Surviving the Darkest Days

In my previous blog on the book “American Icon” by Bryce Hoffman, I commented on the leadership style exhibited by Alan Mulally as he led the Ford Motor Company through some of their darkest days.  He exhibited two key characteristics, Humility and Endurance that are hallmarks of great leadership and may have helped him save Ford.

Photo credit: John Spooner, Creative Commons

Dedication to Teamwork

But it may have been his dedication to teamwork that was equally important to the survival of Ford.  The auto industry and Ford in particular were not pillars of teamwork at the top.  While I’ve worked with many great teams within the auto companies, the warring chiefdoms of the larger corporation often seemed to be the culture de jour.

Self-Selection

When Mulally first arrived in Detroit, both the existing leadership team and the outside community (mainly the press) assumed there would be a clean sweep as Alan brought in his trusted team members from his years at Boeing.  But, Mulally surprised them all when he answered one of the first reporters that his team was already in place, meaning the previous team members of Bill Ford’s team.  He commented with a very particular statement that I have shared with many of the leaders that I’ve worked with through the years.  Build the right vision and culture and the people who don’t belong there and won’t work out in the end will self-select out.  Once they realize that you, as a new leader, are truly taking the team or company in a new direction and you endure through all of the setbacks, they’ll either get on board (as Mark Fields did in the book and is now the current CEO of Ford) or they’ll realize they don’t belong and figure out how to save face and move on.

The Tyranny of Competence

This may be the more difficult issue to deal with when creating great teams.  The Tyranny of Competence is a title Chapter in Robert Quinn’s book Deep Change.  Quinn states that “It is fairly easy to find an extraordinarily competent person who plays a particularly powerful role in the organization.”  “The person often argues, ‘The only thing that should matter is how well someone does the job.’”  In Mulally’s case, it happened to be the Chief Financial Officer (CFO).  This was not only a powerful role but a critical role. Hoffman writes of the CFO “[He] had devoted his life to Ford and worked as hard or harder than anyone else in the building to save it.  But he was dividing the company at a time when it needed to be united like never before.  He had to go.”

The Darkest Moment

In this darkest moment, when you would think that you need all of the hard working competency you can find, Mulally decided that teamwork was more important than experience and hardworking competency.  And he acted.  Mulally, was not looking for blind loyalty, he had demonstrated time and time again that he preferred to hear contrary opinions and radical ideas.  But the CFO was making decisions on his own that were contrary to the team decisions and enforcing them in spite of where the team and Mulally thought they should be going.  This was not going to work.  Teamwork was more crucial in the darkest of days.

What have you seen or how hard have you worked at really building team?  A lot gets written about teamwork in companies. What are you actually experiencing?  Share some stories with us.