It was one of those grunt jobs that employees in any organization might have to do: move a computer center to a new location. Except mortgage lender Fannie Mae asked more than 550 employees to do their "day jobs" all week and then throw themselves into this new task over 13 consecutive weekends, pulling all-nighters on Friday evenings -- without even the promise of extra pay.
To do it, the group had to bring down, move, and start up more than 300 business applications. It had to unplug, wrap, and box 577 computer servers, lay more than 1.8 million feet of copper cable and 35 miles of fiber, and perform more than a million separate tasks to transfer the data center from the Fannie Mae corporate headquarters in Washington, DC to an office park in Reston, Virginia, some 25 miles away. Remarkably, they did it flawlessly, without a single interruption to the company's business -- and it was full-time Fannie Mae people who did almost all of the work.
How? "Napoleon said that an army marches on its stomach, and I fed the hell out of these guys," says Mary Cadagin, the Fannie Mae leader who spearheaded the move last summer. She's half-joking, of course, but she did serve about 1,600 pounds of chicken wings to her crews for midnight snacking -- not to mention the Friday-night themed dinners, ranging from New England clambakes to down-home southern cooking, or the full-blown Saturday morning breakfasts with pancakes, eggs, bacon, and sausage.
It wasn't just the chow. Cadagin is one of those relatively rare inspirational leaders who are able to get people to do extraordinary things. She is what Jon R. Katzenbach, an ex - McKinsey & Co. director who now heads up Katzenbach Partners LLC in New York, would call a pride builder: a leader who instills self-esteem in workers and builds unflagging support for remarkably tough assignments.
In truth, this is the stuff of Leadership 101: drawing the very best out of people by making the emotional bond every bit as important as the monetary one, feeding the soul as well as the wallet. But as profits have plunged and unemployment has soared, nurturing and innovative approaches to leading have fallen by the wayside, replaced by tougher, more autocratic, and more egocentric styles. Inspirational leadership has come to be lumped in with the fripperies of the bubble: the snazzy dotcom digs, the office concierge, the take-your-dog-to-work days. In many workplaces, the message has changed from "What can we do to keep you happy and keep you here?" to "You're lucky to have a job, so sit down and shut up."
But if the recent period of excess and arrogance has taught us anything, it's that leadership must return to the principles that are practiced by people like 49-year-old Cadagin. Eight years ago, in its premier issue, this magazine proclaimed, "Work is personal." That statement is more true today than ever. Howell Raines, an autocratic, inaccessible, and arrogant leader, learned this from his recent undoing at the New York Times. In the aftermath of that newspaper's scandal over the plagiarism and fraud of a favored reporter, Raines quickly lost credibility with his own colleagues, partly because of his leadership style and partly because that style prevented him from understanding the enormity of the problem.
Katzenbach, who has long studied high-performing organizations, thinks that it comes down to one core issue: building pride. In bad times, when money is tight and people are highly skeptical of top leadership, building pride on the front lines of business is central to performance, says the silver-haired consultant and author of Why Pride Matters More Than Money (Crown Business, 2003).
If businesses are to grow their way out of the current economic malaise, they will have to get more productivity out of their people -- not by cutting and slashing, but by nurturing, engaging, and recognizing. Far from being the frothy excess of the boom years, these emotionally engaged leadership styles are enduring -- not because they're new or good or interesting, but because they pay real economic dividends. In fact, there is far more of a payoff to "working the people side" than most managers think. In a study of 3,000 companies, researchers at the University of Pennsylvania found that spending 10% of revenue on capital improvements boosts productivity by 3.9%, but a similar investment in developing human capital increases productivity by 8.5% -- more than twice as much.
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