Terri Kelley is the president and CEO of W.L. Gore and Associates, makers of the waterproof, breathable GORE-TEX material.
- Your foundation and values of your organization will drive your success.
- Gore & Assoc. developed and employed small teams to fuel their organization.
- It is a peer-based organization; each employee's job is to build relationships with their team members and help the other succeed. The effect of this was that ownership greatly increased.
- While Gore & Assoc. has a leadership structure, they do not have a fixed, formalized hierarchy. Decisions are made by the best person to make that particular decision. They call this "hierarchy on demand." A lot more of the population was involved in decision making.
- "Ladder vs. Lattice Organization" - Gore is a lattice organization, in which everyone is connected to their network, and has access to the person they need in order to keep things moving.
- Arriving leaders do not simply direct reports. Instead, they influence them. They try and help them to understand the significance of what they are doing, and shift the energy to get it done from the leader to the report.
- Gore keeps everything aligned by spending more time creating a common foundation in values among their employees: the power of the individual and his/her ideas/influence, the power of small teams, the reality that we are in the same boat, and a long term view (sustainability and innovation over profit).
- Every associate at Gore has to be a good "salesman" - they have to be good at selling their ideas to the company, and get others to buy in to them. They also use a peer review process to help the best ideas bubble up by letting their teams review and recommend ideas that have been put on the table.
- Also: the teams are asked to rank which individuals are contributing the most to the success of the enterprise - top to bottom. This is what determines compensation. The person contributing the most to the success of the organization as ranked by their peers garners the most compensation. The person contributing the least gets the least.
- This process helps to drive people not to just succeed and advance, but to align themselves with what they are passionate about.
- Gore has more "coaches" than "bosses." Gore has utilized the role of a sponsor. A sponsor - usually not their supervisor - takes charge of helping an associate grow and develop, including selecting a career path that will help the associate be the most successful one they can. Each associate at Gore has a sponsor. These responsibilities are delineated from leadership, and the sponsor facilitates conversations that span work and personal interests.
- Gore has 18 plants of 200-250 people each within a 25 mile radius. This encourages relationships, fosters personality and individuality, and encourages collaboration. Beyond this, Gore found that their organization's effectiveness fell off.
- This model also helps the organization's values to be transferrable and rooted.
- While the values binds each plant together, each plant is also given the freedom to achieve those values in a way that makes the most sense for that individual plant.
- Gore spends a lot of time on behavioral interviewing to determine if the values of Gore resonate with their own, and if they can lead into them.
- The "waterline" principle - this encourages healthy risk taking. In things above the waterline - where the water hits the hull of the ship - the individual has the freedom to make decisions. In things below the waterline, the decision has to be run up the lattice.
- Leadership at Gore is defined by followship: people are only a leader if people want to follow them. Leaders therefore are working to secure the influence and trust of their teams. The ranking system is a good reinforcement of this value.
- In this system, the leader spends a lot of time explaining their decisions. At Gore, this is precious time, not wasted time.
- The CEO at Gore is responsible for remaining true to Gore's values while defining the changes in their expression to remain relevant in a changing world. She also determines the allocation of resources, and spends time with their key leaders.
- Over 50% of the associates at Gore reported that they considered themselves leaders in the organization.
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