I had just finished my engineering degree and I was recruited by a Japanese company, Mitsubishi.

They sent me to Japan to get trained.

They were having what is called a Kaizen event where people collaborate from the engineering team, marketing team and the production floor to figure out a problem that can be solved.

It was the folks on the production floor who were coming up with these great ideas and that was a big aha moment for me.

It's really folks in the front line who are touching the product, who are touching the customers.

Every role that I take, I make sure I reach to the front lines because the front line is where the action actually happens.

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Here's Ben.

Hey there and welcome back to Lead the Team.

Today we have for you a treat with Suresh Krishna who's the former president and CEO over at Northern Tool and Equipment where he led incredible growth and transformation.

He's a proven leader who builds championship teams with a focus on inverting the pyramid that we'll get into today.

And Cresh is also a leader who builds cultures of collaboration, accountability and respect where employees are heard and valued in an entrepreneurial, entrepreneurial environment.

And during his tenure as CEO, Northern Tool and Equipment was ranked by Forbes as one of the best midsize employers in the nation.

He served as a senior leader also previously at powerful brands, you know, like Polaris, Sleep Number Corporation and UTC Fire and Security.

Suresh, welcome to lead the team, sir.

Glad to be here, Ben.

Look forward to the conversation.

So let's do this.

What's a lesson you learned from a frontline team member earlier in your career?

This takes me way back to my days when I grew up in India and I had just finished my engineering degree and I was recruited by a Japanese company, Mitsubishi, to work in their factory.

In India.

And they sent me to Japan to get trained.

As part of that training process, I had Sensei, you know, an internal mentor who's a senior manager in the company.

And one of the first days I was there on the job for getting trained, he took me down to the manufacturing floor because they were having what is called a Kaizen event.

This is an event where people collaborate from the engineering team, the marketing team and the production floor to figure out a problem that can be solved.

And I got injected into this.

I didn't speak a word of Japanese and everything was happening in Japanese, but they said, hey, a lot of numbers and figures, so you should be able to figure it out.

And over the course of the day, and it was a multi day event, I quickly realized that the focus was entirely on the folks who are in the production floor.

Even though they were surrounded by engineers, by marketeers and more seasoned people, it was the folks on the production floor who were coming up with these great ideas that is going to make an improvement to the quality process that we had going on at that time.

And that was a big moment for me, saying, while we think we are well qualified, we have great education.

It's really folks in the front line who are touching the product.

And eventually when I became more senior in other organizations, it was the people in the front line, in sales, frontline, in retail who are touching the customers that really have intimate knowledge that if we don't tap into it, we in conference rooms and in offices make assumptions which are incorrect.

So that learning for me has stayed, I mean, 35 years later, this is early 90s, 30, 35 years later, that has been very much in my head.

In every role that I take, I make sure I reach to the front lines.

Whether it is factory workers, warehouse folks, salespeople, retail.

I make sure that I connect with them regularly to understand what is the pulse, what are they seeing, so that I could make sure that the things we are doing as leaders are in tune with what customers need, are in tune with what employees need.

Because the front line is where the action actually happens.

Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

And leadership by spreadsheet can get you in a lot of trouble sometimes.

Now, as you and I shared some of these big brands that you've worked with over the years, how does that, how well does that scale?

Because you're, you're moving up the org, the org chart.

You got more and more people.

What were some of the ways that you stayed in touch with the frontline even though you might have been A couple of continents away, time zones away, you got other responsibilities, board members to talk to.

That's a great question, Ben.

I think you have to make a priority and you have to make sure that you create time in your schedule to do this.

How are high you get.

You have to take time to be out in the field.

As I started from an operations role to become a general manager, I started to also spend time with actual customers, making sure that I'm there listening.

So we call this voice of customer.

It's really important to listen to them and hear them out in roles where I had, you know, 50 countries, 60 countries reporting to me.

There were days and weeks that I would be on the road.

But that was important because if we didn't have that pulse, we would not be making the right decisions.

So while it may be difficult to make the trade off between work and, you know, personal life, it's really important to be able to stay connected with the customers and stay connected to the employees more.

So these, I would say these are the two most important sets of people you got to focus on as you become more senior in the organization.

I also took part in what I would call presidential Kaizens where as a senior leader, I would set aside four or five days to get involved in Kaizen events around the world.

When I was at etc, I had several thousand employees working for me in China.

When I was in Polaris leading our Europe, Middle East, Africa business, I had far from employees in different parts of the world.

I would go on events where we would ride with customers, ride our products.

That way we get to even get feedback on how the product is performing and how they feel about it.

So all of those, you got to design things that happen around you in company events that you can then participate.

That brings employees close to you and customers close to you.

Oh man.

So do you have an example or a time when maybe you were hearing something back from your direct reports and then you showed up at the plant floor and you're like, wait a minute, there seems to be some kind of disconnect and ended up changing how, the way, the way that you're relating?

Yeah, very much so.

I think I'll give you an example of a factory that was struggling.

We had a new factory startup.

This was in my days in Polaris.

We had a factory, a new factory in Poland.

And I was hearing things through management reports.

You know, I joke saying the only thing we produce in headquarters is PowerPoint and nothing else.

And I was seeing these PowerPoint slides that would tell me what the problem is not that they were wrong, but there was not the complete picture.

So I, in one of my regularly scheduled visits to the factory, I was able to dig in and spend time on the production line.

And what I learned, the reason for some of the issues that were the issues were right, some of the root cause provided was correct.

But as you dug deeper, we talk about 5 why, saying keep asking the question till you get to the root cause.

The fourth and fifth why was about not providing the right training.

We had moved production from US factories when we started this factory in Europe, for Europe, and we had not finished our training properly.

Our documentation was not as good as it needed to be.

Yet we were blaming the factory for not delivering what they were supposed to.

So you go through that and you check for yourself.

And we call this the ability to walk the shop.

And in the case of customer walk, walk the talk with the customer.

We realize that there is something we as a management team and a leadership team didn't fulfill on our part.

But it is easy to blame someone else when you dig deep.

Many times it starts where it started and not where it ended.

Yeah.

And the world we live in and we're so remote and we've got customers all over the world, us included.

It's so easy to lose touch with that because we're looking at the numbers, we're looking at the reports and we use those as really to drive a lot of decisions and being willing to make the trip.

Ask the five whys, which, by the way, I've never met a person who enjoys being asked the five whys.

Wait.

Way more fun to ask the five whys than.

But.

But it's powerful.

It takes me back.

My first job out of college was as an industrial engineer.

And I thought I was going to be, you know, in the office, you know, working the spreadsheets.

And my boss sent me immediately to the night shift and not to do an industrial engineering kind of things, but to actually sew garments and, and cut textiles and be on my back was hurting.

And he's like, Ben, I don't want you working with people when you don't understand what they do.

You know, it also earns you respect with the frontline when they see you do it.

And then when you're asking for improvement or you are even providing suggestions for improvement as an engineer, they have respect that you've actually done the job and they're not insulted.

And we have instituted that in my current company and in the past company as I worked.

You gotta start in in our case, you have to go to the retail store, you have to work in the retail store.

And a retail store is the microcosm of where activity comes to life for us.

Right?

You, you have products on display, but you also have an operation in the back room, which you never see when you go to shop.

A store, any store, there's an operation happening behind where they're receiving trucks, they're unloading with forklifts, they're putting it away very much like they would do in a warehouse, except this is a much smaller warehouse.

So that, that retail store is a microcosm of everything that happens in a company.

So the same way in a manufacturing environment, you want people to start like you did in a manufacturing floor to understand what, what's happening.

We do the same in retail as well.

You talk a lot about managing yourself before managing teams, maybe share, you know, what you mean by that.

But also like, when's the time this came in handy for you?

You know, the things I, when I, when I say managing self, to me it's about values.

And I, I think about four to five, I would say five key values that have helped shape how I manage myself.

That in turn helps me manage the team.

So let me start with the very first one, and I think it's the most important is humility.

For any individual, and ultimately a leader and eventually even a team, to stay humble is really important.

The moment you have any arrogance, that is the start of when you're going to start to see failure.

And big, big powerful brands aren't necessarily known for their humility.

With the ones you, once you work for command a lot of respect.

When you walk in the room because of the brand, what do you do to infuse that in your team, that humility and be like, hey, you know, we've, we've had success in the past, but we still got to stay humble.

I think about that customer feedback.

Customer feedback, Customer feedback.

Because ultimately we are winners only because of how customers vote with their wallet.

And in this day and age, there is a lot more transparency to how they feel about your product, your people that they deal with and the service they get.

It's all over the Internet.

And we have other mechanisms we believe in a big way about Net promoter score, where we're actually going and surveying our customers to see how you feel about the service you got or the product even multiple months later.

And all of that we feed back to our leadership team and our employees in the front line as well.

That makes you.

And stay humble because Customers are honest in most cases, even the best of the best.

You're not getting 100% rating.

And you could look at it saying it's either half full or half empty.

Right.

I generally look at it as half empty and say, okay, why aren't we filling it up entirely?

What is the gap?

Let's find out.

And that keeps us humble because our goal through continuous improvement is, say, let's make sure every customer is not just satisfied but delighted by what we do.

And there's always a gap because while you reach the goal, you know what happens.

Customer expectation goes up.

You're always going to be a little short.

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What do you.

What do you do as a leader?

Sort of walk that line of, hey, I'm getting the customer feedback.

We're improving and also balancing it with that, that Henry Ford quote about, you know, if I ask customers what they wanted, they say they'd want a faster horse versus a car.

So, like being that visionary leader of the possibilities, thinking beyond the customer feedback versus or, and balancing it with actually using it for.

So that really takes me to the second value.

We didn't get there, but my first one was humility.

The second one was having a balanced perspective.

The balanced perspective is, hey, you're not only looking at negative or things to improve that the customer tells you.

You're also looking at things that they say you're positive.

Right.

So usually you get a score of 7 or 8 or even 9 out of 10.

So don't forget that there are a lot of things you've done well and you want to play that back to the team and celebrate that.

Not just celebrate.

You also recognize the people who are delivering rate, whether it's in the front lines or in the offices.

You want to celebrate that and highlight that.

So that's part of the second value is having that balanced perspective.

So don't just keep pointing all the negative stuff.

Point out all the positive stuff.

So that allows people to stay grounded while saying, hey, we are doing well and maybe we are in the best of the pack.

We are in the top decile of what we Call net promoter score companies.

But hey, there's still room to grow because if we believe in championship teams, we don't rest by just saying, hey, we made the playoffs, we want to go all the way to the Super Bowl.

Right.

So there are a lot of good things we're doing, but there's a little more room for us to improve.

That's the mindset we want to build from our value system.

And you do that first for yourself, then you translate that to the team.

That's why I say if you can do it yourself for yourself, you will never be able to instill that in your team.

Yeah, there's a real power and role modeling stuff, whether it be for your children, for your team.

People see that incongruence.

It's hard to build a positive team that's going to go the extra mile.

And they see you doing it to see you out there in the field.

Yeah, you get that respect and it can definitely create more alignment for you.

One of the things in the introduction and we've seen you talking about is the inverted pyramid.

And I think you're talking about leadership, right.

And how, how it all works.

But for the listeners, can you describe, you know, you know what, what that means to truly lead by that philosophy for you and the companies you work for and a time where that's been vital and helpful for you?

That's a great question.

Great lead.

And Ben.

So just to define inverted pyramid, most times we think about a pyramid and the CEO or a president at the top of the pyramid.

And as we think about our own careers, we all say, hey, we are starting at the bottom.

We want to grow right to the top.

And that's the visual that I'm trying to paint for people here.

Inverting the pyramid means the moment you're in the leadership, the moment you're in the top, you should just flip it because you should recognize that you're so far away from where the action is.

Whether it's delivering for a customer, interacting with the customer, making the product or shipping the product.

You're so far away from that that you should think of yourself being at the bottom of the pyramid, not at the top of the pyramid.

And then your role is really about removing barriers for people who are getting the work done for your customers.

Yeah, makes a lot of sense when.

You have that mindset.

Let me give you an example.

Like I learned very early on in 30 years, 35 years ago, working on that production line, Kaizen in Mitsubishi, today in Northern Tula, as an example, learned Very quickly when I started back in 2020, visiting the stores, working in the stores that we have a challenge with our IT systems which is preventing our people who are doing the checkouts to do their job very well, whether it is processing the actual transaction or taking returns.

Because we had very old antiquated systems and it was taken a lot of time for them to get the work done, which led to some customer unsatisfaction because they were waiting in lines too long.

Customers compare, hey, I shopped at somewhere else I could get through quickly.

Why is it taking so long over here?

Right.

So we spent time, I spent time asking them the question, are our clerks who are checking people out, cashiers?

And they walked me through, it's green screen and walk me through a menu of things they have to remember.

Yes, there was a cheat sheet that they had to go through several keystrokes.

And this is green screen in 2020.

Right.

You think of the day and age.

No one can.

It's like this is old.

That led us as a corporation to say we going to invest in technology to make the lives of our frontline employees easier.

And that led us to a multi year, multimillion dollar investment which today, fast forward three years later, we have, you know, we have tablets on the sales floor.

Anybody can check out.

Any salesperson can check out a customer without them having to go to a cashier.

We can actually do inventory reconciliation using technology.

A lot of that just suddenly improved the life of the people in the front lines, improved productivity and gave better satisfaction.

So with one move, we could win with every frontline employee and with the customer at the same time.

Yeah, I like that a lot.

And I've been a part of some, some big IT projects myself back in the day and I really felt like the big motivator for a lot of our projects was we want better data, we want better reporting and we could say, well, it's going to help the front line people.

What?

Because we're going to make better decisions.

However, I don't think we always.

Because we didn't invert the pyramid fully.

The frontline employees sometimes suffered because we had to sort of work out their interface and make their ease of use after the fact.

We're like, oh man, this is not working for them.

We actually increased their workload and we have to go back, invest more money.

But your approach, I think, hey, we're going to get the better reporting if we give them a better experience up front.

And starting from that would have been probably a faster implementation for us.

Probably More cost effective one and still got us to where we wanted to go.

Yeah, I think the buy in which people talk about buy in, there is no issue about buy in because it is their idea, it is their need, it's their want that we are fulfilling.

And that's, that's what you do when you're inverting the pyramid.

You're listening to them and then you're giving them what they ask for versus you, pushing it and forcing it from the headquarters.

When's the time you had an unexpected twist or failure in your career and how did it lead to your success or growth on down the road?

Suresh, you know, we talked about technology.

I'll take another example of my early days in company called Diageo.

I was, I was running strategy for them.

And as part of that, you know, we were integrating a big acquisition.

Diageo was a market leader, had acquired Seagram, another big competitor, and we were merging the two entities.

And as part of that, there was a big IT SAP implementation that was taking place.

However, the very first phase of the implementation didn't go very well.

And we were not shipping orders to our customers.

We could not even see where the orders were.

And sometimes for the same order, we shipped the order 304 times.

And the customer would say, already got it.

Why is another truck coming?

So it was a total disaster.

So a lot of us got involved in solving that and it was weeks and months before we could put, put it back on rail.

So to say, we operated almost manually for a long period of time.

And then when the second phase came on, which was for the other part of the business, this was for spirits business.

Then we had a wine, beer business.

We had a second phase that based on the work we did in terms of triage, a few of us were seen as leaders who helped with getting this put back on rails.

And I was asked to lead the second phase.

So the second phase, because of all the learnings we had from the first phase, went flawlessly for us.

But the learning for me there was don't be afraid of a tough situation.

In fact, I have almost always volunteered when I saw a situation that was really difficult or tough, I volunteered to say, hey, I think I can go in there and help.

In some ways it's like, you can't make it worse, so why not?

So, but the other way is, hey, you know, you can rally people, you can, you can get the best resources you want when you have a tough situation and you can really mold the team.

And I talk about championship Teams, there's no great motivator.

Then say, we're in a tough spot, let's get to a better spot with all of us getting involved.

And that, to me, has always been, how do we find.

How do I find a partnering platform so that I can go in there and help and make an impact quickly?

So looking for wins.

Those are, those are great ways to go look for wins.

Yeah.

So looking for.

Yeah, because I can see that.

Because very few people get really rewarded in their career for incremental progress.

Right.

It's like, okay, Well, I improved it 1%.

Congratulations.

But if you get in a difficult situation, there's a bigger leap.

Everyone wants, and that's the bigger number.

That's.

That's the difference between making change or transformation.

Yeah, I think breakthrough is the word I use.

You can make breakthrough improvement versus incremental improvement.

Now, don't get me wrong, incremental increment is very, very important as well.

And that's day to day.

Right.

Each day you got to have the discipline of saying, I want to make things better.

But then breakthrough comes where you take a leap and you get significantly better than where you were.

So thinking about, thinking about your career, this, this confidence or, you know, wildness to go jump into these situations that are so difficult.

Is this, do you think this is something that was fostered in you as when you were younger?

Have you always been a bit of a risk taker on that front?

Like, hey, I was willing to take the risk on this difficult project, but what, what's the key?

Because I look at your career and people listen to the brands.

I mean, you've worked for a lot of different companies at a lot of senior levels.

What's.

And you, you just keep moving up.

Wait.

Yeah.

For me, Ben, that's a great question.

Or what is that in you that you would have done?

Yeah, I constantly look for challenge.

To me, it's maybe a little bit of an adrenaline and rush that happens over a long period of time.

I want the next challenge.

And sometimes the challenge doesn't exist in an organization that you already in.

Especially if you help do a breakthrough.

The next breakthrough will take a while.

The appetite for doing a lot of breakthroughs are not always there.

So many times I've had to look outside because I wanted that next breakthrough opportunity you asked about.

Where was this started?

I honestly don't know, but it could have been very early on in my career, very early on while I was growing up.

You know, I grew up in a small town in India, and I Had to go far away from home to get good engineering education.

And from there I had a chance to get trained in Japan was the first time I got a passport.

And then I worked in the Middle East, I worked in Europe and then I came to the U.S.

but all of those moves for me was taking a leap without knowing what's there on the other side.

And each time I landed on my two feet, I won't say I didn't break bones.

I did, you know, but.

But I turned out okay.

And that's given me the confidence to say, you know, it's okay to keep taking these risks.

It's okay to keep trying new things and having the confidence that I can, I can put a talented team together to get things done.

And building that followership is something that I've learned along the way.

Very early on in my career, it was all.

I was a little more focused on promoting myself very early on.

Talk about what I've done and get the senior.

Because you wanted to move myself and you buy, hey, you don't know my accomplishments and you're trying to create your own visibility of the organization.

But soon I realized, yeah, that is not a long term way to win.

I soon realized that the more attention I provided to my peers, more attention I provided to the accomplishments of my team, the better it became for me in the mid and longer term.

Because guess what, with that approach, I was creating followership.

With that approach.

I had people that wanted to come work for me because not only did I give them chances to do things that they never thought they could because I would generally recruit them to do these breakthrough things, which was hard but very exciting and very fulfilling when you completed it.

I also give them the recognition and the spotlight versus me being in the spotlight.

So very quickly I became the coach on the sidelines versus the player on the field so that then I could put the spotlight on all the people who are playing the game versus myself.

It's really important, I think, to note that I feel like that's something in the world now that we see a lot of where companies, when they bring in a leader, they expect that leader to be able to bring one to nurture the talent there, but also maybe bring your team with you.

And that is no small task because you've got to pluck somebody out of a company who may be already doing well, may have already established themselves and come to a new company and have to rebuild the whole darn thing away.

Have you seen play out in your career were these teams you've Built, able to follow you from company to company and help you make change many times.

Ben, the most recent example I'll give you in Northern Tool, we are a manufacturer and a retailer.

We had a factory in China and given everything that was happening with the geopolitics, we made a decision about 18 months ago to move that factory from China to Mexico.

And we shut that factory down in November of last year.

And at that time we were looking to open a factory in Mexico to support whatever the China factory was doing.

I have had experience building factories and running factories in Mexico along with running in China and other parts of the world.

But as we were building a new factory, I reached out to my network of people that have worked for me in the past.

Not to recruit them, but to say, hey, who do you know that I could bring on to run this factory?

There were at least two on my, in my network who said, would you consider me?

And these are both employed in bigger jobs with bigger name companies.

And you know, the names that I worked for, UTC and Polaris, where they said, why wouldn't you consider me?

I said, well, this is a smaller job.

They said, it doesn't matter.

The opportunities you provided us in the past were so good that develop me.

We will follow you if you ask.

And that to me was the most satisfying.

You know, when you think about everything you can do for people, you know, help them think bigger than they ever thought about.

Help them achieve something more than what they thought they could.

The championship team concept.

People are thinking about daily wins.

I'm instilling in them the opportunity to think of dream big.

What can you be?

Can you not win the championship?

And that's what they felt working for me.

And so they said, hey, I would love to recreate that.

Willing to come work for you, even if the job is, you know, one fifth the size of what I have today.

Yeah, it really goes to show too, as, as big as the brand of your company might be or your 401k, the relationships matter an awful lot.

And the leaders have a lot more influence than they often choose to embrace or excerpt beyond the brand, you know, beyond just, you work for this company, I work for that company.

And people, you know, appreciate those opportunities.

So that's a really, a really important note, I think, for our listeners to consider themselves right now.

So, man, Chris, Suresh, this has been Suresh Krishna, man, it's so, so good today, my friend.

What's your parting thought for our listeners?

Feel free to take it and like a philosophy, perspective or story that Maybe we didn't get to that.

You like to share today?

I'd say for success, when I reflect on what has helped me, I would say it's three things and I would share that willingly with everybody.

Focus always on your customers, whoever they are.

Whichever business you're in, you always have customers.

It could be a business, it could be consumers, it could be the government.

You have to think about the customers always and delight them with whatever you do.

The second one, very quickly, right behind it, almost equal, is focus on your employees, because employees are the ones who make it happen for your customers.

And when you listen to both, you're going to have success.

And the third one, I would say is dream big for yourself and dream big for your company.

Whatever space you're in, dream big for, hey, I want to be the market share leader.

Or if you're in a different space, hey, I want to be the best in the country or best in the world or best in this market.

Dream big.

Focus on customers, focus on employees.

And those three together will help you become very successful.

Thanks for coming along.

Lead the team, Suresh.

It was a fun one.

Thanks, Ben.

This was fun.

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