Simple Solutions

By Tom Schmitt and Arnold PerlPublished by John Wiley & Sons, Inc.
December 2006;$22.95US/$27.99CAN; 978-0-4700-4818-4

Despite the seemingly endless challenges and pressures in today's workplace, many people are firm in their resolve to assume leadership roles and make a difference. One of the barriers they face is that there simply isn't a clear-cut path to follow. This inside look at a uniquely effective style of leadership remedies that and guides the reader along the path taken by these two proven leaders.

Written by Tom Schmitt, a longtime FedEx executive, and internationally renowned management attorney and community leader Arnold Perl, Simple Solutions explains how their style of leadership combines tried-and-true tactics that really work with new leadership metrics that are highly effective in today's high-performance benchmark company. Simplicity is the underlying concept of this style of leadership. The fast-changing and competitive world of business can look exceedingly complex. But Simple Solutions reveals how even the most complex problem can be broken down into simple components and solved using the right tools and the right amount of leadership passion.

Great leadership, as revealed here, is both highly practical and deeply inspirational because it mixes logical leadership skills with creativity and personality. Schmitt and Perl include real advice from effective leaders and real case studies that reveal the ins and outs of truly effective corporate leadership. You'll find expert guidance and real-world insight on making collaboration work, pursuing breakthrough goals, tailoring leadership styles to fit team needs, assembling great teams, and inspiring your people to ever higher levels of success.

But this is much more than a guide to leadership theory; not only does Simple Solutions reveal that the art of great leadership can be learned, it also teaches you that art. You'll learn how to take complex business ideas and turn them into simple solutions and how to apply those solutions to your own organization. You'll see how the heart of quality leadership is the ability to boil things down to their essence, see issues in their simplest forms, and find the simplest answers to problems.

When it comes to leadership, simple is better. If you're searching for answers in the maze of big business, try these Simple Solutions.

Reviews"Arguably, from Lord Nelson to Napoleon to U. S. Grant, the great 'secret' of supremely successful leaders has been determined simplicity. Simple Solutions is a brilliant and much-needed addition to a woefully thin collection on business issue number one: getting things done!"
--Tom Peters, coauthor of In Search of Excellence

"Schmitt and Perl's book begins and ends with simplicity, but in between lies a set of truly powerful ideas. This isn't a new theory on management; it's a guide to management practice that any practicing manager would benefit greatly from."
--Dave Godes, Associate Professor, Harvard Business School

"Schmitt and Perl have crafted a must-have book for all managers who want to have an impact. The clear, simple advice contained in Simple Solutions is invaluable to anyone interested in improving his or her management skills. These ideas work."
--Mark A. Emkes, Chairman and CEO, Bridgestone Americas Holding, Inc. and Bridgestone Firestone North American Tire, LLC

"Simple Solutions is a good road map for leaders of all organizations because it provides concise and straightforward guidelines for leadership. It's not theoretical or longwinded, but gives real-world behavioral instruction to make leaders more effective."
--Richard H. Anderson, Executive Vice President, UnitedHealth Group

"The premise of Schmitt and Perl's book is the need to reduce complex problems to their simplest components, an approach I've seen produce powerful results. Managers at all levels would benefit from applying the principles outlined in this book."
--Pitt Hyde, Chairman, AutoZone

"In a complex world, we often complicate things more than necessary and forget that the goal is to do the right things as well as possible. This book is a terrific primer on identifying the right things and getting on with them."
--John Durrett, Managing Director, McKinsey and Co., Inc., West Coast

"A powerful and thought-provoking book filled with sound advice that would help the young or the experienced executive understand the importance of management and leadership skills. I wish that I had a book like Simple Solutions to guide me through the transition from athlete to executive."
--Jerry West, President of Basketball Operations, Memphis Grizzlies

The Principles of Collaboration

Collaboration occurs among people only when they accept the concept. To ensure that the process is a good experience rather than a bad one, certain principles must be kept in mind.

Mutual Respect

Collaboration starts with mutual respect. The people with whom you wish to collaborate have to respect you. They need to know that if they share information, opinions, and even emotions, they aren’t at risk of losing credit for their successful ideas or being ridiculed for ideas that don’t work. At the same time, you must respect the people with whom you’re collaborating. Mutual respect is based on the belief that everyone in a collaborative effort has valuable contributions to make; everyone brings something important to the table; and each person’s ideas, opinions, and input matter. Without this ingredient, what appears to be a collaboration is nothing more than keeping people "in the loop" -- letting others know what you’re up to, without expecting or really desiring their input.

Enthusiasm

Knowledge and skill should be a given for anyone with whom you collaborate. Yet all too often the enthusiasm factor is overlooked, even though it is one of the most necessary traits for a team member to have. Over the years we’ve become very wary of people who purport to be part of a team, but who constantly play the "devil’s advocate" by suggesting why some problem can’t be solved or some goal achieved. Someone playing this role may regard himself as a smart contributor who points out obstacles that others don’t see. But too often these devil’s advocates are really just naysayers, looking only for reasons not to do something, rather than looking for ways to overcome hurdles. A single person articulating the reasons something can’t be done is enough to bring an entire project to a grinding halt.

Focusing on team members who bring a can-do attitude does not mean surrounding yourself with a lot of "yes" people who agree to anything and everything, without thinking about the process of accomplishing a goal or solving a problem. Every team needs to understand that the path to each goal has barriers that need to be overcome. But there is a difference between an underlying attitude of negativity and one of "we can do it; now let’s figure out together how to overcome the obstacles."

Inclusiveness

Inclusiveness is another bedrock principle of collaboration. If you start a project by including all the people who will eventually have a role in it, the chances grow immeasurably that the project will be completed on time and on budget. This isn’t to say that you have to hold a meeting of 100 people just to launch a new initiative. But many managers forget that at some point in the process a project is going to require input from other functions (for example, legal, finance, and human resources). Rather than waiting until the project is nearly completed to get the necessary signoffs, why not bring those departments into the process at the beginning? Not only does that pave the way for future approval (they aren’t "surprised" at the last minute and forced to make a snap judgment), but it also brings more intellectual firepower to the table. Some managers think of legal, finance, or human resources as "blockers" and try to avoid them until the end of the decision-making process. True collaboration is based on mutual respect. It means looking at these groups as savvy business people with a unique and valuable perspective.

Barriers to Collaboration

If collaboration is such a great thing, why don’t more managers do it? Just as the principles we just discussed encourage collaboration, there are also common barriers to collaboration of which a leader needs to be aware.

Unwillingness to Share Power

Among the most important and prevalent barriers is an unwillingness to share power. The very nature of collaboration is to share credit. Many aggressive, gung-ho managers will see this as a bad thing. They think in terms of zero-sum games, in which any advance one person makes is at the cost of another person. Their rationale runs something like this: If I can grab all the credit, I’ll get ahead faster, so I shouldn’t place myself in a position in which I have to share credit.

The fallacy of that kind of thinking can be shown by comparing it to a baseball game. Strike one occurs when the uncooperative individual achieves less than what could have been accomplished through collaboration. Strike two occurs when senior managers review the performance of this individual and his manager. If the word gets around at higher levels that you aren’t a team player, chances are your grab for all the credit will wind up causing you to strike out for the third time, costing you that "corporate" home run.

"Pretend" Collaboration

Managers who are not team players may realize that they’re being judged in part on their willingness and ability to collaborate with others in the company. In order to appear "collaborative," they cite some people outside their own department in an email to a superior or they mention another department in a speech about their initiative. It certainly looks and sounds like they’re collaborating. In reality, they are only creating the impression of collaboration, while at the same time busily building barriers to true collaboration. An occasional memo or email copied to another function is not truly inviting or valuing their input. Rather, it’s just an example of "pretend" collaboration.

Narrow Scorecards

Finally, the way in which companies measure performance can discourage collaboration. It is very tempting for a manager assigning responsibilities to be very narrow and specific when determining objectives or setting up scorecards. After all, specificity should lead to focus and clear delineation of responsibilities. But that very narrowness allows a person to claim that he was successful in his role, even if the entire project comes crashing down in ruins. Managers need to promote collaboration by setting broader mandates and holding every participant responsible not for just a small segment of a project, but for the overall success of the entire project.

Levels of Collaboration

Collaboration shouldn’t be limited to your own team of direct reports, but should extend throughout the company and even beyond the bounds of the company to include customers and suppliers. Let’s take a look at what collaboration at each of those three levels means.

Collaboration within a Team

The easiest and most productive use of collaboration comes within your own team. You serve as the coach and have the authority, if necessary, to ensure that your team members cooperate (again, that they "play well with others"). Tom has three departments reporting to him, each led by a competitive, results-oriented, and highly effective leader. Some time ago it became apparent that all three departments were functioning extremely well on their own initiatives and projects, but they weren’t collaborating much. Each of the three department heads was focused on what his department was achieving and wasn’t concerned about what was happening elsewhere, nor about what effect this was having on the entire division.

That’s when Tom summoned his three managers to what has become known within the division as the "Bonne Terre Conference." During two days of sometimes heated, sometimes painful discussions at Bonne Terre, an idyllic conference center bed-and-breakfast south of Memphis, Tom laid out his vision of what collaboration within the division should look like. Then, the three department heads and their staffs identified the problems that stood in the way of Tom’s vision. With the help of a facilitator, they identified very specifically where communication and collaboration were breaking down. They began to realize that becoming an outstanding division within FedEx would not be achieved by squeezing an additional 5 percent out of each of their own initiatives. They had to figure out problems together and actively look for linkages, rather than grudgingly keeping the rest of the division informed.

At first this two-day offsite meeting seemed like an incredible waste of time. But when the session broke up and everyone drove home to Memphis, the groundwork for collaboration had been laid. Formal guidelines were established that analyzed each department and designated who should be collaborating with whom on what projects. The formal guidelines were reinforced by Tom’s continuing evangelization that if one department won at the expense of another, it really wasn’t a win, but a loss for the division as a whole. Finally, Tom made collaboration one of the goals in his team’s management objectives and on the division’s scorecard.

Companywide Collaboration

Breaking down silos that exist outside your span of control can be even more of a challenge than leveling those within your own team. It’s a task that requires persuasion and logic. The first step is to find a simple, but descriptive, articulation of your initiative. The second step is to identify the internal contributors and stakeholders whose input is necessary for the successful execution of the project and invite them to join the team. The third step is continuous evangelization about why this effort is so important and why their contributions matter. This is accompanied by well-documented scorecard "evidence" showing the progress being made. The benefits are many. Obviously the project at hand gets the focus it needs from the right parties. Additionally, by enlisting the aid of groups outside your own immediate circle, you set a precedent and build relationships that will make working with these formerly siloed groups much easier in the future. More importantly, you reinforce the idea that everyone is on the same team, working to make the organization as a whole successful and profitable.

Collaboration across Companies

In a supplier-customer relationship, there is a tendency to think in terms of zero-sum games that steer your company and your customer or supplier away from collaboration and into so-called "arm’s-length" transactions. We’re gratified to note a small but growing trend in business-to-business relations toward what is called "collaborative selling" or "solution selling." Those are fancy words for what amounts to teamwork between two separate companies. Just as teamwork in your own department or your own company requires respect for one another, collaborative selling requires that the selling company and the buying company respect and trust one another. At the heart of collaborative selling is the customer’s willingness to share large amounts of data and to describe, openly and candidly, the nature of the problems it faces. Only then can the seller begin to fashion a real solution, rather than simply offer a product or service tailored to meet the customer’s needs. In exchange for devising a solution, the seller can expect to receive a premium price, albeit not so high as to destroy the value of the solution to the customer. In the end, this kind of collaborative relationship becomes a competitive advantage to both the buyer and the seller, a true "win-win" situation.

Copyright © 2007 by Thomas Schmitt and Arnold Perl

Authors:
Tom Schmitt is President and CEO of FedEx Global Supply Chain Services and Senior Vice President of FedEx Solutions.

Arnold Perl is a Partner at the national labor and employment law firm of Ford & Harrison LLP.