When You Need Your People
to Be on Board

May 2010 By Geoff Loftus

Lessons on management and motivation from D-Day Inc. and elsewhere.

GEOFF LOFTUS is former managing editor of Across the Board, this magazine’s predecessor, and author of Lead Like Ike: Ten Business Strategies From the CEO of D-Day (Thomas Nelson), from which this article is adapted. He blogs at http://geoffloftus.wordpress.com.

In the early hours of the morning of June 5, 1944, more than 150,000 men in more than 5,000 ships and 11,000 airplanes waited. Around the world, the president of the United States, Franklin D. Roosevelt; the prime minister of the United Kingdom, Winston Churchill; and the absolute leader of the Soviet Union, Josef Stalin, also waited. In Berlin, Adolf Hitler watched and wondered; and along the northern shores of France, the German Army was ready with miles of barbed wire, machine-gun nests, and artillery emplacements. The occupied nations of Europe and millions of Jews imprisoned in death camps waited, desperately hoping.

The fate of the Western world hinged on the decision of one man—living in a small trailer, drinking too much coffee, smoking too many cigarettes, sleeping too little.

He had already decided to postpone the project, called Operation Overlord, from May to June. Only twenty-four hours earlier, he had decided to postpone again, for a day. And he had already decided that it was necessary to send some of his very best young men into what one of his commanders described as “futile slaughter.”

But as we all know today, Dwight Eisenhower made the decision, and on June 6 those young men faced the possibility of slaughter and emerged victorious. How did Ike motivate and manage his people under such extreme pressure?

Even When It’s Not Life-or-Death
OK, when you get into the topic of motivating people, you’re getting into the mushy stuff. What’s the ROI on motivating people? How do you measure it? In tough times, shouldn’t collecting a paycheck be motivation enough? I’ve had the dubious pleasure of working for organizations that had that attitude, and I can tell you from personal experience that it’s not in the company’s best interests to take that kind of position with its people. In companies that don’t care about motivation, workers right on up through middle management routinely cut corners on the quality of jobs, provide poorer customer service, spend more time on personal phone calls and at longer lunches, and, worst of all, escape from the dreariness of their jobs for hours at a time on the Internet. Believe me, no matter how closely you monitor people, there are plenty of avenues available to pass the time instead of working hard. And if you spend all your time monitoring your people to ensure they do their jobs, when will you have the time to do your own? To coin a phrase: An ounce of motivation is worth a pound of monitoring.

Issuing corporate communiqués that extol your people as your organization’s number-one resource is not enough. You have to mean what you say right through to your bones. Every company says that its people are important. Most of them don’t act as if they believe their own verbiage—probably because they don’t.

At one point in my life, many years ago, I worked for a very large professional-services firm. The organization made a large number of claims about how well it treated its people. The compensation was pretty good, and the benefits weren’t bad at all. But underneath the policies, the place always struck me as soulless. One of my neighbors was a partner at the company, and we commuted together once in a while. One morning, our conversation turned to this topic, and he said something to the effect that all of this “people stuff” was pointless.

I looked at him long and hard and said, “If you could make money without having to have all these people, you would, wouldn’t you?”

He didn’t hesitate: “Absolutely.”

People were just overhead costs to him. No wonder the firm had no soul.

Dwight Eisenhower honestly felt that “D-Day Inc.” had to be a people-first organization. He was asking for a level of sacrifice in job performance that, fortunately, has no equal outside the military or emergency responders such as the police and firefighters. But modern managers shouldn’t dismiss Ike’s example because of the life-or-death nature of his company’s challenge. Corporations are faced with a lesser-but-still-intense challenge: good life or bad life. It would be great if corporations chose the good life for their people for altruistic reasons, but they can choose the good life and be sincere for commercial reasons. From my personal experience, workers who are treated better seem to be more productive. Workers who are well treated are much more likely to rise to special challenges that require longer hours of work or demand the dazzling new idea for a product or service.

But don’t listen to me—look at Gen. Eisenhower. He could have taken the attitude that his forces should do the best they could because it gave them a better chance of survival. Why the heck should he worry about their morale or waste time motivating them? But he did. He made sure that enlisted men got as much time on leave as officers. He sent his “executives” on leave before they burned out from stress and fatigue. He worried about the little things, like making sure that enlisted men could get access to transportation for recreational activities as easily as officers, and that captured wine was distributed equally across the board. And he pressed his executives to be aggressive because he was convinced that aggressive action would save more of his people’s lives in the end.

enry Ford was a major innovator in employee benefits: Famously, he wanted his assembly-line workers paid enough that, over time, they could afford to buy one of the cars they made. He created his own consumer class—a real benefit for the workers, since they could enjoy more pay and ride in a new Ford car, and a benefit for the company, since it would sell more cars and have happier workers. (Ford later struggled bitterly with unions, but his early attitude on workers’ compensation was truly enlightened.)

Ike also motivated people through example. In his earliest days as CEO of D-Day Inc., he insisted that his executives present a cheerful, optimistic face to the world. That’s exactly what he did throughout the war. In December 1944, at the battle conference during the Battle of the Bulge, Eisenhower told those present that he didn’t want to see any glum faces. In the war’s final months, Ike was in a great deal of pain: He had injured a knee while pushing his small scout plane above a beachfront waterline—imagine a modern CEO even carrying his own suitcase, never mind pushing the plane—and it ached constantly. He had a cyst on his back that would require surgery. And, naturally enough for a man under tremendous stress who was getting too little exercise, he was exhausted a great deal of the time. However, only Ike’s inner circle was aware of his pain and fatigue. Whenever he was dealing with his “board,” his executive team at D-Day Inc., his workforce, or the press, he exuded energy and cheer. The minute he was alone, he slumped in his seat, depleted by the effort.

In April 1944, about two months before D-Day, Eisenhower described the mood at Allied headquarters in a letter to a friend in Washington: “This time, because of the stakes involved, the atmosphere is probably more electric than ever before. . . . A sense of humor and a great faith, or else a complete lack of imagination, are essential to sanity.”

The point: It’s not enough to tell people to cheer up or have a good attitude—you have to have it yourself. And project it. Look at the enthusiasm of Wendy’s founder, the late Dave Thomas. Or Ben & Jerry’s Ice Cream founders, Ben Cohen and Jerry Greenfield, who tied their sense of fun to corporate good deeds and a quality product.

In Search of Top Talent
There’s an old saying when economic times get tough, and executives have to take harsh action to save their companies: “It’s not personal—it’s business.” Well, when it comes to managing people, it is personal and it is business. When it comes to talent, intelligence, attitude, and ambition, all people are not created equal. (Wouldn’t life and work be boring if we were all Stepford employees and managers?) But the differences in those personal attributes can present a real challenge to a manager.

Eisenhower excelled at putting aside his personal feelings toward someone and working with them as a teammate. Several of the British executives who were originally assigned to his staff at D-Day Inc. were placed there by Winston Churchill and other board members in a deliberate attempt to make sure that the affable but supposedly non-strategic Ike didn’t mess up. Eisenhower was well aware of the reason for their assignments, but he ignored that reason and treated his British deputies respectfully as colleagues and often as friends. Men like Air Chief Marshal Sir Arthur Tedder and Gen. Sir Harold Alexander quickly became admirers and loyal lieutenants of Ike’s.

Another area in which Eisenhower excelled was spotting and promoting talent, regardless of seniority. He jumped Gen. Omar Bradley past men who were Bradley’s seniors and even assigned the difficult Gen. George Patton to serve under him. Bradley turned out to be the war’s finest field executive and was honored as such by, in 1950, becoming the fifth and last soldier to be given five-star rank, as General of the Army. (George Marshall, the U.S. Army’s top executive throughout World War II, had done the same with Eisenhower, jumping him past senior men to the CEO spot at D-Day Inc.)

In 1984, Barry Diller resigned as chairman of Paramount Pictures. The studio’s powers that be passed over Michael Eisner, then president and CEO, for Diller’s job at the top. The folks at the Walt Disney Co. knew talent when they saw it and offered Eisner, just 42, the position of CEO and chairman. Disney had been wandering in the Hollywood wilderness since the death of its founder and namesake; there was an occasional hit movie, and the theme parks continued to bump along successfully if unimpressively. Eisner changed all that. He lured Jeffrey Katzenberg from Paramount, and the pair revitalized Disney animation with a string of huge hits: The Little Mermaid, Beauty and the Beast (the first of only two animated films ever nominated for the Best Picture Oscar), Aladdin, and The Lion King.

A string of comedies and thrillers from the Touchstone and Hollywood Pictures brands reached adult audiences, with Down and Out in Beverly Hills, Ruthless People, and Stakeout among them. The company created the Disney Cruise Line and expanded and improved the theme parks. Merchandising took off, thanks in large part to the new animated successes. By the time Eisner left the company twenty-one years later, its market capitalization had grown from about $3 billion to $60 billion. Kudos to the Disney board in 1984 for seeing the potential in a guy his previous employer had passed over.

Oil and Water
In returning to Eisenhower’s people management, it’s impossible to avoid the two prima donnas, Patton and Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery. Both were difficult but clearly capable of making substantial contributions. Ike treated them with a combination of patience, support, discipline, and threats. His style worked with Patton, who performed superbly from the time he took command of Third Army in France until he led it deep into Germany.

Monty, on the other hand, never got Eisenhower’s point, never changed in his behavior, and continued to under-deliver throughout the war. Ike couldn’t just fire Monty the way he could Patton—his board had to approve it. Because firing the man was not in his power, when Eisenhower finally resorted to threats with Monty, he was indirect about them. Ike’s mistake with Monty was in trying so hard to make their relationship work for so long. In early 1945, he finally froze Monty out, speaking to him as little as possible and as tersely as possible. The positive was that Eisenhower recognized the value that both men brought to the organization, put aside his own feelings, and did whatever he could to utilize their value.

In the late 1970s, I worked for Fairchild Publications, the publisher of Women’s Wear Daily, among other publications. My boss was the business manager of a group of trade newspapers, a woman named Mary Zaccardo, known to one and all as “Mary Z.” The fact that Mary was the business manager of this approximately $5 million-a-year group spoke to the fact that her boss had recognized talent when he saw it and promoted it when he had the chance. Mary had a commercial diploma from a New York City high school and no college degree. But she understood numbers and budgeting better than many an Ivy League MBA, and she did a terrific job running the place on a day-to-day basis.

When a new, niche publication was being created, the group was in search of an editor. Mary lobbied for one of the women reporters on an existing publication in the group. The two women didn’t get along at all—it was an oil-and-water situation. They had been known to argue with zest. But Mary believed the reporter was the right person for the editor’s job and pushed her for the position. The boss of the group, as he usually did, took Mary’s advice, and the reporter became the editor of the new publication. She ran the magazine very well, and it raked in additional advertising revenues for several years for Fairchild. All because Mary’s boss had recognized Mary’s talent and ignored her lack of a degree, and because Mary put aside her personal feelings to push the right candidate for a job.

o what’s the answer to the question we started with: How did Gen. Eisenhower motivate and manage his people under such extreme pressure? He did it pretty darn well. He made sure that all of his people received the same kind of benefits in terms of vacation, recreational travel, and captured luxuries such as wine. At one point during the war, Ike threw a general out of the luxurious villa he was using as his personal residence—and converted it to a rehab and rest home for wounded soldiers. Henry Ford demonstrated similar care when he paid his workers well enough to enable them to become members of the consumer class.

In addition to ensuring the same kind of care for all his forces, Eisenhower ran a meritocracy. Want to inspire your troops? Make sure that everyone knows that performance will be rewarded, that talent will be recognized and promoted. Ike jumped past the Army’s seniority system to make Omar Bradley the top American ground commander in Europe. Disney hired a rival studio’s discard when it made Michael Eisner CEO. My old boss Mary Z never worried about her credentials—she just did her job the best way she could, with highly profitable results for the entire company.

Take care of your workforce, recognize merit, and succeed at motivating and managing your people, even under extreme pressure. It’s not easy, but it’s very doable. End