Can We Tolerate Working With You?

In 1999 Whirlpool began a quest to go from one-product, one-customer manufacturer of washing machines to being the global leader of marketing and manufacturing major household appliances, with revenues over $10 billion. Today the Whirlpool brand is the top-selling appliance brand in the world.

Many contributed to Whirlpool’s remarkable success story—but arguably none more than Chief Innovative Officer—Nancy Snyder.   Nancy was the chief architect of this remarkable transformation.  She tells the complete story in her 2009 book Unleashing Innovation.

Nancy would be the first to tell you that there was an endless array of people who deserve credit for this remarkable transformation.  That said, amongst those that were closest to the work itself, there’s an especially important group.  Nancy calls them iHeros.   Without the efforts of the iHeros many of the remarkable commercial innovation successes would have never come to fruition.  In addition, these people were the catalysts that enabled the organization to institutionalize (culturally) innovation at Whirlpool.

These are people who took out-of-the-ordinary personal risks, made personal sacrifices, and constantly ‘took one for the team’.  In the end, their ‘reputational capital’ was off-the-charts. It goes without saying that they were respected—but people also liked them.  They were iHeros because their peers recognized them as such—not because the organization issued them an award.

There were those within Whirlpool that were almost singularly responsible for some remarkable commercial innovation successes at Whirlpool.  Yet, they weren’t recognized as iHeros by their peers. Why?  Because they were perceived to be more about ‘me’ than ‘we’.

Whereas iHeros weren’t self-glorifying, these individuals tended to be. General Richard Myers once told me that self-aggrandizement was just about the worst character trait one could have in the military.  Turns out, it’s one of the worst at Whirlpool too—although fortunately they don’t seem to have much of it!

Recall in The Power of Professionalism I advocated that professionals are defined by how, not by what they do.  Here’s yet another example of that at Whirlpool.    

‘Can we tolerate working with you?” This is one of only three key questions that several respected executive recruiters tell us need be asked in hiring interviews.  (The other two are:  ‘can you do the job?’ and ‘will you love the job?’)  While it’s more important to be respected than liked, the Whirlpool experience reinforces how important it is to be liked as well.  Ask yourself, everything else being equal, who would I rather work with—someone I like or someone I just tolerate?   Kind of a no-brainer, huh?