Week 13: Alan Mulally had the Courage to be Different

The biggest takeaway from this week’s lesson is to have the courage to be different!

When it was first announced that Alan Mulally would take over as Ford, many people wondered if he could succeed by being so different from other automotive executives. I’m now convinced his courage to bring those differences to Ford is exactly what made him succeed.

That’s what this article is about.

In summary, Alan Mulally did a few things that his predecessors could have done, but just had not done.

1. He uncovered untapped or underutilized talent in the company.
2. He built trust through honesty and transparency.
3. He reenergized critical contributors at Ford and inspired them that turnaround was possible.

Before we get into the details, I wanted to share this with you. In most of my posts this year, I’ve shared with you how each lesson has uncovered the ways I’ve sabotaged my own change efforts in the past. It’s been a very humbling experience.

After reading chapters 5 &6 of American Icon this week, I am proud to say that I see some of my natural inclinations and demonstrated behaviors reflected in the things that contributed to Alan Mulally’s success at Ford. That feels really good!

Ok so let’s get into it…

How Mulally uncovered untapped and underutilized talent in the company…and inspired them

In order to bring about a successful change effort, you have to have others to help. Especially in a company as large as Ford, one man could never do it alone.

As leaders, we can’t do things alone.

As an example of how Mulally did it, American Icon tells the story of a Ford engineer, James Morgan, who showed up at Mulally’s office one day with engineering schematics and other evidence that showed Ford’s lack of engineering discipline. Mulally heard Morgan’s ideas to reduce the complexity and put him in charge of the effort.

Two things are notable in this anecdote.

First, think of what had to be true for an engineer at Ford to feel comfortable just walking into the CEO’s office. Mulally would have had to somehow communicate that he had an open door policy and instill enough trust in the workforce for them to believe him and act on it.

He did this by being different.

He stopped people in the hallways, ate in the cafeteria and chatted with the people there, etc. Here’s the brilliant part of what he was doing - he was CREATING STORIES. Of course those people told others in the company about how approachable he was! This helped to scale his reputation and led to this interaction with James Morgan and many others.

Also, Mulally empowered the engineer to help solve the problem. Too often the person who is insightful enough to notice the problem, intelligent enough to solve the problem and courageous enough to voice the concern and offer a suggestion is NOT the person who is given the opportunity to own the implementation. This makes no sense, but I’ve experienced it and seen it happen countless times.

How Alan Mulally built trust through transparency and honesty

So, Mulally has been hired to turn Ford around. In this week’s lesson, we learn how he approaches coming up with his long term plan to accomplish this. Here’s my summary of his formula:

• Find all the problems
• Honestly accept those problems
• Figure out a plan to fix them
• Publicly acknowledge that there are problems and communicate your plan to fix the problems - both internally and externally

That really doesn’t seem hard or even very innovative right? But let’s be honest, how many leaders actually do this? SMH.

Mulally had done a lot of due diligence in understanding the challenges that Ford faced during his recruitment process. However, now he had to learn everything he could.

Before I go on, imagine yourself as CEO of Ford at this moment in time. The company is a hot mess and morale is low. There’s so much to do! When would you have time to read stuff, talk to people and seek out information?

But also, how could you possibly know what to do without doing exactly those things?

Mulally shows us that most executives are wrong.

Most executives focus their time and attention on the wrong things - they don’t spend the time talking to people or reading assessments of their organizations. The previous CEOs of Ford certainly didn’t.

The causes of their dysfunction are becoming apparent, huh?

In addition to talking to as many Ford employees as he could, Mulally:

• spoke with industry experts, financial advisers and veteran journalists
• commissioned studies (and actually read the results)
• read analysts’ reports, newspaper articles and even cartoons that he thought reflected the situation
• read old financial reports, white papers, and internal studies that his predecessors had ignored

So, now he’s very clear of all the problems facing Ford. This empowers him to develop a strategy and plan designed to eradicate those problems and transform Ford.

Although I have to give you some details about the book, I’m trying hard to not make this into a book summary. Therefore, I’ll share the plan in a dropdown below. You can review it if you want or you can trust me that it was a good plan 🙂.

What makes it a good plan is that it identifies all the ways that will be necessary to fix the problems and some of them involve implementation details that will not make everyone happy. That is ok!

If I could go off on a rant for a second, I’ll say that not only are most leaders afraid of making the hard choices that could make others unhappy, those that do are often afraid of being open about it.

Mullaly was neither…

…and that’s why there’s a book about him ha ha.

So, first he reaches out to the whole company in an email. The email is amazingly transparent.

✔️He acknowledges the problems.

✔️He sets the expectations around how to solve them. For example, he says “some very good and loyal people are going to leave this company between now and next summer, and that’s going to be tough on everyone.”

✔️He talks about the things he’s discovered about Ford that provide him optimism that the turnaround can be successful.

He also reaches out to the world - Ford’s suppliers, dealers, investors and the car-buying public. He took a similar approach with them - acknowledged the problems and then inspired them around his plan to solve them.

Wow!

So, what have we learned?

Personally, I’ve learned that my vision of what leadership should be was correct. I will never understand the inclination to pretend like problems don’t exist in an organization when everyone can feel them. I have never been able to see how that could result in things improving, and I’ve never seen things improve.

From this week’s lesson, the following things were reinforced for me. I’m proud to say that I can see myself having done many of them and appreciate the additional perspective on their effectiveness through reading this book.

• Talk to people up, down and across the organization to understand the real deal. From my own experience, I’d also say that if it seems like a leader is trying to funnel you in a certain direction, take that as a sign that you need to look in the opposite direction.
• Be conscious of the fact that people are trying to learn who you are and what you are about. ALL of your actions will contribute to that narrative. Show people who you are and make sure your actions back up your words.
• MAKE THE TIME to learn as much as you can before you settle on a plan for change. You want to be successful and in order to do that, you must gather, internalize and synthesize as much information from as many perspectives as you can.
• Be courageous. Make the hard choices that you believe are right for the business. This might not be easy but if you have done proper due diligence to inform your plan and you have shown your team who you are and started to build their trust, you will have the best chance of success.

I really hope you are enjoying this as much as I am. Thank you for reading!