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Volume: 6
Issue: 3
ISSN: 1533-7812
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Last Updated: Sep 4, 2008 - 11:09:12 AM |
[Editor's Note: Remarks delivered by James P. Evans, president and
chief executive officer, Best Western International Inc., April 14,
1999,
AH&MA Leadership Keynote Address.]
Remarks delivered by James P. Evans
Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen, and thank you for your warm welcome.
Just before I left Phoenix to fly here, our public relations director
at Best Western, Skip Boyer, handed me a note that read:
"Hey Jim! Just a short note on timing. April 14, the day you speak in
Nashville—is also the date in 1865 that Lincoln was shot and, in 1912,
the day the Titanic hit ice and went down. It's just a thought, but
have you considered phoning that speech to Nashville?"
How's that for an upbeat PR guy?! Anyway, despite the history of disaster that today carries, I'm glad to be here.
You know, for the past 20 years, I've been sitting in the audience at
meetings like this one, listening to some great leaders talk about the
future of our industry.
I've always walked away with new
insights and a renewed sense of satisfaction that my life has been
spent in our industry.
I hope you'll find something of
value to carry away with you when I'm finished today. I especially hope
you'll carry away a sense of pride in the accomplishments we are all
making in this industry.
Today
is a special occasion for me in another way. I'm here today in my new
role as the president and chief executive officer of best western
international.
This is an exciting time for me,
personally. Best Western is an historic brand with incredible
potential. To be part of it at this moment is rewarding. It's also
challenging and a real test of some of the basic principles of
leadership I've built my career around.
I've been on the
job in Phoenix just long enough to learn there's still a lot to learn.
And I haven't been on the job long enough to offer you the seasoned
advice of a long-time president and CEO. Perhaps someday down the road
I'll feel comfortable trying to do that.
We're here
today talk about leadership. So, I'm going to share with you some ideas
about leadership and the principles of leadership that I'm testing
right now as I begin my career at best western. I think they will give
you a good notion about the kind of company best western aspires to be.
Advice, incidentally, is something that should be offered and taken with great care. Now remember—I warned you…
On that note, I am reminded of Mark Twain at the celebration of his 70
th
birthday. It was a remarkable celebration—a glittering, black tie dinner at the legendary Delmonico's in New York.
The great writer stood up, lit a cigar and said, "I have achieved my 70
years in the usual way--by sticking strictly to a scheme of life which
would kill anybody else. I will offer here, as a sound maxim: that we
can't reach old age by another man's road. My habits protect my life,"
he said, "but they would assassinate you."
With
that advice ringing in our ears, please allow me to offer some
suggestions on leadership that may or may not assassinate you.
Let's begin with the obvious. Leadership is the art of how we relate to
people—usually those people on whom we depend to make our businesses
successful.
I can think of no other industry that must
relate more intensely to people. Although we offer rooms, food and
beverage and meeting space, we definitely are in the people business.
That's a bit ironic, I think, when you consider how we often ignore our
greatest asset. Our industry employs some 1.7 million people and we
lose, on average, 100 percent of those people every year.
And that's only half the bad news. The other half is that it costs
between $3,000 to $5,000 to train each replacement. With nearly 100
percent turnover, that translates to about $4 to $5 billion a year that
we're giving up from our bottom line.
And, besides that,
employee turnover also creates incredible stress for the people who do
stay in their jobs year after year.
I am convinced that
no team with high turnover can win…or at least win consistently.
Professional sports certainly prove that thesis. With only a few
exceptions, the teams that have been together for a while are the
perennial winners. The Yankees didn't win all those pennants with high
turnover. John Elway and the Denver Broncos didn't win the super bowl
twice in a row with 100 percent turnover.
Actually,
those sports metaphors are only partially accurate. The great thing
about sports is that when the game is over, the players go home. The
court or playing field is empty until the next game.
We
don't live like that. For us, competition is eternal. There is no such
thing as totally winning. The game never ends. If you compete and win
today, you must compete and win again tomorrow. You know the old
saying…you're only as good as your last P & L.
As
leaders, our task is both simple and complex… and that's to make
everyone else's job interesting and rewarding, to create an environment
that helps them succeed.
The opposite is unthinkable.
Just imagine going to work every day saying, "I hate my job." That kind
of attitude is why Dilbert touches the lives of so many people. In the
tiny cartoon cubical world of Dilbert, all the mistakes of management
are held up to the world for a mixed response of both laughter and
tears.
The characters in Scott Adams' cartoon strip are
all stereotypes. There's no real leadership going on in the world of
Dilbert…just hapless characters bumbling from one silly situation to
another.
And here's where we come to an important definition of terms.
I'm talking about leaders, not managers. Finding solid managers is not
the problem.. The problem we face is one of finding men and women who
understand what constitutes a leader in
today's workplace.
When it comes to management, American business has written the book.
When it comes to leadership, we're still trying to grasp the point that
something has changed dramatically in our workplace.
That change is at the center of the restructuring of corporate America
that has been going on around us for the past decade. It's worth noting
because some would say it is the first significant restructuring of the
business world since we appropriated our basic management pattern from
feudal lords of the middle ages.
In those times, the
feudal lord ruled the estate. His vassals did the work under the
direction of a handful of early mid-management types. In return, they
received enough to live on. Generation after generation, they did what
they were told. Punishment was swift and often painful.
You could apply that description to the management structure of many
American businesses in the last 200 years. The Dilbert cartoon strip
certainly does.
There were exceptions, of course, but
the parallel is close. Basically, a handful of individuals, who had
little vested interest in what they were doing, managed the activities
of the majority.
Job one was not quality and customer
satisfaction. Job one was preserving the system, staying alive. For
many, it really was a feudal relationship.
Today, the
most powerful force driving our management decisions are the changes
that have taken place during this last decade or so in the workplace
and in how we lead people.
The greatest of those changes, of course, is the changing face of our workforce.
In the late 1980s, the department of labor funded a study that has since become a benchmark.
Workforce 2000 was intended to determine the makeup of the work force in the next century.
The results demonstrated clearly that the only thing the work force of
1963 and the work force of 2000 will have in common is the name. The
study showed that white males account for only 15 percent of the 25
million people who joined the workforce between 1985 and 2000.
On the other hand, Hispanic and Asian populations have grown by 48
percent. The African-American population has grown by 28 percent. Very
early in the next century, non-Hispanic whites will lose their majority
status for the first time in the history of this nation….indeed, the
dominant language in the world is…or is about to become…Spanish. And
women will succeed in shattering the glass ceiling.
These aren't guesses.
This is hard reality. And it was confirmed just last week when the
labor department released its most recent statistics on the workforce.
Unemployment is at a 29-year low---4.2 percent. Labor secretary Alexis
Herman called it 'an historic report.' Among those groups making the
strongest improvement in the workforce were Hispanics. Unemployment
among Hispanics dropped 1.2 percent during the last 12 months—to a
record low of 5.8 percent.
The diverse work force that was described in studies a decade ago
is here now.
It is marked by radically changed employee attitudes. The job is no
longer the defining factor in who a person is, and one thing is very
clear: we can't lead this work force with the same methods we used with
their parents—or even their older brothers and sisters.
Today's work force is a vastly different thing than it was as recently as a single decade ago.
Of course, most of us didn't consciously start out to be leaders. We
had other objectives—personal advancement, security for our families,
retirement and so on. And somewhere along the line, we discovered that
to achieve our own goals, we had to take a leadership position in this
changing workforce.
Let's explore this issue of manager/leader.
In a phrase that has almost become a business cliché. Professor Warren
Bennis says that American businesses are over managed and underled.
Cliché or not, it underscores an important point.
We have a generation of managers who are trained to keep things as they are and, to preserve the system.
Leadership, on the other hand, requires creating what isn't, something
new, something beyond the current system. By definition, that means
taking risks…and, as we know, leaders are, indeed, risk takers.
The focus of many managers is to maintain the status quo.
The focus of most leaders is to disrupt it in the search for a better
way. That's the sort of thinking that flattens the organizational
pyramid, forcing out non-producing levels and shifting responsibility
squarely to those doing the work.
It's the sort of
thinking that understands the concept of empowerment and what it means
to truly empower individuals in the workplace.
Leaders
understand the value of self-management and self-motivation. This is
the sort of thinking that is absolutely necessary if we are going to
motivate the work force—not the work force of the future, but the work
force that is standing at our front door right now.
Managers have employees, for example. Leaders have followers.
Managers command and control. Leaders empower and inspire.
Managers seek stability. Leaders seek flexibility.
Managers make decisions and solve problems. Leaders set directions and
then empower and enable their team to make their own decisions and
solve their own problems.
Managers accept the organizational structure and culture. Leaders look for a better way.
The real issue facing us now is how to release the brain power, the
intelligent curiosity, the know-how, of our greatest asset—our people,
the people we work with everyday.
Managers, even the very good ones, do not know how to do that very well. Leaders do.
The question for us, then, is not the need for leadership. That's clear, and it's obvious. The question is how to
become the leaders we need to be
or how to develop the leaders we need.
Leaders, I believe have several distinctive characteristics.
They are the people who recognize excellence and creativity in others,
especially those members of our team who are out there where the
"rubber meets the road." Simply put, folks, from my experience, the
best ideas usually come from the field—where our customers are. In my
experience, about 80 percent of the ideas that revolutionize the
industry came from people on the front line or, sometimes, even outside
the industry.
Kemmons Wilson, the father of holiday inn
and the modern hotel industry, Jack Deboer, who invented extended stay,
and Bob Wooley, one of the creators of the all-suite concept, weren't
in the hotel industry when they introduced their concepts. Nonetheless,
they believed in their ideas and were out in the field to make sure
they worked.
People with ideas champion them, and
through the agony and ecstasy of trial and error, make them work. I
don't mean to knock headquarters staff, after all, I've worked in the
"faulty towers" of three organizations since 1982. Headquarters people
provide an invaluable service and often are the ones who recognize a
great idea and often have the organizational skills to refine those
ideas and roll them out company-wide.
However—my advice
to the corporate people in the room is--I strongly suggest you develop
strong ties to the field, at least to the general manager level.
Whether you are a management company, franchise company, operating
company or a membership organization like best western, if you don't
have your hand welded to the pulse points of your general managers, you
should consider seeking a new career. Our general managers are the
action folks in our business. They make our industry happen. That's a
basic point.
Moving on to another basic point: the
characteristics of good leaders include the nearly forgotten ability to
listen and truly hear what's being said.
To be a good
leader, listening must be your most important skill. Communications
doesn't begin with the sender, it begins with the recipient. And it's
tough. Sometimes, I feel there are only two kinds of people in this
world: those who love to talk and those who hate to listen.
As I said, I've been at best western for about five months now. During
that time, I've actually spent a few days in phoenix, but most of my
time has been spent meeting with members of our best western team all
over the world. This is my time to listen. If I am to be successful
helping to lead our brand, I must begin by following my own advice.
And listen!!! I must hear and from that, I must learn.
Those are characteristics of a smart leader.
Another characteristic of a leader in our competitive environment today
is the pursuit of knowledge. You must know how everything in your
business fits together, how each critical element impacts and
influences other elements. Your knowledge of the big picture is one of
the things that marks you as a leader.
I mentioned Mark
Twain a moment ago. When he was a young man in his first career as a
river pilot, he was stunned to learn that he was expected to know every
bend, curve, channel and current of the Mississippi River…up and
down…both ways…in the dark. Anybody can steer a steamboat. It's knowing
where to steer that makes you valuable.
Knowing where to steer. That's knowledge.
A few months ago, I met with Best Western's international sales team
for the first time. I told them that the cutting competitive edge
belongs to those sales people who know their customers better than
anyone else. It's a simple concept. The team that knows their customers
the best will be the team that wins most frequently. The knowledge they
have about their customers, competitors and the marketplace comes from
good listening.
If listening and knowledge are key components in the making of a leader, so is a keen competitive spirit.
That competitive spirit is the spark that overcomes the inertia of complacency.
I want to stress that complacency is what will kill you in a consumer business.
When he was coaching Notre Dame, Lou Holtz once noted when the Irish
were ranked number one in the nation, he said, "We're not number one.
We're trying to stay number one." There is a difference. Complacency
turns number one teams into also rans.
It doesn't take
much to let yourself be defeated by complacency. It's easy to become
complacent. Let me remind you of some brands that did.
Pan Am
was once the only way to fly.
Sears' sales
used to be larger than its next two competitors combined.
Schlitz
was the best selling premium beer in America.
Simca was once
the car of France.
The Dow Jones journal used to have 2.1 million circulation and
was a monopoly.
Chevrolet
was the number one car in America.
You can write your own list of great brands that became complacent. I
encourage you to do just that at your next staff meeting!
Real leaders have another vital characteristic and I want to place special emphasis on it today.
Simply put--communications.
And here's a flash for you.
Communicating while sitting in a warm seat in your office isn't smart communications.
As I said earlier, that's not where the action is. The action is in the
field or in your hotel. You have to see what's going on as well as hear
what's going on.
Communications is one of any
organization's greatest challenges. It is for us at Best Western and we
are taking immediate steps to turn that challenge into an asset.
I should explain more carefully what I mean by communications.
It's not more newsletters or bulletins. It is more listening and giving
feedback. It is cleaning up the clutter of our attempts to talk to each
other, reduce the number of mailings and faxes, and, very importantly,
seeking feedback from our primary internal audiences—our team members,
general managers, customers and your corporate team. Listening… to what
they tell you should be one of the most important parts of your
communications plan.
At best western, we are also
initiating, as part of an active communications process, the
development of a formalized ethics process within best western. The
early stages of this process involve an accurate assessment of our
current operating culture and the perceptions of all those who have a
stake in how that culture works and impacts them. Ultimately, the
process is designed to help everyone within best western understand and
integrate principles and values of doing the right thing into their
day-to-day activities. This will make us a more successful company by
making best western the preferred flag for owners and the preferred
company for corporate professionals.
It is another way
of using communications as the foundation on which we will build. If we
communicate honestly, other critical things will happen. We
will
build greater trust between individuals, departments, staff and—most
importantly—our board and all of our members. By building trust, we are
building platinum-level
accountability to each other.
On, now, to another leadership characteristic…
Perhaps the best leadership advice I can offer is to focus on line
employees. This is important whether you are a CEO or a general
manager. The people in the trenches are the ones who deliver the
service and experiences that bring our guests back again and again.
We must spend more time on people. Every individual who works for you is
critical to
your success. As leaders, we must help them all truly understand that,
no matter what their position in our organization, they are vital to
our mutual success.
When the best western 800
reservations number rings in one of our several reservations centers,
the sales agent who answers that call is the most important person in
our company. For that caller, the sales agent
is
Best Western—not me, not the chairman of the board, not the vice
president of marketing. If that sales agent doesn't feel strongly,
passionately about our success, all the millions of dollars we spend on
marketing, technology and sales are wasted.
By
encouraging our team members and making them active partners in our
success, we encourage freedom, which is also a hallmark of real
leadership. Give them the right to fail, the right to take calculated
risks, the right to find better ways. It's called empowering your
employees. I'd rather think of it as encouraging their freedom to do
their very best every day without fear of failure.
You
probably read in the industry trade publications that we've been going
through some budget adjustments at best western. As part of that
process, I turned to the people best qualified to make suggestions…our
corporate team. I asked them how could we do things smarter? More
efficiently?
We got nearly 50 responses in a matter of a
couple of days. Some were thought-provoking. Some were commonsense.
All, however, were important because the members of our team felt they
could respond honestly and candidly with suggestions on new ways to do
things. They were willing to take risks, to attempt new things. As
leaders, that is the freedom we must encourage and cherish.
The only way to ensure you—and your team-- never fail is to never
attempt anything. And that, I as mentioned earlier, is the status quo
and is one of the certain signs that you and your organization are in
serious trouble.
You won't get to perfection if you
don't give your co-workers the freedom to make stupid mistakes and
brilliant discoveries.
Later
this year, best western is coming back here to Nashville and to
Opryland for our international convention. We're excited about it
because we're going to be doing—on a grand scale—just what I've been
talking about. The theme for our convention is "Just Imagine!" We're
going to give ourselves the freedom to explore new ideas, new solutions
and ask ourselves, "just imagine what we
can be!"
Before I touch on my final point, let me recap quickly the key elements I see in true leadership…
A leader is someone who…
…encourages excellence in others
…listens carefully
…knows that knowledge is the competitive edge
…knows that complacency will kill
…knows how to communicate and works hard at doing it well
…values and empowers team members
…recognizes and rewards risk takers.
Now, there is one more thing. And, today, I believe that thing is the
benchmark of the truly great leaders in our industry and every other
human endeavor. I touched on it a little bit earlier.
We
must recognize, embrace and celebrate diversity. I can think of no
other industry that is more of a melting pot than ours.
We must also broaden the definition of diversity. Yes, it must include
race and gender. It should also include language and cultural
diversity. We must see the broad, sweeping spectrum of our diverse
humanity, for these are the people we serve and the people who help us
serve.
We must give everyone a true equal opportunity.
We must look beyond skin color, country of origin and gender and see
the individual potential.
This is both the right thing to do and good, smart business.
Diversity within Best Western is one of our great strengths. I'm
grateful this is so. Diversity is not just something that was predicted
by futurists two decades ago. It is here…now, a powerful influence in
our workforce and our ownership.
If you would be a leader—a true leader—these are the men and women
who will make you successful, if you let them.
Lastly, good leadership makes people feel valued. Hearing 'thanks,' or
'great job,' or 'you really hit that one out of the park' is really
what makes people spend the extra energy and go the extra mile. It
tells them you understand they are critical to your success.
Well, that's it. No big secrets, nothing to change the face of the corporate world.
These are simply commonsense ideas about how we treat each other, about
the respect we extend to one another, about the faith we have in each
other's abilities and each other's judgment. Great leaders were at one
time great followers. They simply learned a few important lessons along
the way.
And one of the first lessons I learned came
from President Lyndon Johnson. In 1964, he said, "The American people
want leadership that believes in them; not leadership that berates
them."
I believe President Johnson was correct.
People—whether the people of a great nation or the people of a great
brand—want leadership that believes in them.
I believe
true leadership casts a long shadow. If we lead with respect, if we
lead with compassion, if we lead with faith in each other, we cast a
shadow that touches those who come behind us and sows the seeds of
another generation of leaders.
And when the day is over
and we have done all we can, perhaps our greatest accomplishment will
not be that we were gifted leaders… but, rather, that we inspired the
next generation of those who will lead. Creating a legacy of leadership
is, perhaps, the final measure of great leadership.
Thank you.
© Copyright 2007 by Academic Leadership
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