CPR: Breathing Life & Vitality
Into Your Leadership

by Rodger Dean Duncan  

Great leadership is no accident. It's the result of deliberate effort and attention to detail. This involves managing values, the "core doctrine" of what the organization professes to stand for. In managing values, the best leaders practice something we call CPR.

For lifeguards and other rescue personnel, "CPR" stands for Cardio-Pulmonary Resuscitation, a method for breathing life into a drowning person. In this instance, CPR stands for Converse, Practice and Reinforce – a way to breathe life and vitality into an organization.

In a typical business, people are pretty good at the Converse part. They can rattle off a list of values or valued behaviors that the company claims to embrace. Things like Accountability, Innovation, Integrity, Quality, Respect, Teamwork.

The Practice part is a bit more challenging. This involves actually doing what you say you value. A critical part of strong leadership is the degree to which what you profess and what you practice are in alignment.

The Reinforce part requires even more effort. Reinforcement involves specific and deliberate application of affirmation, encouragement and "rewards" for positive behavior. It also involves specific, deliberate and friendly correction of negative behaviors.

Symbols and metaphors can play an important role in the way you perform CPR. Here's an example. The new CEO of a multi-billion-dollar service company was hired to reverse a serious decline in the business. He was concerned about turf protection and other forms of in-fighting that had become a cancer to the corporate culture. Shortly after coming on board, he grabbed a can of spray paint and walked into the executive parking lot (knowing full well that hundreds of employees could see him from their windows in the headquarters building). Executive parking symbolized the "privilege of rank" that was a sore spot with many workers. The CEO went to each parking space and methodically sprayed paint over the name of the executive on the sign in front of the car. Then he walked inside and got on the intercom system that previously was used only for fire drills.

"Good morning, ladies and gentlemen," he said. "Some of you were watching me out in the parking lot. You were probably wondering Îwhat's that idiot doing out there?' No, I'm not firing our senior executive team. I just want to emphasize that we're all in this boat together and we need to row in unison. Last year this company lost $156 million. We need to invest our collective energy in working together for solutions, not fussing about silly things like parking places and the size of office furniture. So starting tomorrow, anybody can park anywhere. If you work in the mail room and you get here early, the best spot in the lot can be yours. If you're a senior executive and you come in late, you may get rained on. Have a nice day."

Gamesmanship? Not really, especially since this CEO followed up with many other genuine acts to emphasize accountability and performance over rank and title.

It's estimated that 15% of a leader's effectiveness comes from the Converse part of CPR (what the leader says and teaches). About 35% of a leader's effectiveness comes from the Practice part (the actual behaviors that the leader personally models). And a whopping 50% of a leader's effectiveness comes from the Reinforce part (how the leader encourages positive performance and corrects negative performance).

Reinforcement is really not complicated. You might ask, "Should I reinforce my people for their little day-to-day successes, or should I save up my strokes for when they accomplish something really major?"

The answer to that question lies in the way most volunteers get their work done. (Yes, your people are volunteers. Remember that you can rent their backs and hands, but you must earn their heads and hearts.) The simple fact is that, for most of your people, work is not a string of dazzling successes that they produce one right after another. Instead, the majority of their work consists of somewhat routine activities. They perform most of these quietly and without fanfare.

You'll do well to stay aware and appreciative of the "behind the scenes" effort expended by your people. Then you'll be in a position to follow the first rule of positive reinforcement: "make a big deal about little things." In fact, giving frequent, specific and genuine reinforcement on positive behavior tends to crowd out negative behavior.

In addition to values, the performance environment you establish consists of behaviors and "unwritten rules" at play in your organization. To get the positive performance you want, the unwritten rules must be consistent with the professed values. Your own CPR efforts affect the way values are perceived and acted on. The "acted on" part is the behavior of the people you lead. And their behavior is affected by the unwritten rules they observe. Then behavior becomes the unwritten rules or "the way things really work around here."

One national retailer made a big deal of touting teamwork and collaboration. All the company's sales training emphasized team building and partnering among the sales associates. But the annual awards bash at Disney World featured extravagant prizes and recognition for individual sales performance. Wrong message, wrong reinforcement.

Your leadership effectiveness is closely associated with how well you perform CPR. It can be the breath of life.