Investor's Business Daily, July 23rd, 2007
Some say that to motivate employees best, eliminate barriers of hierarchy that exist between the boss and employees. You can do this by:
Eliminating dual standards. Perks such as reserved parking spaces and company planes upset employees who miss out, wrote former Avis CEO Robert Townsend (1920-98), author of "Up the Organization: How to Stop the Corporation From Stifling People and Strangling Profits."
"Townsend was the first corporate chief to practice what is just now being preached in the best-led corporations," wrote James O'Toole, an organization expert, in the commemorative edition of "Up the Organization."
"Dual standards are the cancer of an organization," said Bob Davids, co-founder of Radica Games. Davids knew Townsend and considers him the top standard of a CEO.
Practicing real leadership. "I think the greatest leader of all time was Mahatma Gandhi," Davids said. "He was a Cambridge attorney who threw away his suit and started weaving clothes to better understand the mass of India. Gandhi basically subordinated himself to a whole population, and in doing so, they gave him true allegiance."
Townsend's book deals with that. "Townsend's ideology is that nobody is special. The leader is actually the servant," Davids said.
Pulling people. Dwight Eisenhower said: "Pull the string, and it will follow wherever you wish. Push it, and it will go nowhere at all." Townsend and Davids practiced that by identifying a problem and pulling their employees through it. Once they saw their employees were responding, they jumped out of the way and made sure they had the tools to correct it.
Finding needs. "One of the things Townsend says is spend your time as a leader with all the employees to find out what they need to do their job. That's really at the heart of his philosophy," Davids said.
Doing MBWA. This means management by walking around.
Herb Kelleher, the former CEO of Southwest Airlines, would go down and handle baggage once a month to better understand what his employees needed to do their job. Wal-Mart founder Sam Walton employed the same strategy. "Good leaders don't lock themselves in an office. They spend more time outside of it than inside," Davids said.
Practicing humanity. "If you have a policy manual," Townsend wrote, "publish the Ten Commandments."
Using the chain of command. Davids tells a story from when he was building Radica Games of an executive who spent close to 30 minutes many days going over with the maid what cleaning supplies were needed and in what quantity they should be purchased. When Davids discovered this, he brought it to the executive's attention that nobody in the company understood what was needed in that area better than the maid, so empower her to make those decisions. That would free up more time for the executive to work on other responsibilities.
Townsend summed up his philosophy this way: "True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not the leaders. In combat, the officers eat last."
