Business guru Thayer aids CEOs
Last week, this column focused on the meteoric success of Johnsonville Sausage LLC and CEO Ralph Stayer.
This week, we turn our attention to the consultant Stayer credits with providing the key advice that turned his company around: Lee Thayer.
For Stayer, the turning point came in 1982, when he heard a lecture by Thayer, a former professor and chairman of the Department of Communication at the University of WisconsinParkside.
“I was stuck. People (employees) didn’t seem to be involved. They didn’t seem to care,” Stayer said. “I asked him (Thayer) if he could help me with my people problems. He gave me the best advice I ever received. He said, ‘I can’t help you fix this business, but I can help you create something else. In the best of all worlds, what do you want to create?’ ”
At that point, Stayer realized he had become the “answer man” at his company. His employees turned to him for all the answers and were not empowered to take ownership and lead on their own, Stayer said.
“We had supervisors who controlled people, not team leaders and coaches,” Stayer said.
Thayer, an author who now operates the Thayer Institute in Flat Rock, N.C., has been advising CEOs at companies around the world for half a century. Thayer’s clients have included executives at IBM, AT&T, Westinghouse, Boeing, CurtissWright, Pratt-Whitney, McDonnell Douglas, Phillips, Shell, General Motors, Sealtest Foods and Hallmark.
Now 89 years old, Thayer fully recalls his three-year stint helping Stayer create a decentralized leadership structure at Johnsonville.
“When he (Stayer) first came to me and asked me to help him
make a change, I said, ‘It depends on what kind of a cat you are,’ ” Thayer said last week by phone. “What we did was reinvent the company from the ground up. It was decentralizing the organization and giving more responsibility and training to the people who work there.”
I asked Thayer to
itemize the four key advantages of a decentralized leadership structure:
1. It is far better to have dozens of competent employees than to have but one “leader.”
2. People who are faceto-face with customers and/or clients make better decisions than “managers,” who are two or three times removed from the action.
3. If the people at the top own all of the problems, then the people doing the work can’t own them. “If the ‘little’ people own the problems, they take pride in their work,” Thayer said.
4. The real accomplishments are where the rubber meets the road — that is, where the work is being done. It isn’t the leader who makes the organization successful; it is the organization that makes the leader successful (or not). “This has been proven many times over in history,” Thayer said.