would prefer to have it another way.

One of the best examples of this I ever encountered was an entrepreneurial leader I know who built a multibillion dollar technology company. When the packing and shipping line went down, he’d head straight to the warehouse to help put machines in boxes.

When he wasn’t needed for packing, he’d stay in the warehouse anyway, making sure people had the supplies they needed and coffee and food to keep going. Gordon Bethune did a similar thing in rebuilding Continental Airlines. He’d work the ticket counters and tarmacs on a regular basis.

On the other hand, one of the biggest weaknesses I see in some business leaders is that they keep their distance from their employees.

I don’t mean their fellow executives; I mean the people who serve customers, load boxes, think up marketing campaigns, enter data, and so on. How can you expect to know how customers are being served or how much quality goes into your products if you don’t know what people are thinking and feeling? Teams take on the personalities of their leaders. Do you want yours to be cold, distant, and uncaring?

People expect to get to know who you really are—your personality and your preferences. That’s why engaging leaders show their true feelings. They understand people want closeness. You shouldn’t keep your distance, even if your employees want to keep their distance from you.

Employees also expect you to get to know them. David Grainger, who built W.W. Grainger into the United States’ largest industrial and office supply business before retiring, was famous for walking the halls and distribution centers, remembering people by name, asking them about their families, and recalling their celebrations.

That’s one reason he became a beloved leader. Sports have an advantage over many businesses in this regard: most sports teams and organizations are small so it’s easy to get to know people. On the other hand, it’s impossible for a coach to hide his weaknesses as a person. If you lead a small organization or,work team, you must get to know your people personally their families, hobbies, interests, and issues. In a large organization, it may be impossible for you to do that, but everyone can get to know if you reveal your true self. You have to be authentic; people can sense when you are trying to be something you’re not. By the way, if people don’t like what you reveal, they’ll tell you. Today, if you don’t change, they’ll probably tell you on your way or their way out the door.

Relationship Building and Caring

What I’m describing is relationship building, and as you build that relationship, you have to show you care. People aren’t going to care about you and your concerns unless they know you care about theirs. General Colin Powell said, “The day soldiers stop bringing you their problems is the day you stopped leading them.”12 Engaging leaders don’t do this just to be nice, though it’s the right way to deal with people. They do it because the more caring they show, the more performance they can demand. Think about it. For whom are you more likely to extend yourself, someone you love or someone you don’t know or don’t like?

In 1998, the Center for Creative Leadership did a study on what distinguishes effective leaders from ineffective ones. After reviewing mountains of data it found only one difference: effective leaders cared about their people.13 Demonstrating caring is done one on one. That means knowing what each member of your team needs to make him or her feel valued.

Appreciation is a highly personal thing. It’s different for each individual. To show appreciation, you may have to take as many different approaches as you have unique people. Your people will feel appreciated based on the personal relationship you build with each of them as their leader.

Dusty Baker, formerly of the San Francisco Giants, now the manager of the Cubs, won baseball’s Manager of the Year award three times. He knows the way to a player’s heart is through his stomach. Giants’ star, Barry Bonds, gave away Baker’s secret to success. “He always brings food in every day. He takes care of everybody.

When he knows you’re down and out, he does something to perk you up. When you’re struggling, he’ll say, ‘Here I brought you lunch. You’re looking a little weak. I want you to get strong.’”14 Baker learned the value of good nutrition from Hank Aaron and now spends $50 to $60 a day on food for his team. He knows every good restaurant in National League cities—not the fanciest, just the best. But he doesn’t deliver food just to make people happy, he does it to win. “You’ve got to be nutritionally strong. In the end, only the

strong survive.”15 Phil Jackson feeds players egos, not their bodies. Former player Stacy King didn’t get along well with Phil when they were with the Bulls. Now a coach in the CBA, King patterns himself after Phil. Said King, “During my first two years with him, I despised about 95 percent of Phil’s approach. Now I see the big picture that I didn’t see before. My style is actually a lot like Phil’s, especially how he handled players. They all have personalities, and to mesh them together without too many restrictions on them takes a lot of work.”16Jackson discovered that Shaquille O’Neal wanted a close, father son type relationship because of O’Neal’s family background. So that’s what Jackson worked on, even before he started coaching him. He also joined with O’Neal’s family to encourage him to finish his degree. O’Neal, with the Lakers’ blessing, left the team for a few days during the 2000–2001 season to attend graduation ceremonies at LSU. To Jackson, it was a matter of supporting O’Neal and his family and getting priorities right.

Admiration and Integrity

The ability to make smart, tough decisions, while still acknowledging the emotional side of things and responding to people’s feelings, makes you a hero to your people. And people want to work for leaders they admire. I hear this all the time in my consulting. Employees spend a lot of time looking upward in their companies, and when they talk about bosses they admire—whether it’s their supervisors or the CEO—they say it with a smile and great personal pride.

The desire to admire may be a distinctly American trait. I’m not certain. Some experts talk about Americans being hero worshippers, based on our culture that celebrates individualism. At the same time, much of the literature on leadership says that heroic leadership is overrated and unnecessary in organizations, even though that’s what the business press likes to write about.

I agree you don’t need to be a heroic leader, like the classic stereotype, to be a success. Still, you have to want to lead and be willing to get out in front. You don’t have to be particularly charismatic, though you have to be able to communicate. People love and are inspired by everyday heroes. It helps them feel like they’re working in the right company if they can look up to their leaders.

Arthur Ashe, the great tennis player, described very well the kind of hero to which I’m referring. Ashe said, “True heroism is remarkably sober, very undramatic. It is not the urge to surpass all others at whatever cost, but the urge to serve others at whatever cost.”17 Leading by serving others to reach your organization’s goals is the essence of engaging leadership.

When I ask people what traits they most admire in leaders, the first thing they say is integrity. There are many other traits that people admire in their leaders, but integrity appears to be the foundation courage, confidence, and caring all flow from it.

Integrity is a big word that can mean many different things. But keep it simple. If people are going to follow your lead, they expect you to act honestly and ethically. We’ve all seen what happens to a company when its leaders lack integrity—Enron comes to mind.

The best people, the kind you want to keep, won’t hang around if you do one thing and say another or don’t play fairly. People watch this very carefully all the time. Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani earned everyone’s overwhelming admiration for his leadership during the World Trade Center crisis. Though his political career was near ruin before September 11, after the horrible terrorist attack he showed the combination of toughness and tenderness that marks great, engaging leaders. People saw an authentic, emotional side to him that hadn’t been visible before, and they were uplifted by it.

The one time he slipped in people’s eyes was when he proposed staying on as mayor after New York City’s November 2001 election. New Yorkers were highly critical of him because they saw this as a violation of the integrity of the election process. Once he dropped his ill-thought case for staying in office, New York’s new love for him quickly returned.

Passion and Intensity

Your people also won’t give you outstanding effort unless they see great passion from you. If it’s not tremendously important to you, don’t expect it to be very important to your team. Your team will take on your characteristics. If you want intensity and enthusiasm from your people, show them yours. If you’re not prepared to work harder and longer than your people, you can’t ask for maximum effort and quality from them. Engaging leaders ask and get people to work as hard as they do.

The Cleveland Browns, an expansion team, fired coach Chris Palmer after its first two seasons, hardly enough time to get started. When asked why, Browns’ president Carmen Policy said, “I think football is almost as much feel and emotion as it is execution. A team will never grow unless it  has spirit, energy, direction, and hope. And I think we were lacking a great deal of each of those.”18 Policy replaced Palmer with Butch Davis, a much more emotional and optimistic coach, and the Browns improved right away.

Is there an appropriate level of passion or intensity for a given type of business? I think so. Here the sports analogy fits again. Football has a relatively shorter season than baseball or basketball, and it’s a collision sport. There are fewer games, but a football coach asks his players to do lots of dirty work and unnatural things wear lots of padding, hit people hard, tackle other players who are running at you at full speed, play in all kinds of weather, and so on. This probably takes more pure emotion executed at a louder volume and a driver mentality. Drivers coached the last several Super Bowl winners. There are no dynasties anymore in football because of the salary cap, increased movement of players, the impact of the draft, and a scheduling process that rewards weaker teams by giving them easier schedules. So football has a shorter-term focus:

A team gets a two or three year window to win it all. This helps explain why an engaging driver, like Dick Vermeil or Brian Billick, wins and Dennis Green falls short.

Still, the newer coaches in the NFL, with a few exceptions, tend to be teachers more than screamers. They’re calmer, but if they’re versatile, they have their loud moments. Steve Marriuci, the successful coach of the San Francisco 49ers, described his approach, “I, think you can be a gentleman and succeed and treat players fairly and like men.”19 The hardcore screamers, like Mike Ditka, have faded into the past.

Basketball and baseball seasons, on the other hand, are a longer grind in which the teams play almost every day for seven months with fewer people. This requires a steadier approach, more like the builder mind-set. As Steve Kerr, a long-time NBA player with several teams said, “I think it’s difficult as a player when you’ve got a coach jumping up and down on the sidelines all the time. You feel more relaxed when your coach is relaxed.”20 In my experience, businesses that are more operationally focused, where the activities are more repetitive, controlled by processes, group-oriented, and perhaps less intellectually stimulating, are more like football. They require more passion from the top for employee motivation, and effective and engaging drivers can do well. Many manufacturing and process-driven companies, like Whirlpool or Southwest Airlines, benefit from this kind of leadership.

So do customer service companies that involve short-cycle sales or more straightforward service operations, like FedEx or Wal-Mart. Though there may be less intrinsic motivation in the work itself, you need to provide more inspirational leadership throughout the company. This requires more volume and outward emotion from you and other leaders.

When work is more individually focused and personally and intellectually challenging, like engineering, legal work, health care, and consulting, or the emphasis is on long-term, carefully cultivated relationships, the calmer approach is better. In companies like Merck or IBM, you can appeal to the person on an individual level about issues of quality, service, and the other results you need.

Leadership doesn’t usually require the same volume, and highly aggressive leaders often are counterproductive. They become a dis-traction to the thinkers who are creating products and relationships.

A builder is a more effective leader in these types of companies. Still, the importance of communicating passion can’t be overstated for any kind of work. Both cold drivers and calm builders have to change their approaches. Your passion, as long as it’s positive, unlocks the energy that fuels people to victory. Without passion, you can’t have quality. People want passion and hope in their lives, and talented people want to feel it in their jobs.

At the same time, engaging leaders know the difference between intensity and tension. They raise the tension just enough to have intense motivation. Too much tension becomes its own focus and causes distraction. This is the downfall of many drivers who can’t move beyond their usual style. On the other hand, builders who aren’t versatile seem not to create enough tension or they inadvertently cause too much. When they don’t create enough, their people lack the fire that it takes to win. When they effect too much tension, it’s because they let a problem go unresolved for too long.

Their followers feel overly tense because they’re waiting nervously for their leader to help with the problem.

Your task as an engaging leader is to create just enough intensity so people can enjoy their work every day. People need to have fun to win.

You can actually measure whether the intensity level is right by how much people love what they do. Tense or fear-oriented leadership takes the fun out of it for everyone. As Lou Piniella says, “Basically,

I let my players play. I want them to have fun, I want them to be relaxed and loose and go out and give me all they’ve got.

When players execute, it makes the manager look good.”21 If the proper intensity is there most days and you’ve built strong relationships with your team, you can turn up the intensity when you need to rise to a challenge or make big changes. You can ask for more and get it during big moments. You can ask people to extend themselves even further than they think they can. They’ll reach for the impossible and do it when they’re able because you’ve engaged them.

Discipline and Participation

The last fundamental for an engaging leader is to set a discipline for performing. In some ways, this comes easily for both drivers and builders, though they approach it differently. How things get done is very important to both of them—for drivers it’s often “my way” and for builders it’s “let’s agree on how to do it?” Ineffective leaders rely too much on their own usual approach either “my way or the highway” or “you people decide and let me know.” Engagers understand it’s a combination of both top-down direction and bottom up involvement. They know when to make the decision, how much input to get, and when to let others decide. People need to buy in to what you want to get done, but they won’t accept it unless they have a voice in goals and methods.

Engage people by establishing accountabilities and a structure for accomplishing them, and then let them operate. This may seem obvious after all these years of employee involvement, but I still see many companies grind people down with operational efficiencies, driving pride and creativity out in the name of process control. Varying processes does disrupt efficiency, but a lack of opportunity for input just puts people to sleep. You need to strike a balance between prescribed methods and enabling employees to have their say, or you can watch your productivity fall as dullness overcomes your workplace.

Engaging leaders balance the right fundamentals for playing their games or running their businesses with the right level of participation by their team members. During the 2001 baseball playoffs, Piniella’s Mariners got beat by Cleveland in game four by a score of 17–2. Piniella hated to lose but he wasn’t upset with the score. Instead he was concerned because his team didn’t play good defense. He didn’t scream after the embarrassing loss because he knew his veteran team would steady themselves. His players took it upon themselves to go into their locker room to sit and talk it over. They said they spent most of the hour kidding each other and laughing, forgetting about how badly they played, so they could get ready for the next game. It must have worked. The Mariners won the decisive fifth game to go on to the League Championship.

Phil Jackson surprised people at how quickly he was able to take the same Lakers team all the way to the top after it collapsed in the playoffs the previous year. Even the man who replaced him with the Bulls, Tim Floyd, was impressed with the structure Jackson brought, “He [Jackson] did a remarkable job of organizing that team, identifying and giving them roles, identifying who their shot makers were, shoring up their defense, teaching them how to play playoff basketball, the whole deal.”22,These behaviors learning about your people,  relationship building, caring, integrity, passion, and discipline form the foundation of engaging leadership, whether you’re a driver or a builder.

When you read positive comments about coaches from their players, these are the things players almost always describe. What would your team say about you?

People who watched Bill Belichick lead the New England Patriots to the Super Bowl Championship said he changed and grew as a leader. He was still the same defensive mastermind, but he was no longer so aloof and remote, a communications disaster. This was his second try at being a head coach, and he learned to loosen up and listen more. One of his players, Terrell Buckley, said, “The great coaches listen to their players but keep control. That’s when you have something special. It makes players around here excited.”23 Tough and tender. A loveable taskmaster. Realistic optimist.

Whatever you call it, the intersection of driving and building behaviors is what engages most people. Successful leaders learn this in their interactions with people. They become more versatile, expanding their own styles by taking on some behaviors that are unnatural to them at first, but become second nature as followers reinforce them by responding favorably. The ability to incorporate parts of these seeming opposites, like the skill of reconciling group goals and individual needs, will make you an engaging leader and a longtime, big-time winner.

T H E H U D D L E

1. Now that you’ve read about drivers and builders, what’s your style? How do you know? (Complete the short questionnaire at the end of this book to find out.) Which coaches or leaders do you most admire? What are their styles? Usually you admire people who are like you or the ones you want to be like.

2. How versatile are you? Do you regularly use behaviors of both drivers and builders? Which behaviors? What do your people say about you? How engaging do they think you are?

3. Answer the following questions using a 1-to-5 scale, with 5 being a high score:

• How well do you get to know your people?

• How successfully do you show your people you care about them?

• How much do your people admire you?

• How often do you display your passion and optimism for your work and your goals?

• Do you bring a disciplined approach to getting things done the right way?

What do you need to do to bring each score up to a 5?