"The key to surrounding yourself with other leaders is to find the best people you can, then develop them into the best leaders they can be. Great leaders produce other leaders." —John Maxwell in Developing the Leaders Around You

A good friend once asked me to write a speech for the president of her bank on this theme: "Great institutions draw on all the resources of their community."

The speech was a hit—as much for the theme as the content and the delivery.

How can you go wrong with a theme like that?

That's become a mantra for me as a newspaper owner and editor.

I grew up in a male-dominated newspaper industry. But time and common sense have changed that. Women have won their rightful place in our industry. Thank goodness.

Our publisher is female. Our office manager, metro editor and bookkeeper are female. Half our design staff and our entire sales force are female.

I feel blessed that they let me—an aging, over-the-hill male—work here with them.

If we are to produce great newspapers—and profitable ones, too—we must draw on all the resources of our community. I hope you have many talented females on your newspaper staff.

"True leadership must be for the benefit of the followers, not the enrichment of the leaders," Avis chairman Bob Townsend wrote in Up the Organization. "In combat, officers eat last."

As a publisher or newspaper executive, you have only three major responsibilities:

1. Hire the right people and get them in the right jobs on your team.
2. Set a direction based on their strengths.
3. Get out of the way so they can take you where you want to go.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins describes this as "transforming" an organization.

Good-to-great leaders begin the transformation by getting the right people on the bus and the wrong people off—then figuring where to drive the bus.

Getting the wrong people off the bus is just as important as getting the right ones on.

In Selling Retail, John F. Lawhon tells the story of a new general manager who studied the records of his 40 sales people and made a frightening discovery.

Only nine of them were truly productive. He fired the rest—all 31 of them.

Was he heartless? Maybe. But he had something else in mind.

He was concerned about his customers and why sales weren't better.

Believe it or not, his sales did not drop faster than Enron stock. They went up—dramatically.

He recruited, interviewed, handpicked and hired nine sales people to replace the 31 he let go.

Sales doubled. His net profit—despite a recession—reached an all-time high.

The general manager didn't call any of the 31 losers in for a frank talk and give them a month, a week or a day to shape up. Not one more precious customer was going to be wasted on any of them, he decided.

As they left, some cursed him and a few threatened to sue. Yet all 31 of them had the ingredients needed to succeed.

The general manager's sales people were hired and paid to serve the company's most valuable asset—its customers. But after months and even years, most of them had made no effort to improve their professional skills.

"Most had never so much as read a book on selling or attended a sales seminar, had never listened to sales training tapes, had never shopped competitors and weren't even familiar with their own company's products," Lawhon said.

"These people had wasted, harassed, ignored, insulted, even abused more than three-fourths of the company's customers. These same people, while loafing in the company lounge, complained to anyone who would listen about the faults of the company, thus adding disloyalty to their major sin of sloth. And they are going to sue the company? Absolutely incredible," Lawhon said.

Once we have the right people on the bus, we need to mold them as a team.

University of Alabama football coach Bear Bryant—one of the winningest college coaches of all time—knew how to create teams, not just individual stars.

"If anything goes bad, I did it," he said. "If anything goes semi-good, then we did it. If anything goes real good, they did it.

"That's all it takes to get people to win," Bear Bryant said.

In Developing the Leaders Around You John Maxwell writes that great leaders—the ones who are in the top 1%—have one thing in common. "They know that acquiring and keeping good people is a leader's most important task.

The asset that truly appreciates within any organization is people.

Systems become dated. Buildings deteriorate. Machinery wears. But people can grow, develop and become more effective if they have a leader who understands their potential value.

Have you taken an inventory of your people's strengths lately?

Have you gauged their performance to find out if they are among the nine who produced and not the 31 who did not?

Build on their strengths, not their weaknesses.

Drawing on all our resources
©2004, The Bellune Company, Inc.