Show Don’t Sell

When George Washington wanted to get his men to cross the icy Delaware River on Christmas Day to ambush the Crown’s mercenaries camping on the other side, he was awfully…quiet. 

No dramatic oration. No grand vision statement. Very few words. Just one unmistakable action:

Getting on the boat himself. 

Julius Caesar’s decisive act wasn’t sending a letter to the Senate he was rebelling against, circulating an encyclical among his men, or giving some grand speech.

It was when he crossed the Rubicon. 

When Mahatma Gandhi wanted to protest British salt laws that made it illegal for Indians to collect or produce their own salt, he didn’t formulate a well-worded counterargument. 

He walked 240 miles to the sea and collected some salt. 

The heartbreaking truth is that when many executives sign into office and address their new team about their goals for the future of the company, employees often think: 

“Sure buddy, we’ll believe it when we see it.”

That sweet, very earnest promise to be more transparent? 

We’ll believe it when we see it.

That pledge to preserve our workforce instead of outsourcing jobs to AI? 

We’ll believe it when we see it.

That vow to give us all big, fat bonuses at the end of the year if we nail this next project? 

We’ll believe it when we see it.

There’s one – and only one – cure for skepticism, and it’s the cure discovered by Washington, Caesar, and Gandhi: ACTION.

When he took office, Amazon CEO Andy Jassy’s first move was to revive Amazon’s scrappy startup culture, the Day-One mentality Bezos had installed decades ago. 

Most CEOs proclaim at their All-Hands that they want to foster an ingenious, out-of-the-box startup mindset. And they probably mean it…at first. 

What made Jassy’s strategy legitimate was that he didn’t pump clever slogans or send out endless memos. He focused on visible, tangible actions. Like the bureaucracy mailbox he set up where employees could flag pointless processes that should be cut.

A memo saying, “We want to cut our bureaucracy” is the sort of thing leaders say all the time.

But, “We want to cut our bureaucracy, so we’ve set up a bureaucracy mailbox where you can report inefficient processes, and we’ve already made 375 changes based on it” was the proof everyone needed to believe the promise. 

Employees will always follow in the footsteps of leadership. So make sure you’re walking them in the right direction. And if addressing them becomes necessary, make sure your talk matches your walk.