Welch on the Eight Principles of Leadership (1)_x000D_

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Editor's Note: After Jack Welch retired from General Electric, many people turned to him for tips on business management. In order to give them a satisfactory answer, Welch decided to collect what he knew into a book, so there was the book "Winning". The highlights of our book on leadership, the eight things leaders should do (the guidelines), are published in two consecutive editions for the benefit of our readers.

The eight principles are: elevate your team; empower employees to embrace their dreams; reach out to employees; earn the trust of others; dare to make difficult decisions; drive business and employee action; be risk-taking and learning Be exemplary; know how to celebrate. This paper first introduces the first four criteria.

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One day, you become a leader.

Monday, you're still doing the things that come naturally, having fun at work, pushing projects forward, laughing with colleagues about life and work, and mocking how stupid company management is. Then, on Tuesday, you also got into management. You become a boss.

Suddenly, everything feels different - because everything is different. Being a leader requires different behaviors and attitudes; and for many, it's the first time they've taken on the job.

Before you became a leader, success was only about your own growth.

When you become a leader, success is all about the growth of others.

There are undoubtedly many paths to becoming a leader. There are many different examples in real life, such as Herb Kelleher, the dashing, straightforward man who ran Southwest Airlines for 30 years; and Bill Gates, The gentle pioneer at Microsoft -- so you can see that there are all kinds of leaders. In politics, Churchill and Gandhi were very different; in rugby, there was Lombardi and Belichick.

All leaders, each will give you a long list of "rules" for leadership.

If anyone asked me, I would list 8 for them. But when I put them into practice, it didn't feel like they were guidelines, but just proper procedures on how to lead others to do things.

Before we go into detail about each of the guidelines, I would like to say a few "self-contradictory" remarks. In fact, being a leader always involves many self-contradictory situations.

A very old contradiction is the contradiction between the long-term and the short-term, just like a problem I often encounter: "It is necessary to ensure the performance of each quarter, and to do things that will be beneficial to the company's business 5 years later. How should such a leader be?"

My answer was: "You are welcome!"

What should leaders do

Criterion 1: Persistently improve their team, put Every encounter with an employee serves as an opportunity to assess, mentor, and help build their confidence.

Principle 2: Not only let employees dream, but also embrace it and practice it.

Criterion 3: Reach out to employees and convey positive energy and optimism to them.

Criterion 4: Build trust in others with openness, transparency, and prestige.

Criterion 5: Have the courage to make unpopular decisions and say things that offend people.

Criterion 6: Supervise and advance the business with curiosity and even skepticism, and ensure that the questions you ask can lead to actual actions by employees.

Criterion Seven: Take risks, learn hard, and be a role model yourself.

Rule Eight: Celebrate.

See, anyone can handle short-term The problem - if you keep squeezing the company's existing business. Anyone can handle long-term goals too—if they stick to their dreams. And you were chosen to lead because someone believed in you that you could handle both the current business and the foundation for future growth. They think you have enough intelligence, experience, and perseverance to balance short-term and long-term interests well.

Leadership is dealing with the daily balance of scheduling issues.

Take Guidelines 3 and 6 above as an example. One says that you should display positive energy and optimism, and inspire your employees with the belief that "I can do it too." But another says you should constantly question your people and don't take what they say too seriously.

Or take the 5th and 7th guidelines as an example. One says you need to act like a boss and maintain your authority. Another says that you need to admit your mistakes and embrace risk-taking employees, especially when they fail.

Yes, things would be a lot easier if leadership were a simple set of rules. However, these paradoxical situations are inevitable in business life.

But that's the fun side of leadership—just because it's tough, every day is a new challenge. This will be a brand new opportunity. When you're in leadership, you can't be perfect by any means, you can only strive to be better.

You can only put everything you have into leadership.

Here's how:

Criterion #1: Consistently improve your team and use every encounter with your employees as an opportunity to assess, coach, and help build their confidence.

Generally, the team with the best players wins. This is why, as a leader, you need to devote a large part of your time and energy to the following three types of activities.

·You have to do evaluations—get the right people for the right jobs, support and promote those who do well, and move those who don't.

·You must provide guidance—guide, criticize, and help subordinates to improve their abilities in all areas.

·Finally, you must build self-confidence - pour out your motivation, concern and appreciation to employees. Self-confidence enhances employees' plasticity, risk-taking and the courage to surpass their dreams. It is the fuel for the winning team.

Many managers believe that focusing on employee growth is a once-a-year action, something that only needs to be done during performance reviews. This doesn't get to the point at all.

Employee growth should be a daily concern, including all aspects of daily work.

A budget discussion, for example, is an ideal time to focus on employee performance. In a budget discussion, you're talking about the business and its goals, but through meetings like this, you can really see how a team is doing. If in a meeting, only the leader lectures seriously, and the others can only sit silently around the table, then you need to do some laborious guidance work. On the contrary, if everyone is participating in the conversation and the whole team is very active, then you should take this opportunity to express your feedback that you really liked seeing this positive, united situation. If there is one person on the team who is doing very well, or one who is doing nothing, then you should communicate your impression to their leader as soon as possible.

In your work, there are opportunities for employee growth anytime, anywhere.

User visits can give you the opportunity to test the quality of your sales force. On a factory tour, meet promising new production managers to see if they can afford to take on greater responsibilities. During breaks, take the time to coach a team member who is about to give an important presentation for the first time.

Remember that assessment and guidance are important in all of these encounters, but helping your subordinates build their confidence is probably the most important thing you should do. Even with those who already have some confidence, take every moment and continue to encourage them on an ongoing basis. Praise without hesitation, the more specific the better.

Aside from the huge impact it has on improving the quality of the team, one of the greatest benefits of using this daily meeting to help employees is that it's a lot of fun in itself.

Endless meetings can make people feel numb and sluggish. Factory tours can only let you see a lot of new equipment for unknown reasons. On the contrary, if you think of every day as a process of cultivating people, Then what kind of mood should it be? In fact, think of yourself as a gardener, with a watering can in one hand and a fertilizer bucket in the other. Occasionally, you'll need to get rid of some weeds, but most of the time, just water, fertilize, and take care.

Afterwards, you can see the garden full of flowers.

Principle 2: Not only let employees dream, but also embrace it and practice it.

It goes without saying that leaders need to have a dream for their team, and they should. But there is more to do than just have a dream. As a leader, you have to make everyone's dreams come true and come alive.

So, how do you make your dreams come alive? First, don't use terminology. The goal cannot sound lofty, but it is vague. The target must not be so blurred that it cannot be hit. Your direction must be specific and clear-cut. Even if you wake up an employee in the middle of the night and ask him, "What is our direction?" he can answer you in a daze, "We have to continuously improve the quality of service to retail customers and strive to attract more small wholesalers to expand our market.”

In 2004, I had exactly that experience. I worked as a consultant at Clayton, Dubilier & Rice, promoting an investment fund they launched. At a dinner party in Chicago, the room was packed with about a dozen investors, all very concerned about our investment guidelines and expected returns.

Steve Klimkowski, chief investment officer at Northwestern Memorial Hospital, is one of them. However, during the chat about investing in the business, he also talked about his hospital, whose mission, he said, is to provide "excellent medical care - putting yourself in the patient's shoes."

He cites various examples of how employees at all levels—including him, a person in charge of investing—began to transform the way they work after building on this dream. For example, he received such training: When encountering patients in the hospital who came to ask for directions, he could not just give them general directions, but he had to personally take them to where they were going. During their performance review meeting, Steve was asked to list a few things he was personally involved in that improved the patient experience at Northwestern Memorial Hospital. Suffice it to say that Steve has both a solid understanding and a rousing enthusiasm for the role he needs to play in realizing his business dreams, so much so that after 15 minutes of talking with him, if you wake me up in the middle of the night, I can articulate those goals too!

It is clear that the leaders of Northwestern Memorial Hospital communicated the dream of their organization to the staff with amazing clarity and consistency, and that is the gist of the question. You have to be persistent in talking about your dreams -- out of your mouth, to the point of being taken for nonsense. There have been times when I myself have been talking about GE's efforts so many times throughout the day that I feel sick to hear that topic again. But I realize that this information is still fresh to some people around me. Therefore, you need to keep repeating.

And talk to everyone.

One of the most common problems in organizations is that leaders only communicate their dreams about the company with their closest colleagues and don't extend their influence to lower-level employees. We've all probably been there: at a high-end department store, you meet a rude, rambunctious clerk; or at a company that promises speed and convenience, your precious time is lost. Wasted by call center operators.

Somehow, they hadn't heard that the company had that mission. This may be precisely because the company's dream is not communicated to them, or it is not communicated loud enough or often enough.

It is also possible that the compensation of employees is not linked to the realization of the dream of the enterprise.

This is the last bullet point of this leadership principle. If you want your employees to live out and embrace the company's dream, then after they take action, it's time to "spend real money," be it a salary, bonus, or some other meaningful recognition. A friend of mine, Chuck Ames, former chairman and CEO of Reliance Electric, said, "Tell me about a company's various compensation plans, and I can see how their employees will fare. Performance."

Dreams are an essential element of what leaders do. But it's just a piece of scrap paper with writing on it, unless you communicate with your employees regularly and reinforce it with rewards. Only then will the dream jump out of the paper - into the life of the business.

Criterion 3: Reach out to employees and convey positive energy and optimism to them.

We know there is an old saying: "The upper beam is not straight and the lower beam is crooked." It mainly refers to how political struggle and corruption infiltrate an organization from top to bottom. It can also be used to describe, in any team, the Bad behavior can have large or small effects. Eventually, everyone gets infected.

Let's put it bluntly, leadership style is contagious. We've all seen this live example countless times: A manager who maintains a positive, optimistic attitude all day long somehow brings out a team or organization that exudes a...yes, aggressive, upward spirit. Conversely, a pessimistic, obnoxious guy somehow brings out an unpleasant team full of his type.

Unhappy teams have a hard time winning.

Of course, sometimes there are good reasons for depression. The economy sucks, competition is cutthroat — for whatever reason, work can be hard.

However, as a leader, your job is to fight negative gravity. This doesn't mean you need to gloss over the daunting challenges that everyone faces, but it means you need to present an overcoming, positive, omnipotent attitude. That means you get out of the office, go deep into everyone, really care about what they're doing, how it's going, and lead everyone over the mountains.

Now, you might be thinking, "Building that kind of emotional bond with my subordinates -- I'm afraid it's not for me."

Some people just can't do that. I have met several very capable managers who manage their companies with enough distance from their employees. These managers can demonstrate the right values, be open and demanding, and deliver outstanding performance.

However, they didn't really get to the heart of the employee, and they lost something as a result. They work for work.

With a better attitude, they could have gained a lot more.

I wish you had.

Criterion 4: Build trust in others with openness, transparency, and prestige.

For some people, being a leader means starting their own journey to power. They like to feel in control of people and information. As a result, they keep secrets from revealing their thoughts about their employees and their performance, and hoard their thoughts about the future of the company.

This behavior certainly allows leaders to establish their own turf, but it excludes trust from the team.

What is trust? I could give you a definition from a dictionary, but I know, you know in your heart what it is. Trust comes when leaders are sincere, candid, and walk the talk, it's that simple.

Your employees should always know how their performance is doing and how the company's business is going. Sometimes there's bad news -- for example, layoffs are imminent, etc. -- and any normal person would be reluctant to uncover it. However, as a leader, you must overcome your instincts and not try to cover up or gloss over bad information, or you risk losing the trust and energy of your team.

In order to gain the trust of employees, leaders should also be rewarded and punished clearly and lead by example. They must not seize the achievements of their own men and steal the good ideas of others for their own. They should have enough self-confidence and reason, and don't need to be bullied, because they know that the success of the team is the recognition of themselves, sooner or later. In tough times, leaders need to be held accountable for things they do wrong. In times of prosperity, they would generously praise their subordinates.

When you become a leader, you sometimes feel the urge to say, "Look at what I did." When your team is doing well, you want to take the credit for yourself on the head.

After all, it was you who directed the show. You get paid so employees listen to your every word (or they pretend to listen) and they laugh (or pretend to laugh) at your humor. In some companies, being the boss means having a special parking space or being able to travel in first class. These will form an impression in your mind, and you may actually feel who you are.

Don't think that way.

Remember that being a leader doesn't give you a crown, it gives you a responsibility to bring out the best in others. In order to achieve this goal, you must make your employees trust you. If you can demonstrate honesty, trustworthiness, and down-to-earth qualities, then they will.

This article is excerpted from the book "Winning" by Jack Welch and Suzy Welch, published by CITIC Press in May 2005.