Page 231 - The extraordinary leader

208 • The Extraordinary Leader

Such a policy works when there is an unlimited supply of people seeking
to work for an organization, because of its prestige, its high compensation, or
some other factor. Elite universities practice this with junior faculty.
However, the time has come to seriously challenge the wisdom of this
policy. Turnover is costly. Good people are hard to find and expensive to
develop. The impact of this policy has never been fully measured.
Terminating poor performers who refuse to work hard and tenaciously is
clearly the right thing to do, but arbitrarily terminating the bottom 10 to
20 percent of the workforce each year is not the most enlightened policy.
Harsh treatment of people is no longer acceptable. As the late Andrall Pearson
noted, “People have so many more options than they used to. They can
leave—and you can’t find more talent just by turning over the next log. Sec-
ond, that kind of treatment demoralizes people.” 12
The Marines, and other organizations, have demonstrated that you can
work hard to have everyone succeed. Weeding out the bottom 10 percent is
not the most effective way to achieve a highly productive workforce.
Diversity Should Be Encouraged, Not Discouraged. Large corporations
develop criteria for selecting future executives. This usually involves an analy-
sis of the competencies displayed by the current executive group, so new peo-
ple are chosen exactly in their image. This process screens out the maverick,
innovative person who does not fit the mold, but who may be exactly what
the organization needs. Indeed, Clayton Christensen, in his highly applauded
book, The Innovator’s Dilemma, has noted that the decline of so many large
organizations may be attributed to the inbred nature of their leadership and
the formulaic approach they took to running the institution. “Good manage-
ment was the most powerful reason [these leading firms] failed to stay atop
their industries. Precisely because these firms listened to their customers,
invested aggressively in technologies that would provide their customers more
and better products of the sort they wanted, and because they carefully stud-
ied market trends and systematically allocated investment capital to innova-
tions that promised the best returns, they lost positions of leadership.” 13
Everyone Should Be Trained to Be an Effective Leader. Social scientists
and management experts have long argued that seldom was one person the
leader and everyone else a follower. Indeed, leadership is a function or set of
behaviors that often gets passed around in a group. The person with the lofti-
est title and supposed power is no longer the one with all the answers and is
seldom the one to define the strategy as a solo performance. Given the