Josh Walden’s Leadership Lessons | ExCo Insights

In this series, we explore some of the most important lessons and insights from our executive coaches and mentors.

Josh Walden, an executive coach and mentor at The ExCo Group and the former SVP and General Manager of Intel’s Product Assurance and Security Group, shares his leadership lessons and highlights the significance of being open, honest, and transparent, understanding underlying issues, and going to where the value is created, or the “Gemba.”

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KEY LEADERSHIP LESSONS

The first lesson is about the importance of being open, honest, and transparent. I’m a very bad liar, and I wear my heart on my sleeve. There was a moment when I was coaching someone on my team, and I was too indirect. I said, “Why don’t we bring someone from another site who can look at our operation and help figure out how to improve things?” And he confronted me and said, “So you don’t trust me in what I’m doing?” I said, “No, that’s not it.” And, of course, it was. He said I was being duplicitous and got up and ended the meeting. I felt terrible, but he was right. So, I learned that I must stop pretending that nothing is going on when it is. You have to be open and transparent with people.

“When you are open and transparent, the organization trusts you. I tell people what I know when I know it, and if I can’t, I explain why I can’t share it.”

And that’s been my approach ever since. Even in big meetings to discuss confidential long-term plans and investments, I’ve shared information openly in forums. My colleagues have worried about this approach, warning that there will be leaks to the newspapers. But when I’ve done this, nothing leaked. When you are open and transparent, the organization trusts you. I tell people what I know when I know it, as long as it’s legal to share. And if I can’t, I will explain why I can’t share it.

The second lesson I learned is that many leaders can lose touch with who does the actual work in the company when they move into senior roles. And so, when an issue arises, they react by wanting to discipline or terminate an employee rather than seeking to understand the underlying problem.

There’s an expression, “Go to the gemba,” which means go to where the work is being done. Regardless of my position, I would always go and talk to the people doing the work. In one example, I was asked to take over an underperforming facility. I started talking to the people who worked at the site, and it became clear that the engineers who had written specifications for the work had never actually done the work themselves. There were 130 pages of specifications in one case, and they made absolutely no sense. The technicians explained the problem to me, and I asked them, “If you had a magic wand, what would you do to help improve this operation?” By having conversations like that, we improved efficiency at the site by about 30 percent. And so, in my leadership roles, I’ve always told people on my team that they have to go to their operations and get trained on how the work gets done there. We saw big improvements in all cases by listening to them and acting on their advice. In some cases, the fixes were either inexpensive or free.

WHEN I COACH CLIENTS, WE OFTEN TALK ABOUT…

A common theme for leaders at all levels is stakeholder management, including understanding the internal politics of an organization. Because every organization has politics, and a lot of people struggle with how to navigate those. They see it as bad rather than needing to embrace it. I tell them that they need to understand what’s motivating the other person to act the way they are. What do they want to do? And how can you help them be more successful?

Sometimes, people object when I give them that advice because they might feel like they are giving up their integrity. But it’s never about giving up your integrity because no one else can take that away from you. Only you can. Once they get over that issue, they can move forward even when they feel like their values are different from the other person’s. That’s okay because there’s a common ground. What is it they’re looking for? How can you both be successful? What’s the right thing for the shareholder?

The second big theme is networking, which is related to stakeholder management. I’ve found that people, once they’ve finished working on a project together, often stop talking to their counterparts. But you have to maintain relationships because you never know, as you move up in an organization, when you are going to need to reach out to those individuals for help.

Networking doesn’t come naturally to everyone. But I tell all my clients they must invest that time and effort. Especially as you move up into more senior roles, you’re not going to know all the answers, so you need to be able to tap into your network of experts. You don’t want to be in a position where you only reach out to people for help when you need them. It’s about emotional intelligence and making people feel valued so that they respond when you do reach out.

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