Alan Mulally - The culture of working together

interview

Alan Mulally, CEO and President of The Ford Motor Company The Culture of "Working Together"

I think probably the most important thing when faced with a transformation

or faced with growing a business is to be really intentional

and really clear on the vision for the organization and also their strategy

for achieving it and then the relentless implementation plan

of people working together.

I think probably the most effective way to actually accelerate

the culture of working together

is to get everybody together on the leadership team.

Everybody's included, all the stakeholders, the consumers,

the customers, the employees, the suppliers,

and come together around the vision,

come together around the strategy for achieving it,

and then start the Business Plan Review each week, every Thursday,

everybody there, connected around the world,

going through the vision, the strategy, the plan,

and also color-coding that on how it's going.

How's each person doing, green is going well,

yellow have an issue but have a solution, red we have an issue,

we're still working on the answer.

Well, you can imagine if you're really intentional about the Business Plan Review

and the expected behaviors are working together, we're going to listen to each other,

we're going to appreciate each other,

we're going to seek to understand before we seek to be understood

that all of a sudden meeting regularly both following the process and the behaviors, boy,

does that culture absolutely accelerate to a high-performance culture.

Well, they're always going to be people that they're aligned with the organization

and your way of working together at different speeds.

My favorite thing is the word okay.

And what I mean by that is that,

"It's okay if you do not want to subscribe and embrace the working together process

but also the expected behaviors."

I've even said to some of our teammates over the years that

if you're in a Business Plan Review,

you need start to go after somebody instead of being supportive, just say you're sorry.

Well, most companies, you haven't heard the sorry word.

And so I had one CFO that every Business Plan Review

would go after somebody and then they catch themselves and say,