One of my ten leadership beliefs is the importance of “everyone wants to succeed, and success is contagious.” I have never in all my life, in any career, in any country, at any time, met a person who tries to fail.  Everyone I have met wants to succeed.  So, the job of the leader is to help people succeed.  A leader’s job is to catch people succeeding, even if the success is a small one, and to use that small success to build a virtuous cycle of ever larger successes.  When I speak, I often will ask the rhetorical question, “Who got up this morning and said I want to go prove I am the world’s biggest failure?”  Never has anyone raised their hand.  Of course, no one purposely tries to fail.

Don’t Manage By Exception

Yet, we as leaders oftentimes spend too much time managing by exception—waiting for something to go wrong before we intervene.  I know as a leader I have managed by exception too often.  Our time is limited.  Does any leader have too much time on their hands?  Of course not.  We are all time-starved.  Especially today, our electronic devices are going off constantly. So, we tend to manage by exception and intervene only when something goes outside the limits that are acceptable.  We even at times systematize this approach with red, yellow, and green stoplight charts.  Yet, my experience is it is easier to improve an organization by making green greener than by turning red to green.  Your organization is already designed to deliver the green.

How An Environment of Contagious Success Begins

As a leader, commit yourself to spending more time catching people doing something well. This will create the virtuous cycle of small task, achievement, small reward that will lead to larger task, achievement, and larger reward.  This virtuous cycle creates a culture of success in an organization, which can become contagious.

This contagiousness dawned on me when I was speaking to a group of P&G leaders, who had a sports-themed event at their offices that day.  I looked into the audience and saw many people wearing the garb of their favorite teams.  What I discovered of course was that the more winning teams had more people wearing their clothes.  It reminded me of an article I read about Nike wanting to renegotiate their contract with Manchester United when soccer star David Beckham left their team.  Jersey sales went down.  People like to be part of a winning team.  The leader’s job is to create this culture of success and attract people to the team.

Letting People Do What They Are Good At

I remember when I was running P&G’s business in Japan.  We decided to test the idea that we would allow employees to voluntarily transfer to other operations within P&G Japan.  I was initially surprised about how the general managers in the organization resisted this change.  They didn’t want employees having the option to opt out of their organization.  They feared giving employees this choice.  I thought it was a good idea since it would lead to better leadership in the organization. In the end we implemented the new policy, and my hypothesis was confirmed.

Reality and Objectivity Drive The Leadership Process

While it is important for the leader to create this culture of success, it is also important for leaders to face reality.  Cheerleader leadership of a business or organization is ineffective.  Leaders need to maintain their objectivity and face reality.  This is true not only when you take over an organization but also throughout your tenure.  Facing reality is oftentimes assisted by the leader surrounding themselves with those who will tell the unvarnished truth to the leader.