Rule 30: Put the Interests of the Organization over the Interests of Individuals - Very Carefully

Overview

SNAPSHOT

When you make decisions, do you put the organization or individuals first?

Organization: 82 percent

Individuals: 18 percent

Most professionals with staying power learn to put organizational interests above the interests of individual employees or other people who might be adversely affected by business decisions. But making the organization paramount is a very tricky process. Obviously, by putting the organization first, top professionals believe that they are looking out for the greater good of their employees, shareholders, and business partners. But they recognize that these organizational decisions can literally devastate individual lives. If you want to get to the top, therefore, you have to be willing to take action that will hurt people whom you like if the interests of the organization so require. But there are some important rules that you must follow if you are to pull this strategy off successfully.

Mike Sears of Boeing tries to develop close professional bonds with the executives working for him. Yet he stated to me in no uncertain terms that if a friend is not performing well, he will without hesitation remove that friend from his or her position. It is tough, but it has to be done—the organization comes first. His former boss, Harry Stonecipher, had to downsize St. Louis operations substantially after the merger of McDonnell-Douglas and Boeing—reducing the St. Louis operation from forty thousand to less than seventeen thousand employees. The long-term viability of the organization required this downsizing. Thousands of people were hurt, but Stonecipher did not hesitate to do what the organization required.

American presidents have for over two centuries made decisions that adversely affected the lives of thousands of Americans when the interests of our democracy required such a policy. Most recently, after September 11, 2001, President Bush, supported by Vice President Cheney, issued an order that the U.S. military was to shoot down any hijacked commercial jetliner that was heading toward a city. That directive means our own forces will likely kill two hundred or more Americans should another terrorist hijacking occur. Why? For the greater good. The president decided that sacrificing two hundred lives was better than the uncertainty of how many lives might be lost if the plane were crashed into a building, and that it was even worth sacrificing those lives for the possibility that a major symbol of our country—the Washington Monument, the Statue of Liberty, etc.—would be destroyed. He made the tough decision that the risk of greater casualties or the psychological devastation of seeing a major monument in flames was worth two hundred innocent lives. This was a tough but necessary decision in the minds of most Americans.

There can be no doubt, therefore, that organizational interests must prevail if you are to become an executive with staying power. However, putting organizational interests above individual interests is a process that is fraught with risk. Invincible executives manage to put the organization first without engendering career-fatal levels of resentment against them.

In order to be able to put the organization first successfully, you have to follow some pretty strict rules or your career will come tumbling down. Let's go over them.