Rich Teerlink - Harley Davidson

CLLC: Rich Teerlink

Rich Teerlink is the former CEO of Harley-Davidson spoke on People Driven Execution, based on his new book, More than a Motorcycle: The Leadership Journey at Harley-Davidson (with Lee Ozley).

If you ever get the chance to hear Teerlink speak, go do it, even if you aren't particularly interested in motorcycles. He has an off-beat style, and he tells a great story about how Harley-Davidson went from being a laughingstock in the early 1980's to the high performing "lifestyle company" that it is today.

He credits most of this turnaround with how Harley-Davidson treated its employees and its customers. In his talk he made reference to a graph (never displayed) that suggests employee moral (or involvement) and customer satisfaction have a direct impact on the bottom line of the company. In his talk he said something to the effect of "If you have happy employees and happy customers, profitability will take care of itself." He told the story of how Harley-Davidson went about making happy employees and happy customer, peppered with wonderful stories and examples.

With respect to happy employees, he talked about the familiar idea that simply giving people (the right) information changes their behavior.

Teerlink reflected a comment that one of the blogs in business panelists made: Make your employees passionate about what they are doing. Passionate people want to be there. They will take risks because they recognize there is always room for improvement. At the panel a few weeks ago, someone talked about giving blogs to passionate people within your organization and amazing things would happen.

He talked about that "our people are the most important asset" mantra of many business leaders. Teerlink's complaint with this is that he doesn't believe most business leaders really believe this. "When was the last time you went surfing with an employee?" he asks. Yes, people are the only sustainable competitive advantage of any business. And until they are passionate about what they are doing, they are not your competitive advantage, no matter how many times you say it. Interestingly, Curt Rosengren agrees

The real rocket ride comes with employees who get so much energy out of the work they do that they can't help but function at peak performance. Engaged employees have been proven to increase profits, productivity, employee happiness and retention, and customer satisfaction.

What is the role of leaders in an organization of passionate people? Teerlink says that leaders are responsible for the "operating environment." They set the tone of the business. Leaders do not need to be wise, problem solvers, or even responsible for results. Leaders need to show their people how it is to be done (a theme for the conference).

In this vein, Teerlink discussed how they transfromed and flattened the organizational structure. They discovered that they had to model the new behavior in the executive suite just as much as they ask them to do this on the shop floor. He drew his "org chart" as a Venn Diagram of intersecting responsibilities that anyone could fill. At the executive