Elaine and I often stress that leadership is not exclusive to position power. You don’t need a C-level title and a corner office to make valuable contributions. But sometimes a top executive is also a great leader.
Ken Iverson took Nucor Steel from near collapse to the forefront of the industry. He believed that giving employees a say in decisions—and a stake in outcomes—would provide sufficient motivation for them to perform.
Three items from his 1998 memoir Plain Talk come to mind:
- Iverson said Nucor’s 7,000 employees were the best paid workers in the industry, but that Nucor had the lowest labor cost per ton of steel produced. This is not a conflict but the result of linking individual employee compensation to company results.
- When Plain Talk was published, Nucor was a Fortune 500 company with sales of more than $3.6 billion. Yet it had only 22 people working at corporate headquarters, and just four layers of management from the CEO to the front-line workers.
- When American steelmaking was least profitable, roughly half the people in the industry lost their jobs—yet Nucor had no layoffs. All employees took pay cuts, with the largest reductions taken by Iverson and his leadership team. They shared the pain.
Those three examples show incentives and opportunities for all employees, a flat organizational structure that gave people in the company greater access to each other, and a commitment by executive management to align their fortunes with those of all other employees.
Iverson clearly believed in doing fewer things and doing them well. Even though the book is nearly 30 years old, it’s still worth reading today.