The Leadership Philosophy of Bob McDonald, Vice Chairman of Procter & Gamble

Throughout my education, military, and business careers; there are a few principles in which I believe deeply that drive my behavior everyday.

  1. Everyone wants to succeed. I have never in all my life, in any career, in any country, at any time, met a person who tries to fail. Everyone I have met wants to succeed. So the job of the leader is to help people succeed.
  2. Success is contagious. A leader’s job is to catch people succeeding, even if the success is a small one, and to use that small success to build a virtuous cycle of ever larger successes. Since success is contagious, on success will always lead to another, and one successful person will always influence another to be successful. Our job as leaders is to start the fire that fuels the virtuous cycle of success.
  3. Putting people in the right jobs is one of the most important jobs of the leader. People like to do work that they are good at. Think about your education. What was your favorite class? What was your grade in that class? Chances are that the class you liked the most was also the one in which you received the best grade. That is not an accident. Human beings always gravitate to things they do well. So our job as leaders is to identify what our people do well, and then to put them into jobs that take advantage of that strength. I personally do not believe in the concept of putting someone in a job to build an “opportunity for improvement.” That hurts the individual as they will be unhappy, and hurts the organization as we underutilize the person’s talent.
  4. Character is the most important trait of a leader. At West Point I learned that the character of a leader is their most important attribute. Character is defined as always putting the needs of the organization above your own. As a Captain in the Army, I always ate after the soldiers in my command. At P&G the leader should always take personal responsibility for results of their organization. As a West Point plebe (freshman) I learned that I was only permitted four answers: yes, no, no excuse, and I do not understand. These four answers are about character. There is no opportunity to equivocation or excuse. There is no “but.” Living up to this ideal of character requires courage, determination, integrity, and self-discipline. You must live by your word and actions, and know that is the most powerful demonstration of leadership.
  5. Choose the harder right instead of the easier wrong. This powerful line came from the Cadet Prayer at West Point. A leader who lives by their word can be counted on to “choose the harder right,” to put the needs of the organization above their own, to do the unpopular thing when it is right. Have you ever noticed how it is easier to do wrong things than right things? That should be a clue to us all as we make decisions. To always follow “the harder right” a leader must truly believe that a life directed by moral guidelines promises deeper and richer satisfaction than a self-serving, self-absorbed life. In this sense the task of the leader becomes a calling, a profession; not a job.
  6. Ineffective systems and cultures are bigger barriers to achievement than the talents of people. In Total Quality training we all learned how difficult it was to pick up the right proportion of red and blue beads if the device we were using to pick them up was rigged to get a bad result. Similarly, Peter Senge teaches in his best-selling book The Fifth Discipline “structure influences behavior,” and systems often result in unintended consequences—like rent controls in New York to help the poor who lived in sub-standard housing actually further reduced investment to upgrade the housing, hurting the people the rent controls were designed to help. The role of the leader is to improve the systems and the culture in which their organizations operate to improve the consistency and level of success of the results. Any High Performance Organization must have four components: passionate leadership, sound strategies, robust systems, and a high performance culture. A leader needs to work on all four pillars.
  7. There will be some people in the organization who will not make it on the journey. Even after taking all the steps above, there will be some people in the leader’s organization who will be either unwilling or unable to go on the journey of growth with the leader and the organization. It could be the Sales manager who thinks you took away his job by eliminating price/volume negotiation by getting rid of Temporary Price Reduction. Or it could be the individual who it is impossible to find the right job for. A clue to finding these individuals is to find who is not happy day-to-day. It is the leader’s job to identify those who cannot go on the journey, help them recognize the tension, and help them identify other careers which offer greater promise.
  8. Organizations must renew themselves. Any organization, as with any organism, which is growing must renew itself. Growth by definition requires change. Change requires renewal. The standards of performance which are acceptable today will be unacceptable tomorrow if the organization is growing and improving. As such, the leader must provide training and development opportunities for the individuals in the organization to grow. Renewal is particularly important in a “promote from within” Company like P&G. We need a healthy level of attrition within P&G to provide future opportunities for growth for our more junior employees.
  9. Recruiting is top priority. There is nothing more important than recruiting. When we recruit we are hiring the future leaders of the Company and also our future friends. It is the source of growth of the Company as we continually hire more talented people over time. The leader needs to be active in recruiting to ensure we are constantly raising standards and to gauge the level of renewal in the organization.
  10. The true test of the leader is the performance of the organization when they are absent or after they depart. The leader’s job is to build sufficient organization capability, including the leadership and individual initiative of the members of the organization as well as the strategies/systems/culture of the organization, so that the leader’s presence or absence would not significantly affect the business results. This means that the organization will be able to sustain itself successfully over time regardless of the quality of the leader.