Jack Welch was the CEO of GE for over 40 years. He grew the company from 13 billion to over 400 billion during that time, employing over 300,000 people. Bill Hybels interviewed him.
- Leaders have to be authentic. You have to be yourself. People can see through a phony in a minute. People want to know that you are who you say you are, and that you can be counted on.
- You should make your church or place of business less formal, where people can be themselves.
- Leaders have to have energy. You not only have to be energetic; you have to be able to energize others. It is not enough simply to be energetic; you have to excite people to achieve the mission and the vision that you have articulated.
- Energizing people towards a vision takes time, relationship, and investment. You have to enjoy this process.
- Energizing people is not hyping or manufacturing; it is getting people to feel where you are going. Unless the leader feels the fire, he or she can not pass it on. It's helping people connect to and tell a story of life change. You get people excited about the journey because you are excited about the journey.
- The job of the leader is to always raise the intellectual bow of the room by drawing out the people who will make you smarter. You have to hire smarter people.
- Insecure people hire dopes.
- Leaders have to speak with candor, and encourage/develop/protect it among those who lead. You have to fight desperately to get what people are actually feeling on the table. Over the long haul, this requires less meetings, less posturing, because everyone is free and obligated to be honest and tell what they believe.
- Leaders have to be ok with differentiation. At GE, they identified the top 20%, the vital 70%, and the 10% of people were low performers who needed to be improved.
- The best sports teams differentiate. Differentiation leads to winning.
- You can not have a differentiated organization without having candor.
- You have to get rid of your phony evaluation systems.
- You can not go to work with people who constantly don't know where they stand.
- Chances are: people already know who is in the top, middle, and bottom groups.
- Leaders have to stop spending so much time with the bottom 10%. Rather, they should get them out and into a different organization in which they would be a better fit.
- The bottom 10% know where they stand if you promote candor in your organization.
- The top 20% (the A group) are filled with energy, likeable, and have a gene that says "I love to see people grow. I love to reward people." They celebrate their people. They have generosity of spirit.
- These people also hire great people, and love to have them around. This is an attractive and contagious characteristic.
- Top performers also are free of envy.
- The vital 70% (the B group) are hard working people. What is hard about this, though, is that the top of the 70% don't like being in the same group as the bottom people in the 70%. You have to keep them in the organization by telling them that this is a snapshot in time, and what they have to do to improve so that they can be in the top 20%.
- When giving performance appraisals, write over the old appraisal. Don't write up a new one.
- The bottom 10% (the C group) are low energy, acidic people. They actually have negative energy. These aren't the boss-haters or the loudmouth disrupters; these people are the silent whisperers.
- You have to do everything you can to stop the meeting after the meeting. The meeting after the meeting is an unacceptable event. If something needs to be solved, it needs to be solved in the context where a solution can be found - the actual meeting.
- You can't give your top 20% enough.
- The idea of never acknowledging performance is silly. No winning team operates that way.
- Non-profit can not mean non-performance. You have chosen non-profit; you have to deliver non-profit.
- Jack Welch's biggest mistake? Moving too slowly. People have to have the self-confidence in the gut to do things when they feel that they have the right answer. If they are right, it gives them confidence to make the hard decision the next time.
- You can't over-criticize a mistake. It will kill self-confidence.
- Jack Welch began the process of selecting his successor 8 years before he was going to retire. He had 8 candidates; 3 of which were long shots. When it came time to make the decision, the final 3 candidates were all the ones who began as the long shots.
- Hiring is hard; succession is brutal.
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