Bankable Leadership

Happy People, Bottom-Line Results, and the Power to Deliver Both

Tasha Eurich

• Publisher: Greenleaf Book Group Press
• Year: 2013
• Print ISBN: 9781626340190
• eBook ISBN: 9781626340206
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Leadership
• Index: Business

"If I relentlessly drive my team to achieve our goals, they won't like me.""If I try to make everybody on the team happy, we won't hit our numbers."As a leader, you've likely felt this fundamental tension—the tension between driving results and developing positive relationships with your people. Despite all the research telling us that effective leaders do both, most of us struggle to balance the happiness of our teams and the health of the bottom line. We are more comfortable focusing on one or the other, and we feel overwhelmed and drained by the challenges we face when we try to accomplish both. In Bankable Leadership, psychologist, executive coach, and proud leadership geek Dr. Tasha Eurich (or Dr. T) solves this dilemma and reveals how to make leadership exhilarating, fun, and fulfilling. Built on decades of research and the transformation of real leaders, her fresh, practical model can help anyone become bankable —producing results while fostering a healthy work environment that ensures sustainable success. Discover how to
• Be human and drive performance,
• Be helpful and drive responsibility,
• Be thankful and drive improvement, and
• Be happy and drive productivity.Dr. T's approach will help you develop these universally effective behaviors through an online assessment and boots-on-the-ground tools, like earning trust through transparency, treating adults like adults, and taking a no-fear approach to feedback. Whether you're struggling to build a more productive team, increase confidence in your leadership skills, or consistently deliver results, Bankable Leadership is the resource you've been waiting for!

Part I

BE HUMAN and
DRIVE PERFORMANCE

During my first conversation with Patty Gage, I asked her to sum up her team’s situation in one sentence. She did—with the perfect metaphor.

“We have too many different zoo animals in the same pen,” she explained. “They’re all great people, and they’re not carnivorous—so they’re just hiding at the edges of the pen, trying to keep to themselves as much as possible.”

Patty was a whip-smart, well-respected commercial real estate banker. She had been hired by Colorado Business Bank to bring rigor and discipline to the bank’s commercial real estate group. Walking into a challenging situation on the heels of the Great Recession, Patty was tasked with transforming the organization’s commercial lending department to a standardized and scalable powerhouse. Given the organization’s informal and flexible culture, this was a tall order. But she had a killer network and an incomparable drive for results. How hard could it be? she had wondered.

To get her team where it needed to be, Patty needed to bring in senior bankers with backgrounds in large banks, private equity, and private development. This will be great, Patty thought. But it wasn’t great. Her new bankers had a markedly different way of doing things, which proved to be rather unsettling for the “old guard.” Some decided that they weren’t a fit for the new group and left the company. Others began to show signs of conflict, which detracted from the team’s success and eventually created more turnover.

Patty felt like she was hitting a brick wall. The team was a great bunch of people who had no idea how to work together. She knew she’d have to do something—quickly—to get the team back on track. That’s when she called me.

I interviewed her team members, one by one. Over and over, they complained that they didn’t understand where the team was headed: How were they going to meet aggressive goals? Would they be involved in changes to how things were done? What would the changes mean for their daily work? They had lots of questions and few answers. The team also viewed Patty’s disciplined approach and packed schedule as evidence that she didn’t care about them as individuals, which couldn’t have been further from the truth.

When I reviewed the themes from my interviews with her team, she stared at me, stunned into paralysis. Then with a small smile, Patty joked, “Wait, what? You mean that not everyone can read my mind and just automatically do things my way?” We both chuckled.

The solution was immediately clear to both of us. This was a team of relative strangers who didn’t have a strong understanding of, or appreciation for, one another as people, and as their leader, Patty needed to make the first move. Most were introverts, including Patty. I would often joke that you could hear a pin drop when you walked through their work area, and it was true. There was no sign of the usual buzz of coworker chatter.

But at the retreat we conducted, the team experienced a breakthrough. “You all lived through the downturn,” Patty began, “and you all know that our reputation in this bank hasn’t been particularly positive. More than anything, I want us to be the best-managed portfolio in the bank—and be proud! Each of you is a critical piece of the puzzle, and I can’t do it without you.” Her team nodded enthusiastically, looking truly hopeful. Patty smiled.

That was just the beginning. Later in the day, Patty surprised the team again. To help her team learn more about one another, we arranged for them to take a personality assessment. Carrying the metaphor of our original conversation, Patty purchased a small stuffed animal to represent each personality type: a poodle, a bear, a giraffe. She dutifully delivered each team member their stuffed animal and explained why she chose the animals she did. For the first time, possibly ever, the team broke into a fit of genuine laughter. By being herself, Patty provided the glue that was needed for her team to connect with each other—and with Patty!

The team capped off the day with its first-ever happy hour. Almost immediately, everyone—including Patty—seemed more comfortable being themselves. As those connections continued to grow over the following weeks, the team helped each other and bravely worked through conflict when it arose.

Through a few simple but powerful behavioral changes, Patty had managed to turn her team around. In a matter of months, everything started to improve. On the people side, the “lone ranger” approach we’d seen before had been replaced by genuine collaboration. For instance, the bankers trusted their administrative staff and were more willing to let them run with things. This made the bankers more efficient and gave the administrative staff a clearer sense of purpose. The administrative staff, previously intimidated by the bankers, now felt comfortable approaching them when a problem came up. The team shared a new sense of camaraderie and met monthly to recognize its accomplishments.

On the results side, the team excelled. In the year prior, their loan-grading metric had received a “needs improvement” rating; the two ratings following its breakthroughs were “satisfactory,” and the second rating received positive comments from the auditors, which is quite unusual. Patty’s team now has one of the best reputations in the bank for excellent loan underwriting documentation and management. The vision Patty shared at the retreat had materialized.

As Patty learned, Bankable Leaders connect with their teams as human beings and drive them to top performance. It is a rare leader who can do both naturally, without careful thought and development. I often meet leaders who say things like, “I don’t want to hear people’s whining—I just want them to do their jobs.” Less frequently, but still often, they say, “I just want them to be happy! I don’t want my team to think I’m a tyrant.” The spectrum might look like this:

On the left is The Pushover. This leader is overly focused on the happiness of her staff, so rather than being direct and up front, she’ll tell her team what she thinks they want to hear. Mediocrity is the trademark of The Pushover. Michael Scott from The Office is a great example. As is clear from his “World’s Best Boss” coffee mug, he’s so interested in being liked that he doesn’t push his team to greatness.

On the right is The Tyrant, who is focused on performance at all costs. This type of leader can often create results; however, research tells us that they aren’t sustainable and will come at a cost. For example, if you forced your team members to work twelve hours a day, they might get a lot done … at first. But after six months, they would leave the company, get sick, or at the very least start to resent you. The movie Office Space is a prime example of what happens when managers focus on the bottom line above all else. In that case, the protagonists start embezzling money from the company, and the downtrodden Milton burns the building down. Most of the time, the resentment is more subtle, but you get the idea.

Think about how it would feel to work for each type of leader. Both might be fine for a while, but for different reasons. The Pushover would be fun to talk to and would probably show you she cared about you as a person. But when the time came for a tough conversation, she’d start acting strangely. Instead of giving you feedback, she may beat around the bush and leave you confused about what to do differently. In times of change, you might notice that she’s telling different people different things, and chaos would ensue by virtue of the sheer confusion.

The Tyrant might help you bring your “A game” for a few months, and the feeling of accomplishment might be rewarding. But over time, you’ll wonder whether he values you as a person or even appreciates your work. You’ll start to feel resentful that you’re not being recognized, and you may be tempted to even the score by not going the extra mile. When another job opens up, you’ll pursue it, longing for a boss who cares about you.

As I mentioned earlier, you probably lean more toward one pole than the other, but you need to do both to do either one well. For instance, to get great results, you have to connect with your team on a human level. A Development Dimensions International study found that more than two-thirds of employees report putting in more effort when their manager supports and listens to them.¹ And to connect with your team, you have to give them something to be a part of that’s worth their best efforts.

Even though the behaviors of The Pushover and The Tyrant might feel opposite, they are simply different sides of the same coin. Just like Patty, you can broaden your repertoire to become a results-focused leader who also connects with her staff and helps them connect with each other. If you’ve ever worked for a boss like this, you probably excelled at your work and felt extremely satisfied in your job.

Bill Daniels is the epitome of such a Bankable Leader. Often called the “Father of Cable Television,” Daniels created a community antenna television system in 1952, allowing television broadcasts to reach remote Wyoming communities whose reception had previously been blocked by mountain ranges. In 1958, he established Daniels & Associates, a cable television brokerage firm and investment bank. After spending nearly fifty years in the business, Daniels was inducted into Colorado’s Business Hall of Fame, with Daniels & Associates having enjoyed a tremendous amount of success—in its first ten years the company brokered more than $100 million in deals.

Daniels valued his employees as people and relentlessly pushed them to greatness. Describing his performance/results side, a Rocky Mountain News article dubbed him “utterly demanding and absolutely precise.”² One of his mottos was literally chiseled into the lobby wall of his Denver office building: “The best is good enough for me.” Here’s an example of how this value drove his leadership, as described in Relentless, a biography of Daniels:

Bill was … known to conduct surprise inspections of his company facilities, which could cause quite a scramble if he showed up unexpectedly. Associates at one of Bill’s cable systems in California remembered the day Bill was on his way for a visit, and they realized the goldfish pond was overgrown with algae. In the last 20 minutes before Bill arrived, they removed the fish, emptied the water, took the pond apart, and placed a plant from someone’s office onto the remaining concrete podium. Despite their last-ditch efforts, the employees later received a scathing letter from Bill. “You will find this company one of the easiest ones to work for, and I am tolerant of many faults, as I have many, but I will not tolerate sloppiness, unti...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART I BE HUMAN and DRIVE PERFORMANCE
• PART II BE HELPFUL and DRIVE RESPONSIBILITY
• PART III BE THANKFUL and DRIVE IMPROVEMENT
• PART IV BE HAPPY and DRIVE PRODUCTIVITY
• Conclusion: Bankable Leadership Happens Day by Day
• Notes
• Index
• Want to Harness the Power of Your Company’s Leaders?
• About the Author