How Leaders Learn by David Novak

Author:David Novak [Novak, with Lari Bishop, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
Published: 2024-04-06T00:00:00+00:00

Chapter 16

Round Up on People

Learn to trust in positive intentions

I’m a Theory Y leader all the way.

Back in 1960, Douglas McGregor, a management professor at MIT, described two leadership outlooks on human behavior in his book The Human Side of Enterprise. Those who fell into the Theory X category believed that employees had to be coerced, controlled, and threatened to do good work or take responsibility. Those who fell into Theory Y believed that people were generally creative, ingenious, and ready to take on responsibility, if they were treated accordingly.

I believe in running an organization based on the assumption that 99.9 percent of people want to do good, not bad or even mediocre, work. I trust in their positive intentions.

Active learners understand the power of trust and leverage it to learn more, faster. Trusting in positive intentions helps us overcome our natural defensiveness and listen with an open mind. It helps us overcome our bias against ideas from people we may not see as on our side - which is often just a story we’ve made up about them. When we move beyond that kind of thinking, we’re more collaborative and we get to better action faster.

But that kind of trust doesn’t always come naturally. We’re too much on alert for threats in our environment. We’re too ready to interpret people’s actions through a negative lens, especially when there’s a long-standing issue or conflict. I don’t want you to think I’m naive, and I don’t mean to sound like a Pollyanna. My biggest disappointments in life haven’t been in business results or ideas that flopped - they’ve been in people who have betrayed my trust. But I know that it’s still worth starting from a position of trust.

In 1994, Wayne Calloway, chairman of PepsiCo, asked me if I would want to be president of KFC (I was COO of Pepsi-Cola, the beverage division, at the time). I pretended that I needed some time to talk it over with my family, but I knew I’d say yes. And I knew Wendy would support me in that decision. I couldn’t wait to get started.

When I accepted the job, I got more calls offering condolences than congratulations. Wayne asked me to take the job because I had built a reputation for helping to turn around struggling businesses - and KFC had been struggling under PepsiCo’s ownership. It never achieved its business plan and had had no same-store sales growth for seven straight years. It had become a graveyard for PepsiCo executives. To franchisees, who owned 70 percent of the KFC restaurants, corporate was seen as a bunch of outsiders who didn’t enjoy fried chicken and didn’t believe KFC could beat our competitors. They also held a majority of the marketing votes, which meant they controlled everything from advertising to new products, and they often voted as a bloc - against us. Trust was so frayed at the time that the franchisees were suing us over territorial rights.

I had inherited a business in decline and a broken franchise system waging open warfare with us.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.