Put Your People First

Last week I attended a Leadership conference focussed on the qualities needed for the leaders of tomorrow. Many of those qualities are clearly very different from those expected in the past, as wonderfully illustrated by the report “Go Where There Be Dragons”, prepared and presented there by Russell Morris of the Conference Board.

Still, it did get me to thinking about how the greatest of leaders have certain key qualities that will stand the test of time, no matter whether now, in the past or in the future. To me, with a large part of my career spent in the hospitality industry where this proved critical to sucess, one of those keys is :

“Put Your People First“.

To illustrate, I’ll go back over 100 years to someone who showed this quality as strongly as any leader in history, and to another leader whose example if more current, but no less timeless.

Sir Ernest Shackleton lead the 1907-09 Nimrod Expedition, which was to be the first to make a successful journey to the South Pole. Despite achieving certain first on the way, Shackleton and team made it to within 97 miles of the Pole before he made the tough decision to turn back. By declining what would have been a suicidal race to glory, and choosing instead to preserve the lives of his men, Shackleton not only survived to carry out future exploits but proved himself a leader that the same men would gladly follow through any adversity.

A few years later, Shackleton was planning the 1914-16 Endurance Expedition, and this advertisement was placed (or so legend has it!) :

“MEN WANTED: FOR HAZARDOUS JOURNEY. SMALL WAGES, BITTER COLD, LONG MONTHS OF COMPLETE DARKNESS, CONSTANT DANGER, SAFE RETURN DOUBTFUL. HONOUR AND RECOGNITION IN CASE OF SUCCESS.”

In part, this was certainly due to having the right people for the job, and the astonishing recruitment ad above was bound to attract adventurers of the right calibre. However, by the time Shackleton was looking for men for that expedition, he was already known as a man that people would follow, quite literally, to the ends of the Earth.

“On many polar expeditions of that period men did not survive, precisely because they and their leaders succumbed to their baser instincts of greed, self-promotion and pessimism, and thereby insured their own destruction. We should view Shackleton’s men as they viewed themselves: ordinary men in extraordinary circumstances led by a humane and gifted leader who brought out the best in them. We are all capable of being our best selves in times of crisis. To think otherwise is to doom ourselves to failure before we begin.” - Margot Morrell (author of Shackleton’s Way, very much worth a read, but a quick recap of that expediation may also be found here ).

Shackleton was an amazing leader who one may think of in the “command and control” mould that is now widely recognised to be a broken model.

I would argue instead that his leadership qualities were in fact those of the leaders we need to look to now. From putting his people first, to being flexible in the face of new challenges, to assessing risk and knowing when to take a risk and when to pass. These are all qualities of leaders of the future.

Now, to one more modern example, but another clear case of putting people first. Herb Kelleher of SouthWest Airlines was legendary for his focus on his employees. As he told Fortune in 2001 : “You have to treat your employees like customers. When you treat them right, then they will treat your outside customers right. That has been a powerful competitive weapon for us.” As Kelleher stepped down in 2008, that approach didn’t change, as he told Des Griffin. “We’ve never had layoffs. We could have made more money if we furloughed people. But we don’t do that. And we honor them constantly. Our people know that if they are sick, we will take care of them. If there are occasions or grief or joy, we will be there with them. They know that we value them as people, not just cogs in a machine.”

Most people come to work either for the Carrot (the pay)or the Stick (because they have to). The best organisations though, have leadership that seeks to create a culture and an organisation where people come to work simply because they want to. Motivation is far more powerful than any Carrot or Stick.