Business Leaders: 7 Lessons My Silent Mentor Jack Welch Taught Me

I like to read … why? To be entertained, to learn new things, and to stimulate thinking.  Jack Welsh is a favorite author of mine, especially when the book deals with business leaders and with employee development. I have a set of five authors that I selected over a decade ago to be my silent mentors … they mentor through their writings and presentations. Jack Welsh is one of my five mentors.

Check out our thoughts on team leverage.

Yes … they all do stimulate a lot of thinking and learning, but they all have a great knack for entertaining while they teach and silently mentor. They also share many other common attributes that makes them such successful mentors for me.

Related post: Retail Design …11 Ways Businesses Are Responding to the Future

It probably is not necessary to tell you a little about Jack Welch. Welch is the former Chairman and CEO of General Electric who served in this capacity between the years 1981 to2001. The two decades when GE was one, if not the top brands in the world. He gained a solid reputation for uncanny business acumen and unique leadership strategies. He remains a highly regarded figure in business circles due to his innovative management strategies and leadership style.

There were two major eras of innovation in the 20th century. The first hit its stride in the 1920s and the second had its biggest impact in the 1990s. We’re now on the brink of a new era of innovation and its impact will likely be profound. Though much like Drucker back in the 1930s, we are still unable to fully grasp what is yet to come.

In this blog, we have selected 7 favorite topics of Welsh and used quotations and a compendium of ideas from many of Jack Welch’s books, articles, and presentations to focus on what Welsh teaches on each. We use these thoughts regularly in our work with our client teams.

Leadership

Managers turn the crank, leaders inspire. Leaders are people who share their vision of how things can be done better.

What we are looking for are leaders at every level who can energize, excite, and inspire rather than enervate, depress, and control. 

Genuine leadership comes from the quality of your vision and your ability to spark others to extraordinary performance. Getting employees excited about their work is the key to being a great business leader.

We now know where productivity – real and limitless productivity – comes from. It comes from challenged, empowered, excited, rewarded teams of people.

Business leaders … reality

Face reality, and then act decisively. Most mistakes that leaders make arise from not being willing to face reality and then acting on it. Facing reality often means saying and doing things that are not popular, but only by coming to grips with reality will things get better.

 Face reality as it is, not as it was or as you wish it to be.

Change

Change, BEFORE you have to. Change is a big part of the reality in business. New ideas are the lifeblood of business. And the basis for creative change.

Willingness to change is strength, even if it means plunging part of the company into total confusion for a while. Keeping an eye out for change is both exhilarating and fun.

The operative assumption today is that someone, somewhere, has a better idea; and the operative compulsion is to find out who has that better idea, learn it, and put it into action – fast.

Famous business leaders of all time … competitive advantage

 If you don’t have a competitive advantage, don’t compete.

It doesn’t get any simpler than this. This concept resulted in GE selling those businesses they owned that were not number 1 or 2 in there respective markets.

Business leaders who changed the world … learning organization

Turn your company into a learning organization to spark free flow of communication and exchange of ideas. Create a truly confident workforce. Confidence is a vital ingredient of any learning organization. The prescription for winning is speed, simplicity, and self-confidence. Self-confident people are open to good ideas regardless of their source and are willing to share them.

Just as surely as speed flows from simplicity, simplicity is grounded in self-confidence.

The desire, and the ability, of an organization to continuously learn from any source, anywhere – and to rapidly convert this learning into action – is its ultimate competitive advantage.

An organization’s ability to learn and translate that learning into action rapidly is the ultimate competitive advantage.

A business leader focuses on teamwork

Managers must learn to become team players. Middle managers have to be team members and coaches. Take steps against those managers who wouldn’t learn to become team players. And the sooner the better.

Business is all about capturing intellect from every person. The way to engender enthusiasm it to allow employees far more freedom and far more responsibility.

Giving people self-confidence is by far the most important thing that I can do because then they will act.

The essence of competitiveness is liberated when we make people believe that what they think and do is important – and then get out of their way while they do it.

Globalization

Globalization has changed GE into a company that searches the world, not just to sell or to source, but to find intellectual capital – the world’s best talent and greatest ideas.

GE’s tremendous growth in the two decades of Jack Welch’s leadership can be attributed to the search and development of talent, more than any other factor. Particularly leadership talent. Just look around at all the GE senior leadership that are now CEOs of major US companies.

 Yes, there are probably many, many current great authors and leaders with these attributes, but you’ll be hard-pressed to find a better leadership silent mentor than Jack Welsh.

The bottom line

You can’t make anything or anyone grow; you can only provide the right conditions. Jack Welch as a mentor selection is very effective at providing components of the right conditions. Employee growth and development were two of his key interests.

So, who are your favorite silent mentors, and what sets them apart for you? Any comments or questions to add below?

So what’s the conclusion? The conclusion is there is no conclusion. There is only the next step. And that next step is completely up to you.

It’s up to you to keep improving your management and leadership skills. Lessons are all around you. In many situations, your competitor may be providing the ideas and or inspiration. But the key is in knowing that it is within you already.

All you get is what you bring to the fight. And that fight gets better every day you learn and apply new lessons.

When things go wrong, what’s most important is your next step.

Try. Learn. Improve. Repeat.

Are you devoting enough energy to continually improving your continuous learning?

Do you have a lesson about making your leadership better you can share with this community? Have any questions or comments to add in the section below?

Mike Schoultz is the founder of Digital Spark Marketing, a digital marketing and customer service agency. With 40 years of business experience, he blogs on topics that relate to improving the performance of your business. Find them on G+, Twitter, and LinkedIn.  

Digital Spark Marketing will stretch your thinking and your ability to adapt to change.  We also provide some fun and inspiration along the way.

Check out these additional articles on business lessons from our library: 

What do You Need to Know Before Opening Your Retail Store

Walt Disney World Stories: 14 Surprising Facts to Make The Visit Amazing

 Consultant Success Attributes That Will Make One Remarkable