May 10, 2021
Hire People Bigger Than You To Create A Company of Giants
Giants some in various forms, shapes, sizes. There is the Jolly Green Giant, there are the New York Giants. Jack and the Beanstalk Giant. Godzilla. Andre the Giant. San Francisco Giants. Giant Bicycles. Giant Food stores.
Lots of things called and named giants.
Companies that experience gigantic growth often have a few common denominators, one of which is cultivating a culture of empowerment, autonomy, and fortitude — one in which managers and executives are encouraged to hire people better than them.
Short and sweet, one of the gems from genius David Ogilvy:
When you are appointed to head an office in the Ogilvy & Mather chain, I send you one of these Russian dolls. Inside the smallest you will find this message: ‘If each of us hires people who are smaller than we are, we shall become a company of dwarfs, but if each of us hires people who are bigger than we are, Ogilvy & Mather will become a company of giants.’
Fear seldom leads to positive results within companies, especially during turbulent times such as merger, acquisition, or integration. What Ogilvy was trying to teach us with the humble nested matryoshka doll, was that developing people doesn’t happen, it’s no accident, and whether the organization grows or withers is function of it’s leadership’s ability to cultivate, motivate, incentivize, and harmonize.
Shadow of the Leader is a real factor, and organizational culture, according to greats like Peter Drucker (“Culture eats strategy for breakfast”), Jack Welch (“Culture trumps Strategy”), Lee Iacocca (“Lead, Follow or Get Out of the Way”) and others, can leverage or undermine the best intended strategic plans, new technologies, or high caliber managers.
The nexus of growing the next levels of managers is a mix of empowerment, challenge, opportunity, but most of all, using execution as a tool to create results and motivate people. Organizations often fail when their leaders, owners, or managers stop using tools and start being them.
The funny thing about giants is that they are challenging to move. In Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians find it a challenge to move the fallen giant, until they all decide to pull in the same direction. That can’t happen without cogent management execution, and clear directives. Absent the fear of competing in the workplace, employees need to understand they get further together than alone. One of the pearls of wisdom I heard growing up was, better to eat together than starve alone.
In Gulliver’s Travels, the Lilliputians find it a challenge to move the fallen giant, until they all decide to pull in the same direction.
Group human behavior is fascinating and there are many HR experts who know it best — what we know at our firm is how to maximize work structures to run organizations. Shadow of the Leader was first studied in business organizations and commented on in Larry Senn’s 1970 doctoral dissertation. Senn’s dissertation was the first systematic study of the concept of corporate culture and its central finding was that organizations become shadows of their leaders. It was popularized in leadership workshops and speeches in the mid-1970s when Larry Senn founded Senn-Delaney Leadership to work with top leaders and their teams to shape organizational culture.
So, what is the culture of the organization you work for and how does it develop it’s leaders?
Recommended reading here, in addition to anything from David Ogilvy, Jim Collins, or Tom Peters, are In the Eye of the Storm: Re engineering Corporate Culture by John Childress and Larry Senn, Winning Teams — Winning Cultures by Larry Senn and Jim Hart, Gino Wickman’s Traction, and Hammer and Champy’s brilliant Reengineering the Corporation.
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Sources: WikiPedia, Ogilvy & Mather, “When Advertising Tried Harder” and Winning Cultures by Larry Senn and Jim Hart.
Copyright, 2021, QORVAL Partners, LLC and/or Paul Fioravanti, MBA, MPA, CTP. No part of this article may be reproduced, shared or distributed or posted in any form without the express written consent of the author. All rights reserved.
