The Intangible Excuse

A friend called me late one Friday evening more than a decade ago. At that point in my career, I would have let any other name go to voicemail. I was working 50 to 60 hours per week in my full time role as a safety and human resource manager and every bit as much in the business Cindy and I had started a year or two prior. It had to be serious for him to be calling me at that time on a Friday. I won’t share the full story here since I’ve done so in detail previously, but one of the comments he made during that call had a direct impact on me writing What’s Killing Your Profitability? several years later. After explaining a tough conversation he had earlier in the day with the board of directors at the company where he served as CEO, a conversation that challenged him to build better relationships with the executive team members reporting to him, he told me: “I don’t have time for that touchy-feely stuff, they’re paying me to get results.”

Very early in my career, I bid on and accepted a position facilitating a behavior-based safety process in a large manufacturing facility similar to the one where Cindy worked, where they measured the air. The human resources manager who headed up our department focused on measurable results. While that wasn’t an odd focus for the parts fabrication department I started in, it was different in an initiative so tied to prevention; how do you measure injuries that don’t happen? Even in my mid-twenties and being new to that role, he never allowed me to use the intangible excuse. I fell short of his expectations more than I care to admit, but it taught me to do everything in my power to track exactly how anything I worked to implement (positively) impacted the departments we supported. Showing an increase in productivity and profitability was expected for me to remain employed.

During the two decades I worked directly in safety and human resources, I developed a strong intuition for what increased productivity and profitability, and I developed a keen eye for what cut directly into both. That skill set served me well but it wasn’t until I started the manuscript for What’s Killing Your Profitability? that I dedicated real time into finding data that backed what I had experienced. I could feel the difference when I worked with actively engaged employees. In “The Things They Do For Love”, Leigh Buchanan provided the hard statistics behind that: “Increased commitment can lead to a 57% improvement in discretionary effort... That greater effort produces, on average, a 20% individual performance improvement.” In a HuffPost Canada article, Gerard Seijts detailed a Wells Fargo class action suit - one that hit very close to home since it cost me and Cindy around $10,000 at a time when we were so broke we could barely pay attention. A paragraph in that article opened by sharing, “Failing to [assess] leadership character can clearly be expensive,” and went on to cite nearly $10 BILLION in total losses. One from Forbes.com called “Leadership and What It’s Costing Your Business” put it this way: “When you have poor leadership in management positions, it affects not only the morale of your business and the productivity of your team but also your bottom line in your business.”

Leadership was never intangible. It has ALWAYS been a line item; most organizations just kept filing it somewhere else. Thank God my HR manager pushed me to pay attention for so many years, long before I even had a concept for why productivity and profitability mattered so much. Even more than the Friday evening call with my CEO-friend, that experience provided me with the foundation for writing my first book. The case that people drive profit is already made and already sourced. What has been missing is not the argument - it’s the instrument. Before we get to the instrument, Cindy’s going to show you what that gap looks like inside a single building. Now, though, I’ll challenge you to find one number in your own business you have privately blamed on “the market” or “the workforce” this year. Ask what a leadership explanation for it would look like.