Guts and Passion

I like the expression “ Go out on the limb that’s where the fruit is”. However, after reading excerpts of Leadership Wired’s interview with author and leadership expert Kevin Freiberg, I now know that real guts is planting a whole new friggin’ tree-that’s never been planted before. Freiberg’s most recent book is titled “Guts! Companies that Blow the Doors off Business- as- usual”. Below is a taste of something different, something we all can learn from.

Leadership Wired: What makes a gutsy leader?

Kevin Freiberg: In a nutshell, it's someone who is willing to step outside their own comfort zone, the comfort zone of the organization and the comfort zone of the industry to do something extraordinary, whether it's extraordinary for employees in creating the kind of work environment that causes people to engage heart, mind and soul, or whether it's extraordinary in terms of doing something that causes customers to engage and become emotionally bonded to a company.

When we set out to write the book Guts, we looked for companies that were doing things that were outside the norm that everybody else would look at and say, "You can't do that and still make money." So you have a company like SAS Institute—the largest, privately-held software company in the world today. You step on their campus and your mind will be blown. They have a 56,000- square-foot fitness facility, including an indoor Olympic swimming pool. They have eight full-time trainers on campus that include yoga instructors, weight trainers and nutritionists. They have a medical clinic that has 56 employees, including four full-time doctors. They've got golf courses and tennis courts on campus, two onsite daycare centers, and a gourmet cafeteria that includes high chairs because they want you to have lunch with your kids.

Jim Goodnight, who founded SAS, said, "If I can eliminate the distractions from people's lives, they'll write better software. If they write better software, the customers will like that." This is a place where the gates close at 6 p.m. because they want everybody to work a 35-hour workweek. Now, that's extraordinary. That takes guts, because most people would say, "You can't do that and stay in business." And yet they're in 96 percent of the Fortune 1,000 companies with their software. Their software is licensed, which means it's renewable, and their renewal rate is 98 percent. The margins of software are huge. You develop a product for $100,000 and you sell it for $100,000 over and over and over again. To me, that is an example of a gutsy leader who said, "I'm not a charity. I'm not doing this just out of altruism. I'm doing it because it makes good business sense, and if I care about these people and eliminate the distractions from their lives, they will become more wedded to what we're doing."

LW: Does being gutsy come naturally, or does it have to be learned or developed?

Freiberg: Being gutsy comes from passion. You probably could testify to this in your own life, and I certainly would in mine. The more passionate you feel about something and the more passionately you pursue something, the more courage and guts you have to deal with the speed bumps and the obstacles that get in your way.

. What gave Martin Luther King Jr. the guts to stand at the end of the bridge when he knew the chance of getting his head beat in and subject his followers to getting their heads beat in was pretty likely? It was a passion for civil rights and equality, wouldn't you say? So I think when you look at the companies we've researched and you look at great leaders that are truly gutsy—their gut isn't just John Wayne bravado. It emanates from a deep-seated passion or, I might add, an outrage with the status quo. They're saying, "Something isn't right here that needs to be right."

LW: What is the most compelling example of gutsy leadership that you've ever seen?

Freiberg: The SAS example is pretty gutsy. Let me give you one other. There is a Brazilian company called Semco—they're not only gutsy, they're just nuts. Ricardo Semler took over a marine pump business from his father about 25 years ago when he was 21. He stepped in and fired all of his father's senior executives because they didn't have the vision or the passion to grow the company as Ricardo did. Here's a company that says, "If you treat people like adults, they'll act like adults." That seems like common sense until you learn that 40 percent of their workforce sets their own salary. All manufacturing plants—and they have many—set their own schedules. You say, "That's crazy—people will take advantage of that." No, because every six months you have to re-up for your job. If you pay yourself too much, you find yourself working with resentful and bitter colleagues who will sit down in a team environment and say, "You know what, Kevin paid himself way too much—he's greedy, he's arrogant, I don't think we need him on the team."

Leaders are evaluated every month by the people they lead and the results are made public. This is a place that has no corporate headquarters. If you want to have a meeting, you schedule a meeting in one of their conference rooms in one of their satellite offices around Sao Paulo. This is a place that has hammocks in the meeting places in case you finish a meeting and you want to take a nap. This is a place that says, "You know what, if people are going home and returning e-mails and doing paperwork and finishing reports on Sunday afternoon, why shouldn't they be able to take their wife or husband or kids to a movie on Monday afternoon?" Semler's whole point is simply this: If you treat people like adults, they'll step up to the plate, they'll perform and they'll produce, and they won't take advantage. I think that's pretty gutsy.

LW: You encourage leaders to define their work as a heroic cause. What exactly does this mean? And how does it help in motivating employees?

Freiberg: At the end of the day, people come to work for a paycheck and a set of benefits. They're not going to come to work without those things. But ultimate meaning comes from pursuing a purpose in life and work that is truly noble and truly heroic. So when you define the business as a cause, people feel a sense of heroism about what they're doing. Whether we're in touch with it or not, whether it's conscious our subconscious, everyone wants to do something heroic with the gifts and talents God gave them. I don't care who you are—I know that's true because that's how we're wired. We weren't given these gifts and talents just to be mundane.

How does that play out in a company? The janitor in a hospital can be seen as a mundane nobody who does something boring and routine for work every day—sweeping floors. Or that person can be made to be a part of a team saving lives. It's a different perspective. There's a story that's told about a guy named Joe Saltzer who was a cleaner for NASA in the late 1960s. A bunch of tourists were touring the plant at NASA and they came upon Joe and they said, "What do you do?" And he said, "I'm helping to put a man on the moon." Gives it new perspective, right? "Well, come on," you say, "sweeping floors for a living is pretty mundane." No arguments there, unless a leader comes along every so often and says, "Let me show you how your individual contribution is linked to something more noble, more heroic and more meaningful in terms of what we're doing around here."

We had some photo developers in a seminar many, many years ago. They operate these one-hour photo shops in Wal-Mart and other places. I said, "What's really heroic about what you do?" I got all these TQM answers—our photos are the best quality photos, we have a better share of the market, we know how to mix chemicals to create clearer prints, our machinery is the best. Finally a woman stood up in the back and said, "That's true, but that's not what's heroic about what's what we do. What's heroic about what we do is we preserve people's memories." Now, at the end of the day, do you get more excited about coming to work and pushing three green buttons and pulling a lever that spits out a print, or do you get more excited when you say, "Know what, that wedding is important to you—we got it. The birth of your first child—we got it." See what I'm saying? You're connected to something larger and more noble.

To really motivate the contemporary workforce, we've got to define the business, not as a business, but as a cause. And when the business becomes a cause, what follows is a movement. I don't know about you, but in our company, I don't want just workers. I want fanatics. I want people who are fanatical about what we're trying to accomplish and who feel like they're part of a movement. We get into about 80 different organizations a year and I can tell you, I've heard my share of boring, mundane executive speeches. Some guy gets up there and says, "If we don't take care of the customer, we're going to be in bad shape. If we don't cut costs, shareholders are gonna start to complain." People are in the back of the room dousing themselves with lighter fluid just to stay awake. If you listen to people like John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. or Nelson Mandela or even frail little Mother Teresa, people would get done listening to one of their speeches and they're not dousing themselves with lighter fluid. They're saying, "Let's march. Let's lock arms and let's march—now," because they felt like they were part of a movement, whether the movement was the civil rights movement or to take care of the poor.

What if we could build that spirit in more organizations where people came to work and said, "I'm not just part of IBM or Starbucks—I'm part of a movement, and the movement isn't going to advance as effectively without me"? When we get there, we're cutting to the heart of true motivation and true leadership.

If you want to get to the heart of what’s really going on with you and/or your company, have an outsider ( that would be me ) help you to take a look.

Guts and Passion - To learn more about this author, visit Allen Hatton's Website.

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