When I was an area manager in Amazon fulfillment network I worked at a building that was one of the worst in the network. After about a year I put into transfer to another building that was closer to home and everyone I spoke to told me don’t go to that building, its the only building in the network that’s worse than ours. For me, it didn’t really matter, the building was closer to my home and I could save a lot of money on gas and living expenses by transferring to that building. So I made the move and luckily a new general manager had just taken over the building, and he meant business… Before I even transferred over, I got a document with the general manager’s vision for the building. He had lofty goals, he laid out that we were going to be a top 10 building in the network for every metric that mattered, and we would do it by focusing on the basics. He laid out five priorities for each manager, and how they would be held accountable to those priorities. This was something I hadn’t seen on my last building. Although the building was one of the worst at the time, reading through this document got me excited and I was ready to give it everything to try to reach those goals.
The first thing that has to change in a losing organization is the mentality of all the team members. The reason they’re losing is they’ve accepted mediocrity, they don’t hold themselves to a high standard. So first you have to change the self image - we are a winning team and we don’t accept anything less than the best.
I was fortunate enough to be in a position where I could watch the general manager pretty closely. I observed him and paid close attention to how he led his team. I wanted to see if this turnaround was actually possible. On my first week, I had a one-on-one meeting with him and he reiterated the mission in the vision and also made it clear that he was here to support. He had an open door policy and that I could come in and talk to him anytime. I watched the general manager deal with associates and managers in real time, and I also got to talk to people on the other end to see their opinion of the general manager. Now in general, most employees don’t usually have good things to say about their general manager. They employees feel like they’re the ones doing the work and the general manager is just sitting in his or her office dictating commands - they don’t really have understand what its like working on the front line. However, this GM was different. His team all the way down to the front line workers knew that he cared about them and their well being. When a concern was raised he would make sure to address it quickly. The front line workers LOVED him.
He would start checking his emails and the building metrics at 6 AM, be in office by 7, and he didn’t leave until 6pm at the very least. Most days ended up being longer than that. For context, most general managers follow the strict 9 to 5 schedule - in at 9 and out by 5. The expectation was that you had to work hard to be successful in this org, and he modeled hard work for everyone.
I watched him dig deep into metrics to understand the root cause. If you didn’t have a good answer for why something was happening, he would make it your priority to keep digging deeper until you found the root cause. You couldn’t BS your way through things in this org, you had to actually be working on value added things. He had one of the best BS filters I have ever seen, and that’s because he actually knew what was going on in his operation. He knew the numbers, processes, and people inside and out. The expectation was that you also own your area/business. I saw him listen to his leaders updates and question them to make them think at a higher level, to look around corners, to get ahead of any potential issues that may arise.
I watched in meetings where if there was a lapse in upholding a safety standard, he would turn red and we wouldn’t discuss anything else in the entire meeting. Safety was his number one priority, and he did not take it lightly.
I watched as many many of the people that were a part of the building’s launch quickly started to leave the building for other opportunities. These were people that felt like they deserved to move up solely based on tenure - they had been at the building for the longest. This wasn’t going to fly with the general manager. He made it clear that merit wins out in this organization. He gave clear guidelines on what the expectations were for getting promoted for each level, and he instructed all managers to give their direct reports a timeline of when they can expect to be promoted if they met the standard. Of course, there were some people that stayed and advanced on merit, but there was a a lot of hiring the had to happen to get the building fully staffed and in position to be a top 10 building.
I watched him turn an organization that had a losing mindset and had gotten content with being the bottom of the network to an organization that was battling with the best. In his book, The Score Takes Care of Itself, Bill Walsh talks about the journey of taking over the San Francisco 49ers and taking them from the worst team in the league to win three Super Bowls. This journey didn’t happen overnight. Bill mentions that the first thing he had to fix was the peoples was his teams perception of themselves - their self image. They had to see themselves as winners. They had to respect the 49ers organization, and he had to instill that in them. They had to act like winners before they became winners. It was no different at our building, we didn’t get to top 10 in Q1, Q2, or even, Q3. It took us a full year of working day in and day out to finally improve to the level of being top 10 in the network.
Before you see meaningful change in whatever domain you’re looking for change and you first have to deserve that change. If you’re a loser, chances are your actions are not actions of winners.