Or they would claim that the marketers hadn’t put together the right campaign for their local market. When the CEO tried to hold the buyers accountable for the slow moving merchandise, they would blame the stores for not displaying it well enough. Or the buyers would point their fingers at the marketers for not moving the merchandise. When the marketers were confronted, they blamed the stores or the buyers. Another organisation in the office equipment business had started an intense focus on customer service and quality improvement.

As they began finally listening to their customers, they kept hearing how bureaucratic they were. One day a customer in one of the biggest cities they served, pointed out that they had 33 phone numbers in the phone book. “We don’t know whom you should talk to. Here, you figure it out,” is what the company was essentially saying to its customers. “Maybe you should give us an organisation chart so we have a fighting chance of getting to the right department,” the customer suggested. When improvement teams tried to map out some of the service processes in these departments, they had to follow the bouncing customers as callers were sung a few verses of “No, that’s not my department.” Service providers were just as frustrated by all the interruptions from “all those idiotic customers who keep calling us when we’re obviously not the right people for them to talk to.”

Both of these examples illustrate the behaviour-shaping role of structure and systems. It’s like the strange pumpkin I once saw at a county fair. It had been grown in a four-cornered Mason jar. The jar had since been broken and removed. The remaining pumpkin was shaped exactly like a small Mason jar. Beside it was a pumpkin from the same batch of seeds that was allowed to grow without constraints. It was about five times bigger. Organisation structures and systems have the same affect on the people in them. They either limit or liberate their performance potential.

We’re Getting the Behaviour We Designed

If we are unhappy with the behaviour of people on our team, we need to take a closer look at the system and structure they’re working in. If they behave like bureaucrats, they’re likely working in a bureaucracy. If they’re not customer focused, they’re probably using systems and working in a structure that wasn’t designed to serve the servers and/or customers.

If they’re not innovative, they’re likely working in a controlled and inflexible organisation. If they resist change, they’re probably not working in a learning organisation that values growth and development. If they’re not good team players, they’re likely working in an organisation designed for individual performance. Good performers, in a poorly designed structure, will take on the shape of the structure. Many organisations induce learned helplessness.

People in them become victims of ‘the system’. This often comes from a sense of having little or no control over their work processes, policies and procedures, technology and support systems. “You can’t fight the system,” they’ll say with a shrug as they give the clock another stare, hoping to intimidate it into jumping ahead to quitting time. These feelings are often amplified by a performance management system that arbitrarily punishes people for behaving like the structure they’ve been forced into. ‘\Empowering’ helpless people without changing the structure they work in is worse than useless. It increases helplessness and cynicism. It’s like ‘empowering’ that seed in the Mason jar to become a full grown, well-rounded pumpkin– but leaving it in the jar.

Reaching full potential

Improvement planning, process management, teams, skill development, and the like are either constrained or boosted by our organisation’s structure and support systems. If they are poorly aligned with our Context and Focus (vision, values, and purpose), strategies, and goals, performance will never come close to its full potential.

I race too much. My brain races too much, so even if I’ve listened to everything somebody said, unless you show that you’ve digested it, people don’t think they are being well heard. Sometimes you really don’t hear because you’re racing. It’s just the way my brain works. If you really want to get the best out of people, you have to really hear them and they have to feel like they’ve been really heard. So I’ve got to learn to slow down and improve in that dimension, both to make me better and to make the people around me better.

Q. What’s it like to be in a meeting run by Steve Ballmer?

I’ve changed that, really in the last couple of years. The mode of Microsoft meetings used to be: You come with something we haven’t seen in a presentation. You deliver the presentation. You probably take what I will call the long and winding road’. You take the listener through your path of discovery and exploration, and you arrive at a conclusion. That’s kind of the way I used to like to do it, and the way Bill [Gates] used to kind of like to do it. And it seemed like the best way to do it, because if you went to the conclusion first, you’d get: “What about this? Have you thought about this?” So people naturally tried to tell you all the things that supported the decision, and then tell you the decision.

I decided that’s not what I want to do anymore.

I don’t think it’s productive, and I get impatient. So most meetings nowadays, you send me the materials and I read them in advance. And I can come in and say: “I’ve got the following four questions. Please don’t present the deck.” That lets us go, whether they’ve organised it that way or not, to the recommendation. And if I have questions about the long and winding road and the data and the supporting evidence, I can ask them. But it gives us greater focus.

Q. How do you assess job candidates?

If they come from inside the business, the best predictor of future success is past success. It’s not 100%, but it’s a reasonable predictor. For an external candidate, what I’ve found is that reference checks are super-important. I didn’t used to believe so much in reference checks. You can always get somebody to say something nice about you. But the truth is, if you ask enough questions and you ask around, you can really get a profile of who’s accomplished various things and who hasn’t.

And I try to figure out a combination of IQ and passion. I just ask somebody to tell me what they’ve done that they are really proud of and tell me about it. And if it’s something you are proud of, you should be able to answer any question I can come up with, at least at a level that would satisfy my interest. I ought to be able to see your passion. It might be quiet passion; it might be bubbly passion. But I should be able to sense that you are one of those people who throws themselves into things.

Q. Is there a skill qualification or trait that you’re looking for in prospective hires that didn’t matter as much ten years ago?

Mostly, I’m still looking for what I’ve always looked for: extremely smart and talented people who love to work hard, who are passionate about technology and who have a great foundation in maths and science. But compared to ten years ago, technology is more complex, products and services span people’s lives in new ways, and our business is much more global. So it’s more important that people can think outside the confines of their individual expertise and their product group and connect the dots between technologies, customer needs and markets in new ways.

Q. What’s the most challenging part of your job?

Finding the right balance between optimism and realism. I’m an optimist by nature, and I start from the belief that you can always succeed if you have the right amount of focus combined with the right amount of hard work. I get frustrated when progress runs up against issues that should have been anticipated or that simply couldn’t have been foreseen. A realist knows that a certain amount of that is inevitable, but the optimist in me always struggles.

Q. Fill in the blank. You want the culture of your company to be more _____ ?

Efficient. That’s the direction every business leader is steering their company culture towards right now. Given the current economic climate and the uncertainty about how long the recession will last, this is a time when organisations need to do more with less, and Microsoft is no exception. We’ve made good progress, but for a company that has grown every year for more than 30 years, learning how to operate under more constrained circumstances is not always that easy.

At the same time, the need to be more efficient drives us all towards a sharper focus on what is important and what can truly move the needle in terms of meeting customer needs and taking market share. Of course, we need to be innovative, but we also need to be efficient.

Q. Any books on management and leadership that you’ve found particularly useful?

Jim Collins’s book Built to Last.

Q. In all the speeches you’ve given, is there a favourite line, story, passage or quotation?

In 2009 I was invited to share my business perspective on the economic downturn with House Democrats at their annual retreat. In that speech, I got to share something that my dad always told me growing up, which is a simple piece of advice that really shaped my approach to life and to business.

My dad worked for Ford for 30 years. When I was a kid, he’d say: “If you’re going to do a job, do a job. If you’re not going to do a job, don’t do a job.” What he meant was, if you really want to accomplish anything, you have to be committed, motivated, tenacious and smart about what you do. That’s really just the essence of the American work ethic, but it’s one of the most important things I ever learnt.

Q. If you had to choose another profession, what would it be?

Education, probably. I like working with young people, and I think it’s really important to encourage talent. I love basketball, so I could see myself as a high school basketball coach. I think a basketball team that I coached would have a really good chance of being a winner.

Q. What would you like business schools to focus on more, or less?

I’d like to see more emphasis on the importance of taking the long view. Companies focus too much on short-term results in business. It takes patience to build a great business, and sometimes you have to be willing to make the long-term investment and then keep at it if you want to succeed.

Q. If you could teach any business school course, what would it be?

Leadership. Microsoft has grown from 30 people to more than 90 000 since I started, so I’ve had the chance to play a leadership role at practically every stage imaginable in a company’s growth and development. I’ve learnt a lot about leadership along the way from some great people that I’ve worked with and through experience. I’ve come to believe that to be a great leader, you have to combine thought leadership, business leadership and great people management. I think most people tend to focus more on one of those three. I used to think it was all about thought leadership. Some people think it’s all about your ability to manage people. But the truth is, great leaders have to have a mix of those things.

They lack empathy and remorse, are egocentric and prone to abusive treatment of others. The really bad news is that one in 25 bosses meets those criteria, according to a study by researchers from the Universities of North Texas and British Columbia. Paul Babiak, Craig Neumann and Robert Hare were able to get personality information on 203 professionals who had been selected by their companies either as ‘high potentials’ or for leadership development.

They were deemed to have the skills that could eventually set them up to be senior managers within their companies. Over a period of two years these people were interviewed, their performance reviews were studied, and feedback was provided by the people who reported to them.

The findings

• 4% of managers qualified as psychopaths (compared with just 0,2% of the general population)
• The potential for ‘possible’ psychopathy was much higher
• Psychopaths can and do get ahead. Of the nine people with the highest scores for psychopathy, seven were already managers.

Why is there more psychopathy in the corporate world?

Lack of realistic life goals, say the researchers, when couched in business language, can be misinterpreted as strategic thinking, a highly valued executive talent. Even traits that reflect a severe lack of feelings (lack of remorse, guilt, empathy) can be put into service by corporate psychopaths, where being ‘tough’ or ‘strong’(making hard, unpopular decisions) or ‘cool under fire’ (not displaying emotions in unpleasant circumstances) can work in their favour. In fact, the very skills that make the psychopath so unpleasant and even abusive in society can facilitate a career in business. The researchers suggest this is testament to their superior communication skills and their ability to manipulate decision makers. So be careful out there.

Identifying the dangerous ones

The group shared several traits that distinguished them from their colleagues.

1. Psychopaths had very high ratings on communication, strategic thinking and creative abilities
2. They had been reprimanded for poor management style, failing to act as team players, and had poor performance reviews. Despite this, they still managed to get selected as ‘high potential’ performers.

Lisa did the happy dance all the way down to her sales manager’s office and burst through the door. After an elated high-five, her sales manager asked her a few questions about the opportunity. “Uh oh! I forgot to ask about those things.” She better not cash the commission cheque just yet. There’s work to be done to best prepare a winning finalist presentation strategy.

Gear up for the final lap

The finalist stage is an exciting time, but top sellers don’t let exuberance knock them off their game. For your team to develop the winning finalist presentation strategy, you need to know answers to the six following questions:

1. What did they see in the RFP response that led you to be selected as a finalist?
2. What did they see in the competition’s RFP responses that they want you to address during your finalist presentation?
3. Who from their team will be represented at the finalist presentation and what do they want you to be sure to cover?
4. What other firms have been selected as finalists?
5. What criteria will be used to score the finalists?
6. What is the selection process following the finalist presentation?

Be prepared

For each of these six questions, there are several follow-on questions that needed to be asked based on the responses received. Will you always get answers to all of the questions? Of course you won’t. However, every information nugget you receive helps you develop your finalist strategy, select your team and craft your presentation.

During the conversation, be sure to also ask about logistics like:

• Amount of time for the presentation
• Who to ask for upon arriving at their office
• Projector/Internet access (if needed).

Being adept at closing the sale, and every step in the process, is an important key to productivity. So, let’s examine the issue of closing, beginning with the first principle:

1. Closing is a process which always ends with your customer’s agreement to take action
As you consider this principle, you’ll realise that closing is not just asking for an order, although it certainly is that. In addition, it is a process you repeat at every stage of the sales process. In fact, almost every time you interact with a customer, you can close the interaction by asking for some agreement. Whenever your customer agrees to take some action, you have closed that step in the sales process.

Let’s illustrate this principle with a typical real life situation. Suppose you’re talking on the phone to a prospect, and he says, “Sounds interesting. Send me some literature.” You say, “Okay, I’ll put it in the mail today.” Have you closed that step of the process? The answer is no. You have agreed to take action – send some literature – but your prospect hasn’t agreed to do anything. Remember, a close always ends with your customer agreeing to take some action.

Can you turn the same situation into a close? Back to the same situation. Your prospect says, “Sounds interesting. Send me some literature.” You remark, “I’d be happy to. After you review it, will you discuss it with me over the phone, say next Friday?” If your customer says, “Yes,” you’ve closed. He’s agreed to take some action. I recently made a sales call with a sales person who left the call unclosed. The prospect was definitely interested, but the sales person never asked for any action. Instead, the sales person said, “I’ll check back with you in a couple of weeks.”

We walked out of the sales call with absolutely no resolution of the issue, and the chance of making the sale diminished significantly. Understanding this principle is crucial to closing the sale. Many of the offers and proposals on which you work are very involved, requiring a number of steps in the sales process. As you proceed through the sales process, you continually ask for some kind of action in order to keep the project moving forward. When the time comes for the final decision – the agreement to buy – that decision is often the natural, logical consequence of the decisions that led up to it.

Every interaction can and should be closed
Closing, then, is not an isolated event that only happens at the end of the sales process. Rather, it’s a routine part of every sales call. That leads us to the second powerful principle of closing the sale:

2. Every interaction can and should be closed
In other words, at the conclusion of every interaction with your customer, ask for an agreement on the action he or she will take. The telephone conversation described above is a good example of closing the interaction.

Here’s another common situation. Let’s say you’ve discussed a product or proposal with your customer. He says, “It looks interesting, but we’re not ready for that now.” You might then say, “When do you think will be a good time?” Your customer responds, “Probably around June.” You might typically say, “Okay, I’ll make a note to discuss it with you then.”

At this point, you haven’t closed the interaction, nor have you resolved the issue. Take the conversation one step further Suppose you now say, “At that point in time, will you spend a half hour with me to discuss it in detail?” You have now attempted to close the interaction by getting an agreement for action on the part of your customer. You’ve put the issue on the table, and are attempting to resolve it.

Let’s take the conversation one step further.
Suppose your customer says, “No, probably not.” You now have a decision to make. Should you probe the reasons why, or should you accept his decision? Let’s say you decide to accept his decision. The conversation has value to you in that you learnt that this proposal isn’t going to fly in this account. The early “no” was valuable to you.

You didn’t waste months chasing something that wasn’t going to happen. That’s the value in resolving the issue. Let’s now say that, instead of responding “no,” your prospect responds to your close by saying, “Yes, I think it has enough merit to spend that time discussing it with you.” You now have his commitment to spend some time with you, so you have moved the issue forward. You’re one step closer to the ultimate sale.

Implement these two principles and you’ll dramatically improve your productivity. Keep in mind that closing is an agreement for action on the part of your customer, and make it your goal to close every interaction.

Name: John Sikanadze, 50
Designation: National Sales & Marketing Executive, Dawn Wing Global Express
Sales Team: 45 sales staff in 14 depots
Offering: Dawn Wing offers regional, national and global express courier services
Career: John’s sales and marketing management experience spans a period of 27 years, the majority of which was spent in the ICT industry. He holds an IMM Sales & Marketing Diploma.

The most important thing you’ve learned in sales? Our bodies will only follow what our minds direct. In any situation– whether it’s making a sales call or improving performance – your attitude and mind-set will determine the outcome more than any other factor.

What’s your key to closing the deal? That often depends on the nature, size and value of the deal, but generally speaking, I would say: (1) Link closure to resolving objections; (2) Compare cost over time; and (3) Trigger identified emotions.

The most useful thing you know about negotiation? In business you don’t get what you ask for – you get what you negotiate. Everybody wants to know, “What’s in it for me?” So for you to get what you want, be prepared to answer that question.

What is the most effective strategy you’ve used to motivate your sales team? Developing and identifying inspirational sales leaders who in turn are able to create a sense of purpose, pride, and commitment, which translates into improved performance across every part of the sales team.

How do you measure your own success? Using three major criteria: meeting revenue goals, creating an environment where the entire sales team can succeed, and helping the entire company to realise its potential.

What were some of your ‘rookie’ mistakes in your early days in sales? Hitting the road without a sales plan. Without it, you are missing the opportunity to succeed. I learnt that without the two major components of a sales plan – the sales strategy and sales tactic – you are bound to chase your tail forever because you do not understand how and how much you can sell.

What was the best and worst advice you’ve received in a sales management context? The best advice was, “Never send an email or letter that you wouldn’t mind seeing printed on the front page of your hometown newspaper.” The worst was, “If we make a brochure, we will increase sales.”

Who is your greatest sales mentor and what lessons did they teach you? Robert Sussman, joint CEO of Integr8 Group, taught me that taking a personal stake in advancing the lives of your sales force has a direct effect on the bottom line.

What are the key challenges currently facing Dawn Wing and how do you plan to overcome them? The biggest sales challenge is finding industryseasoned, high calibre strategic sales persons and, more generally, sourcing well-trained IT and Logistics professionals. For the recruitment of experienced strategic sales persons, we have no choice but to source from the industry, but for IT and logistics professionals, we have embarked on a learnership programme where we train graduates on the job.

Even without a formal discovery process, you know your competitor’s every weakness. You know where you are stronger, where they are weaker, and you know how you beat them and when and where you do. You don’t have to fear your competitor, but you must respect them, lest you underestimate them. If you really want to improve your ability to compete and win, study how your competitor views you. Write your competitor’s case against your product, service, and solutions.

Competing on Strengths

We spend a lot of time and energy studying our competitor’s weaknesses. That energy is sometimes better directed at studying our own competitive disadvantages.

• If you were your competitor, what would you say were your weaknesses?
• In what areas is your ability to create value for your dream client limited?
• If you were your competitor, how would you lay out a logical argument against choosing you, your product, your service, or your solution?

This isn’t an exercise designed to make you squirm, though it probably will. It’s designed to make you think about how you sell. It is difficult to compete where your competitor is strong and you are weak. It’s far easier to compete where you are strong and where they are weak.

But, by looking at your offering from your competitor’s viewpoint, you can start to decide how to mitigate your weaknesses.

Mitigating Weaknesses

There is a difference between being weaker in an area and competing where you don’t really compete. If the area where you are weak and your competitor is strong is the fundamental criteria being used to decide, you shouldn’t be competing, you probably should be disqualifying.

The ability to mitigate your weaknesses requires that you lay out a logical case as to why your strengths far outweigh your weaknesses. You can be weaker in some areas and still create far more value than your competitors overall.

• Is there a reason that you are weaker in a certain area? Does focusing less in this area allow you to focus your time, efforts, and energy in an area that is more important to your clients?
• Is the value you can create in this area so limited that even your best effort there doesn’t really produce or contribute much to the results your clients need?
• Is a weak area really something that isn’t primary or fundamental to generating results?
• Do you generate the same result as your competitors by doing something completely different?

If you were your competitor, you would frame your offering to highlight your strengths and to expose your weaknesses. Knowing what your competitors are likely to expose as weaknesses means you can address them thoughtfully and honestly. It means you can be prepared to address them and mitigate the case against you.

Not a Call for Cynicism

If you sell, you need to be honest and know that you, your products, your services, and your solutions have weaknesses. This shouldn’t make you cynical. It should make you thoughtful about how you help your clients, and it should make it easier to compete where you can win.

It should make it easier for you to disqualify yourself when your weak areas make it impossible for you to help a client. If the weak areas cause you to lose, instead of being cynical and complaining (or pulling your punches), you should sell the changes that need to be made within your own organisation. There is no one closer to customers than the sales force, and your feedback can and should shape the company’s future.

1. Keep an open mind
A common mistake that new managers make is to walk into the job with a plan that is one-sided and lacks employee input. Resist the desire to make immediate changes in your department in a show of authority, or you run the risk of damaging morale. While you are most likely to make adjustments and possibly even reassign some of your team’s roles, you should first work to obtain team feedback and, eventually, support.

2. Solicit input from the group
Ask what changes, if any, they consider necessary and the reasons for their recommendations. Remember that some individuals may have been doing their jobs for many years and are likely to have good ideas for improving the group’s cohesion and productivity.

3. Don’t assume, and don’t be a perfectionist
Assume you don’t understand all that’s required of you in your new role. There’s a good chance it’s more complex than you think, and if you go in believing you’ll get it right away, you’ll make a lot more
mistakes than if you approach it as a learning process. Also, some new bosses are so focused on proving themselves that they push people to work late and come in on weekends to get everything perfect. Being a superhero is not really worth wrecking the work-life balance of the whole team.

4. Be willing to back off a little
Get to know your staff. It’s vital that you form strong working relationships with your staff members. As their manager, you play a large role in their career advancement. People appreciate a workplace that makes their professional development a priority.

5. Start off on the right foot
Arrange one-on-one meetings with every person on your team. Before each meeting, do your homework. Review personnel files and evaluate recent performance reviews. Find out if your group has interests or talents that they would like to develop. Decide what you can do to foster such interests and how you can best take advantage of each person’s skills and experience. Set measurable goals and incentives, as well as a method for making sure these objectives are met.

6. Set the tone
Your actions will determine how your team sees you. Your goal is to establish your authority while also becoming worthy of respect. And when that tight deadline does hit and you ask your team to put in extra hours, do you stay late yourself? Will you stand up for your people if a conflict arises with another group, resolve their problems or discuss challenges?

7. Get feedback from your colleagues
Some new managers make the mistake of lowering morale inadvertently or in subtle ways. Like cutting off a team member who is speaking during a meeting. Don’t allow multi-tasking to prevent you from giving your full attention to an employee seeking guidance on a project. Also, don’t be the boss who keeps forgetting to include a particular person on group emails. While these indirect offences may seem minor, they could cause your team to resent your new role.

8. Be prepared for tests
As you establish your leadership, you may find that certain individuals will test your authority by missing deadlines or meetings, for example.

Create rules from the start on how you will deal with such behaviour, as your actions will set the tone for your tenure. Meet with those individuals and explain the impact of such actions. You might point out, for example, that failing to turn in a report by a set date may cause more work for other members of the group who rely on the information. If the employee has normally
been a high performer, try to find out what the problem is, and see if there is a way to help resolve it.

9. Be flexible – and collaborate
As long as you remain open to suggestions, encourage communication and set clear goals and incentives for your new staff, your chances of succeeding in your new position are high. And whatever the size of your business, you need to partner with people across the organisation and be prepared to work with leaders of external organisations and stakeholders.

I was an engineer at Boeing, and I was promoted to supervise other engineers. I had my thoughts about what that supervisory job should be. The engineer assigned to me would prepare his work, and I had to approve it. So I thought that it was really important that it reflect my standards of quality. And 14 drafts later, he walked in and he quit. I said, “Why are you quitting?” He said, “Well, I think you’re a great engineer and I think you’ll be a good supervisor someday, but right now, this is just too much for me to be supervised this tightly.”

Q. What did you learn from that?

It was a gem, because I really thought about why it happened. I realised very early that what I was really being asked to do was to help connect a set of talented people to a bigger goal, a bigger programme and help them move forward to even bigger contributions. That was a different role from what was expected of me as an engineer. That experience stayed with me forever on what it really means to manage and lead.

Q. Can you talk more about that?

The more senior your management position is, the more important it is to connect the organisation or the project to the outside world. You know, how does this fit in with what we’re doing? What is the real goal, the real mission? And it makes you also think about: What business are we in? And how do we pull together to have a comprehensive plan to create whatever we decided to do together? And then, how do you get everybody included, where everybody’s contributing and everybody knows what’s going on?

Q. How do you get everybody to contribute?

I think the most important thing is coming to a shared view about what you’re trying to accomplish– whether you’re a non-profit or a forprofit organisation. What are we? What is our real purpose? And then, how do you include everybody so you know where you are on that plan, so you can work on areas that need special attention. And then everybody gets a chance to participate and feel that accomplishment of participating and contributing.

Q. Looking back over your career, have you learnt other important leadership lessons?

I’ve been very fortunate to be part of projects that are really big and broad. Airplanes are some of the most sophisticated designs in the world, four million parts flying in formation, and it involves hundreds of thousands of people all around the world creating these vehicles. And the same is true now at Ford, with our full product line. So they’re just very big, large, compelling visions, and the biggest thing I’ve found is that the more everybody comes together on the real purpose, the higher order of that, the better. Is the airplane really about an airplane or is it about getting people together around the world so they can find out how more alike they are than different? And is a car about just a driving experience or is it about safe and efficient transportation, and your family, and freedom?

And so the higher the calling, the higher the compelling vision that you can articulate, then the more it pulls everybody in. One of my favourite stories is an analogy where this reporter stops at a construction site and interviews three bricklayers. He asks the first bricklayer, “What are you doing?” And he says, “Well, I’m making a living laying these bricks.” The reporter says: “Oh, that’s great. That’s very noble.” He asks the next bricklayer, “What are you doing?” And he says, “Well, I am practising the profession of bricklaying. I’m going to be the best bricklayer ever.” And the reporter asks the third bricklayer, “What are you doing?” And he says, “I’m developing a cathedral.” There is technical excellence and professionalism, but we all want to contribute to making a cathedral. And the more we feel that and we know what our part in it is, themore I think you can take the team performance to a whole new level of excellence.

Q. What have you learnt to do less of over time?

I guess I’ve moved to a place where I’m really focused on four things. I pay attention to everything, but there are some things that are very unique to what I need to do as the leader. I have to really come through on these. And one of them is this process of connecting what we’re doing to the outside world. I mean, we’re here to create a business of serving customers with the best cars and trucks in the world, so where is the world going? Where is the technology going? Where are the customers going? Where is the competition going?

A second focus for me is: What business are we in? What are we going to focus on? What’s going to be our business? Are we going to have a house of brands of vehicles? Are we going to focus on the blue oval? Are we going to be competitive on quality and cost and fuel efficiency? Are we going to be best in class? So what’s our point of view about the value proposition of our company? The third one that I really focus on is balancing the near term with the longer term. And especially in the environment that we see today, where you absolutely want to keep investing for the future, even though you could invest less and make your business performance look better in the near term. Do we have a plan that works in the near term and also creates value for the long term? And then I really focus on the values and the standards of the organisation. What are the expected behaviours? How do we want
to treat each other? How do we want to act? What do we want to do about transparency? How can we have a safe environment where we really know what’s going on? I’m the one who needs to focus on those four things, because if I do that, the entire team will have a collective point of view and an understanding of all four of those areas.

Q. What’s your best career advice?

Don’t manage your career. Follow your dream and contribute. Think about just exceeding expectations of every job you’re being asked to do. Continually ask for feedback on how it’s going. Ask everybody involved what you can do to do an even better job, and the world will beat down your door trying to ask you to do more and more.

I’ve never laid out a career, and frankly, I’d propose that you really don’t know what a job is until you’re in it. The most important thing is that you are open to really understanding what is expected, and also where you can make the biggest contribution. The more humble you become, and the more honoured you are to serve, the greater your understanding is of what you can do to make a bigger contribution.

Q. Let’s talk about hiring. I’ve just walked into your office. How would you interview me as a job candidate?

Your résumé tells a lot about what you’ve done. I would want to know what you’ve enjoyed about what you’ve done, what areas you feel comfortable in making a contribution right away, what areas have you struggled with, what you really want to do, and, especially, what your strengths are? And between what you’ve done and the way you communicate, I can just look in your eyes and tell a lot.

Q. What about time management — how do you do it?

I guess my answer to that comes from the thought of having one integrated life. So I don’t have separate buckets of my life, like my family life or my personal life or my work life. I just have one integrated schedule, and for as long I can remember, the kids and my wife have had access to my calendar. They all just build into the calendar whenever they need me.

However, the research also showed that because opportunity doesn’t always “come knocking,” those who create opportunities to achieve their goals are most likely to succeed.

Request a raise

According to the survey, more than 45% of people are unhappy with their jobs because they believe they are underpaid. At the same time, less than 50% said they have ever asked for or negotiated a pay increase. Look at what happened to those who did:

• 25% said they got more money than they were expecting
• An additional 38% said they got the raise they were expecting
• 17% got more money, but not as much as they were hoping for
• 5% did not get a raise, but they did get some other type of incentive
• Only 15% got nothing

That means that of those who asked for a raise, 85% at least got something, while 63% got at least as much as they asked for.

Demand a promotion

Another big reason for job dissatisfaction was lack of opportunity for growth, mentioned by 34% of respondents. But few had ever asked. Once again, the research shows that people who believe they are under-appreciated or stuck in their jobs should just ask for the job they want. Here’s what happened to those who did:

• 17% got a new role, and it was a better one than they’d hoped to land
• 42% got the role they asked for

That means 59% of people who requested a promotion got one. In addition, 5% of those who asked for a promotion got new responsibilities instead, helping to move their career forward. So if you’ve never asked, go for it.