Said to be the most studied CEO of the 20th century, Jack Welch began his 41-year career with the General Electric Company in 1960, and in 1981 became the company’s eighth chairman and CEO. Fortune named him “manager of the century,” and the Financial Times named him one of the three most admired business leaders in the world. He teaches at MIT’s Sloan School of Management and recently launched the Jack Welch Management Institute at Chancellor University, offering advanced management degrees online. A prolific business writer, he authored the internationally best-selling autobiography, Jack: Straight from the Gut and also wrote The Welch Way, a widely read BusinessWeek column.
Authenticity
- You have to be yourself.
- You have to be comfortable in your own shoes.
- Don’t portray yourself as being something other than you are.
- People can see right through phoniness.
- People want to be able to count on you.
- In business, people take on a persona that is not really themselves.
- You have to be real and not hide behind a title.
- You have to be able to engage people in conversation.
Energy
- You have to energize people around you.
- You have to excite people and bring them on board.
- If you are always jumping around it doesn’t help people.
- You have to give people a clear mission and vision you articulate that will energize them.
- You have to take time to tell people the story of where you want to go and helping them decide if they want to be on board.
- It’s getting people to feel where you are going.
- If you can’t feel it yourself, why would you do it.
- Unless the leader feels the fire it’s hard to pass it on.
- You can make routine jobs seem exciting.
- Tell a story, show them how their lives and options can change if they are successful.
- Get them excited about the journey.
- Get people to tell their stories to one another.
- So much time is wasted with meetings and PowerPoint slides.
- You need to create engagement.
- The job of the leader is to raise the intellectual level of the room.
- Insecure people hire dopes!
- Let people role model and say what works, what doesn’t work, etc.
- People can all share experiences.
Candor
- Fight desperately to get how people really feel about things on the table.
- Say what you believe, not what people expect to hear.
- Candor creates less meetings.
- Establish a culture of differentiating people.
- The teams that win are the ones where the players know their individual roles.
- Candor has to be the foundation of an organization.
- Use candor to develop an appraisal system.
- No leader can go to work without people who work for them knowing where they stand.
- People need to know who’s in charge and where they stand.
- People spend more time trying to fix the bottom when the bottom can’t get better.
What’s the attitude of the top A-Level leaders?
- Filled with energy.
- Likable.
- Good values.
- They have a gene that says, “I love to see people grow.”
- They love to reward and promote people.
- They aren’t mean-spirited.
- Generosity defines them.
- They aren’t afraid to have great people around them.
- They don’t envy, the celebrate.
- When you set your values
B-Level Leaders
- Just as important.
- Hard-working.
Bottom 10
- Low energy.
- Not a team player.
- Pain in the arm.
- Nothing is worse than negative energy in an organization.
- They are disrupters and boss-haters.
- The boss-hater needs to be listened to every once in awhile.
- You can’t shut down the noise from someone who’s willing to be noisy.
- It’s the person who whispers, the cynics, you have to watch out for.
- The hallway cynic’s whisper is deadly to an organization
- You have to do everything to stop the meeting after the meeting.
Compensation
- You can’t give people in the top 20 enough.
- There’s not a better way to build a team than letting people know where they stand.
- You have to acknowledge performance.
- No winning teams ignore performance.
- Sometimes non-profit means non-performance.
- You’ve got to put out a profit.
What’s your biggest failure?
- I moved too slowly.
- You can never move too fast.
- Don’t ponder.
- No one ever says, “I wish I would have waited.”
- You might make some mistakes, but GO!
- Quicker decisions mean you get quicker feedback.
- One of the jobs of a leader is give people self-confidence to make decisions.
On Transition
- They had 8 possible candidates for his successor.
- The long-shots were the ones who made it to the final 3.
- It’s a growing process.
- Time changes things.
- You can’t make a decision in a snapshot of time.
- You’ll never know how someone will behave at the next level.
- Hiring is hard.
- Succession is brutal.
- Include as many people as possible as you can in the process.
Celebrations
- If a leader isn’t doing regular celebrations they are missing a significant opportunity.
- People have real trouble celebrating small victories.
- Build a little into your budget to celebrate!
