Bill Marriott’s Leadership Lesson

By George McQuain

This morning when I read the newspaper, I learned that J.W. “Bill” Marriott, Jr., CEO of Marriott International, is retiring. As the Washington Post said “J.W. Marriott Jr., who built the company his parents started as a District root beer stand [19 seats in 1927] into a global lodging giant, is stepping down as chief executive, ending a storied 39-year run that ushered in a new standard of dependable, middle-class hospitality for travelers around the region, the country and then the world.”

There are many lessons to learn from Bill Marriott, his family and the company they’ve built.

My first job out of college was at Marriott. After several promotions, I became the Manager, Cash Management. In that role I was responsible for Treasury Management Systems, Banking Relationships, Corporate Loan Agreements and managing the company’s $500 million floating-rate debt portfolio. At the time, I was 26 years old. Marriott was doubling in size every two to three years and the company had just passed $1 Billion in annual revenue.

One day I was in a meeting in my office when my assistant interrupted the meeting to tell me that Mr. Marriott was on the phone and that he wanted to speak with me. Given that I was three levels below Mr. Marriott in the reporting structure and this wasn’t an everyday event, I suspended the meeting to take the call. Doing so had a huge impact on my career and the way I dealt with my co-workers because, on that call, Bill Marriott taught me a very, very valuable leadership lesson.

Here is how the call went:

1.     Mr. Marriott started the call by asking how my family was and noted that he had heard that my wife had recently given birth to our first child.

2.     Mr. Marriott then asked me about my decision to award the banking business of a hotel that was about to open to a certain bank. This was before interstate banking in the U.S. and most banking was local or on a state level.

3.     Mr. Marriott went on to tell me that a very important contact of his was the Chairman of a bank in the same city and the very important contact had called him to ask why his bank had not gotten the business. He, in turn, wanted to know why his contact’s bank had not gotten our business.

4.     I explained to Mr. Marriott the business reasons why I had awarded the business to a competitor of his contact’s bank.

5.     I then asked Mr. Marriott if he wanted me to award the business to his contact’s bank, noting that he was the Company’s CEO and that his family’s name appeared on my paycheck.

6.     Mr. Marriott then asked me a question. I quote “George, does the company pay me to do your job or does it pay you to do your job?”

7.     I answered “It pays me to do my job.”

8.     To which, Mr. Marriott responded “And you are doing it very well. George I will call my contact and tell him why his bank didn’t get the business. Thank you for your help. I really appreciate the great work you’re doing.”

Here are the leadership principles I learned from that brief leadership lesson I received from Mr. Marriott:

1.     Know and care about the folks on your team. Make what’s important to them important to you. Note how Mr. Marriott knew about my new son and asked me about how he and my wife were. He had taken the time to learn about me and ask me about something that was important to me.

2.     Ask questions. Note how Mr. Marriott told me the situation and then asked me “why?” He didn’t tell me what to do; he asked me why I did what I did.

3.     Trust the people closest to the situation to do the right thing and show them respect for who they are and what they do. Mr. Marriott listened to my reasoning and trusted my judgment. In keeping with Marriott’s values and culture, he treated me like an adult and respected my abilities.

4.     Say “Thank you”. In every situation where I personally dealt with Mr. Marriott and every time I observed him interacting with others I ALWAYS heard him say “Thank you”.

Mr. Marriott is a great American business leader and one of my role models, a great man who “walks the talk”. I hope you have learned from his simple, but profound, lesson to me in leadership.

Is It Your Job to Fight Fires? Part 2

by George McQuain

Let me start by answering the question asked in the title of last and this week’s blogs. The answer is a resounding “NO”. 

As a manager/leader, if you think that your job is to fight fires, I would ask you to re-orient your thinking. I encourage you to think of your job as maintaining and improving the performance of your team. That entails actively managing your team’s work processes and improving performance standards by actively designing systems, processes and procedures that eliminate problems and errors.

Additionally, if you think that your “problem” is that your employees don’t do their jobs correctly, I would contend that you are mistaken. During my career, I have led at least twelve successful turnarounds where I have helped teams, divisions and companies restructure, reposition, refocus, morph, re-launch and achieve their revenue and profitability targets.  All of these turnarounds required changes in culture and changes in the way business was conducted. In almost all cases, they required execution against a “life or death” time critical plan. In NONE of them was a wholesale staff change required.

In fact, the potential to eliminate problems lies mostly in improving the systems through which work is done, not in changing employees. In study after study, it has been shown that 85% to 90% of problems are caused by the systems (including training) put in place by management and that only 10% to 15% of problems are under an employee’s control.

So, if you want to improve your team’s performance, focus on the systems, processes and procedures and design them to produce great results.

Last week, I talked about measuring and monitoring “Key Input Variables” as a way to focus on early identification and elimination of problems and as the best way to make sure processes lead to great results.

Here are the key questions you need to ask and answer in designing your process:

1.    What are the results my team and I are trying to achieve?

2.    What key inputs will lead to those results?
3.    What do the values of those key inputs need to be to achieve our target results?
4.    How can we measure those key inputs?
5.    What actions need to be taken when our key inputs are not on target?

How do you identify the key inputs?

Key inputs must be objective and specific being either expressed numerically or as having specific attributes. These five questions must have a “yes” answer:

1.    Is it controllable?

2.    Is it measurable?
3.    Can clear, objective standards be established for it?
4.    Is there an individual in direct control and responsible for it?
5.    If controlled, is it likely to have a significant positive effect on the finished product, customer or client relations, productivity, sales, costs, etc.?

The key is to use common sense and to use as much factual data as you can.

The best specific tool to use in identifying key inputs is a Cause and Effect Diagram. The Cause and Effect Diagram can be used to identify:

1.    Causes of Desired Outcomes (preferred for this purpose)—This approach is more positive, forward looking, identifies what to do, proactive, process oriented and plan driven

2.    Causes of Problems—This approach is more negative, looks backward, reactive, inspection oriented and event driven

The Cause and Effect Diagram can be completed by an individual or by a team in a brainstorming session.

Here is a general example.