Name: Xerox CEO Offer Tips on Leading Employees Through a Transition
Uploaded: 2017-08-17
Duration: 3 min 41 s
Description: Jeffrey Jacobson writes a weekly blog for his 35,000 workers.

Jeff, you are trying to reinvent Xerox. What kind of leadership skills do you need to pull that off? Suzy, it all starts for me with culture. Leadership is all about culture. So what do I want people to do? I want them to work collaboratively. I want them to be results oriented. I want them to have an energy. I want them to feel empowered. I want them to get up to the bat, take some swings, not be afraid of missing. Take some well thought out risks and to drive the company. This is all about playing to win and going on offence and that's what I want the team to do. What do you have to do as a leader to get that kind of culture? I wear this Xerox pin every single day. And I'm really not a very symbolic person. What I want all 35, 000 plus people to understand is that they are Xerox. Xerox is not this amorphous name that's a corporation. Everything we do is because of one of the 35, 000 plus people. If they wear this close to their heart and they embrace what they're doing and they understand everything that they do touches the customer, that's really what I want them to understand. How's it going so far with that? Pim are you getting the results you want? I am what I have to do is get in front of people and I travel a lot. And a lot of my friends say in this world where you just go and video, why do you travel so much? But it's about getting the strategy out getting the message out making sure that people understand the direction we're going And being accessible. What I tell my employees all the time is all 35, 000 plus, if you wanna call me or email me, I'll commit your response back that day. Do you? I do. And I would challenge you to ask any of the 35, 000 if I haven't meet that commitment. I understand that you also put out of blog, kind of a Personal journal every single day you email it to those 35, 000 employees, why are you doing this? We do it about weekly and the reason I do it is, if you're gonna follow your leader to know who they are, and you have to trust and there has to be an authenticity, and they have to know that you really mean it, so I give an example, Usually when I go around, or if I'm doing earnings, I'll put out a blog. Mother's day and father's day, I put out very personal blogs, which is somewhat unlike being in a business environment. But I talked about my wife, and everything that she does that enables me to do my job. On father's day, I talked about my father who passed away 14 years ago, and the life lessons I learned. And I just think that's so important because people relate to people at the end of the day. It sounds like these are all clever ways of keeping even your best employees from leaving Xerox as you go through this transition. How's that working out? The real key is to make sure That we can touch around points and we have to stay close to them, because the worst thing is if somebody leaves and we don't know about it, it's like loosing customer. Our retention rate is very high I wanna make sure we're hiring the best talent and one the things I wanna make sure is that our people have been through a while are not threatened when we bring an external talent it's all about the varsity, it's about getting the best. Thoughts, the best minds, the best brain power we can and having to join all together. Sop you've been CEO now for a little more than eight months, Sure. What's the most important leadership lesson that you've learned so far? You alone, there is no question when you arte running a public company at the top, you have your board members that you could speak to, but there are aren't all that many people because so much of what you're dealing with is confidential information, The hardest part is probably pushing people when you know they really don't want to be pushed. Making them feel very uncomfortable. But you have to be relentless. You have to know when to figuratively kick. And when to figuratively hug. And you just have to keep it going and I keep telling them this is a boulder we're turning, this part of a transformation, this is part of a turnaround. And when we have that boulder going, you don't wanna slow down, you don't wanna roll backwards you wanna keep going forward. [ BLANK AUDIO ]

Xerox CEO Offer Tips on Leading Employees Through a Transition

Leadership

Jeffrey Jacobson writes a weekly blog for his 35,000 workers.