Ep 675 | The Hidden Advantage of Hands-On Leaders

Thank you for joining me today. It's Brian Gubernick, and welcome to the No Days Off podcast, where we believe that every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. As I mentioned just the other day on an episode, I have gone deep into the Harvard Business Review online, reading articles online, in the magazine, and I still get it every other month when it comes. I just love the magazine and there's a lot of great topics, whether you're running a large corporation or you're running a sales team. There's a lot of applicable guidance in there. And one, one particular topic that, that caught my eye was this idea or this, this support or research around the hands-on leader. See, there's this myth of the big picture leader. We've been taught that great leaders think big and delegate the rest, that a leader's job or CEO's job is to stay out of the weeds. The CEO's job is just to set vision and strategy and goals and then let others handle the execution. Even Peter Drucker, the famed researcher and individual who's kind of known for talking around management and leadership, even Peter Drucker once said, "The executive is not supposed to be a handyman." He's supposed to be a builder. Business schools echo that. They tell new CEOs, stop acting like COOs, operations people. Get out of the day-to-day, focus on the what and not the how. But what if the most successful leaders in the world all rejected that idea? What if their success wasn't in spite of being hands-on, but because of it? Well, the article I read studied 4 individuals at 4 major companies, Jeff Bezos at Amazon, Larry Culp at a company called Danaher, Eric Engstrom at an information company called Relax, and Eiji Toyoda at the company Toyota. When they studied these 4 companies, they found that these leaders in the company shared a pattern, that each leader built their business not just around what to achieve, but around how the work gets done. These individuals weren't micromanaging, they were system building. They weren't inserting themselves into every decision, they were creating frameworks so that everyone else could make better decisions. These leaders didn't meddle, they coached. They didn't override, they elevated. They didn't hoard decisions, they taught others how to decide. And the result, these organizations They didn't depend necessarily on the CEO being in the room because the method was built into the culture. At RELAX, the CEO, Eric, he turned a 200-year-old publisher once predicted to die in the internet age into the best-performing stock in the FTSE 100 history. How did he do that? He did it by drilling one question into every employee. He was asking, how does the customer measure value and how do we know? That was the question he'd ask. How does the customer measure value and how do we know? See, most companies track metrics that show how customers benefit the company through retention or lifetime value or transaction size. But Eric flipped it. His teams track how the company benefits the customer. Now, Bezos did the same thing at Amazon. He didn't just claim low prices, he built a bot to scrape thousands of competitors every day and just automatically was repricing products to make sure that they were staying the lowest. He didn't talk— he didn't just talk about fast shipping. He measured down to the second how long each package took from the click on the computer to the doorstep. When the CEO shows obsession with customer outcomes, not just company outcomes, that obsession tends to spread. It becomes cultural. It creates mission clarity. So, these CEOs obsessed over customer-defined metrics. Little different than what a lot of CEOs do. Next, these CEOs architected the way work gets done. By 2003, Amazon was already pretty massive. It was huge. And it was actually pretty slow. Employees described it as a tectonic plate and not an F-16. Bezos responded by redesigning how work happened. He created these small, independent, what he called two-pizza teams. He banned PowerPoint decks in favor of 6-page narrative memos. And that's because he wanted deep thinking, not these bullet point presentations. He demanded vigorous debate in meetings. He treated decisions as two-way doors, meaning that most choices can be reversed. So move fast and experiment. This wasn't bureaucracy, it was architecture. He didn't just change culture, he built systems that empowered decision-making closer to the front lines. I think that's the core difference between micromanaging and coaching. Micromanagers control outcomes. But hands-on leaders like Bezos design environments where others can win. At Danaher, you know, there, there was a concept Larry Culp deployed there. He built one of the most admired operating cultures in the world. And the way he did it, every year 100 executives would fly in from around the globe for a week-long boot camp. They didn't just sit in lectures though, they would fix real problems. Culp said that we force division presidents to develop a command of the how so that they can teach the how. Don't just say, go do that. Say, come do it with me. And that was Larry Culp's approach. So when Danaher acquires a company, the new leaders spend 2 months learning the Danaher business system. The voice of the customer, the value stream mapping, the problem solving. And when Cope went over to GE, he did the same thing. He led from the front lines. He's quoted as saying, "The best leaders don't outgrow the trenches. The real fun is getting your hands dirty." So hands-on leadership isn't about proximity to tasks, it's about proximity to learning. And when a leader models curiosity, teaching starts to become contagious. At Toyota, Toyoda with a D. The company's Toyota with the T, but Toyoda, the leader, with a D. He built a culture where every decision is an experiment. Experimentation became a way of life. From the factory workers to the executives, everyone had the opportunity to test hypothesis. Right? Test the hypothesis, not just a hunch. So they don't chase transformations. They practiced kaizen. And kaizen is a function of continuous improvement. And they would also have this practice of self-reflection. So, when the CEO Toyoda wanted to know if the company Toyota could succeed manufacturing in the US, he didn't just write a white paper on it, he ran an experiment. He reopened a shuttered GM plant that was in California. And guess what? It worked. And that's actually how Toyota Kentucky was born. At Toyota, even CEOs test their ideas. The decisions are made by evidence and not by rank. And that's why hands-on leader aren't— hands-on leaders aren't seen as micromanagers. They're seen as learners. At Relax, the CEO Engstrom there had a mantra that was a pretty simple one. He said, better, faster, cheaper every year forever. Better, faster, cheaper, every year, forever. That was not a slogan. That was a system that he created. Every team had to translate that phrase into measurable improvement, which meant shorter turnaround times, higher fraud detection, better client insight. At Toyota, he refused to say, "The problem is solved." Instead, they would say, "The problem is managed," because every fix can be improved. Bezos would say failure and invention are inseparable twins. Culp at Danaher built daily improvement into the company's heartbeat. Cadences like review cadences, leadership rotations, more of these boot camps I was describing earlier. These leaders, they don't do transformation. What they do is they avoid the need for transformation by never letting the system go stale. In order for that to happen, they had to be hands-on. Now, most leaders struggle copying this because there's this, this paradox. These systems aren't secret. Toyota opens its factories to the public. Bezos publishes his playbook in his shareholder letters. Kolpe even teaches his method at Harvard. And yet few companies ever replicate their success. Why is this? Well, I think it's because there isn't a toolkit. It's actually an identity shift. Most leaders— here's the crux of what we're talking about here today— most leaders were trained to stay above the fray. Again, cast vision, set strategy, set goals. They were trained to stay above the fray. But the hands-on leaders like I'm describing here have the discipline to move between altitude and detail, to zoom in without getting lost and zoom out without losing relevance. They don't dabble in the details. They enter with purpose, and they enter to teach or to model or to refine. I think that's why this style can't be faked. It's not a tactic. It's actually a way of being. So let's put what I'm talking about to work. Okay, here's your action item. I want you to ask yourself, do I lead the work or do I just review the work? Do I lead the work or do I just review the work? Pick an area of your business. Maybe it's sales calls or hiring interviews or something in the transactional details and spend a week inside the how. Don't correct people. I just want you to observe and I want you to ask, ask some questions. Things like, hey, what slows us down here? Or where does the customer actually feel value? Or how can I teach a better system instead of giving a better answer? At the end of this exercise, debrief with your team and ask, what did we learn from doing this together? That's how you become a system builder and not just this general oversight or supervisor. So as we wrap up, I want you to recognize the best leaders aren't above the work. They're actually inside it. They're teaching it, refining it, and elevating everyone around them. When you care as much about how the work gets done as you do about what gets done, you stop running a company and you start building one that can actually run without you. That's all we have for you today, the No Days Off podcast. Thank you so much for listening. And remember, every single day brings a new opportunity to get better. So let's get after it.