How do we go from good to great? That's the central question of management. It should be top of mind for all of us.

You are all leaders and CEOs. You are the leadership team. It is your company. When people look to you for leadership, your every action is magnified, repeated and discussed. I refer to this as the shadow you cast. People watch their leaders with critical eyes. They tend to look for the bad stuff. While they are doing that, though, they'll see the good stuff if it is there to be seen.

Your values lengthen your shadow. When your people emulate the good things you do, the organization has a great chance at success. Your behaviors as leaders trigger behaviors from your team that either positively or negatively impacts the organization. When they emulate the bad things you do, the organization is in peril.

As a business, there is always room for improvement. Any of us can look at the numbers and find areas that need to be improved. It is the same with each one of us as people and leaders: We can improve.

One of my favorite quotes is: "There is always room for improvement. It is the biggest room in the house."

We have to look at every event, every day, every opportunity if we want to go from good to great. You have to make the choices and tough decisions that are right for the corporation. We need to make changes that get the customer excited. When you do the right thing, believe me, nobody will stop you.

So, how do we do it?

We each have to take responsibility for those things we can control. To put it in financial terms, we've really worked hard to put some numbers on the board this year, and that is a driving force because we know that part of our culture is putting a target up and going after it.

We want to increase our global market share and increase our profit before tax. The questions to write down and ask yourself are, "How much of that is directly under my control? How much is indirectly under my control?"

Focus on the things you have control over that are actionable, get those in place. Do them. Take care of them now.

Other things are more difficult, like organization. Like culture.

If you look around the organization and examine business as usual, you might notice that you have someone who does a particular job, and that someone else in another group does a similar job. The hard part of being a leader is having the courage to say, "Why don't we just have one person doing this job?" That is where leadership comes into place.

As I go after what I have under my control, I have to ask how I can spread my influence out to control even more and what changes I need to make in order to make that happen. That's important. It's top of mind with me. I call the affect of spreading my influence out as widely as I can the Shadow of the Leader.

How do you spread your influence in a positive way? How do you cast a wide shadow as a leader?

First, you live the values. You do the right thing. You do the right thing by your employees, by your supervisors, by your customers, by your dealers, by your suppliers. You live the values everyday in everything you do.

Second, you coach the people who report to you. You coach to the values.

Values, of course, can be abstract or ambiguous. Our corporate values state the customer is job number one. You would probably agree with me on that. If I ask you what this means and what behaviors it should motivate, though, we'll have nearly as many answers as we have people.

We distribute to employees our values, our visions, and our mission statements on pocket cards. On the back is our Ford Leadership Behaviors 2000. Why is this important? Because we must have a set of values that we all agree on.

So, yes, coach to the values. As you do that, though, also create a set of guiding behaviors that your supervisor and your team can agree exemplify the values. Identify specific behaviors that reflect our values and help us reach our goals.

For instance, if we say teamwork is one of our values, we need to attach recognizable behaviors to that. We might say that one of the things teamwork means is being willing to cross organizational boundaries to get a job done most effectively. We could easily add a list of other behaviors to that to create a set of teamwork behaviors that can be coached.

Leaders create visions that people can share in and work together to reach. Leaders find a way to get their people to focus on the vision and keep it foremost in their minds as they go about their daily jobs. I can go to any of my 21,000 people and discuss our values. When I see someone who isn't doing exactly what I want him to do from a teamwork standpoint, I don't have to slap him or her on the hand or go nuts with them. Instead, I can ask, "How are you living up to these values today?" They get the message.

I've talked a little bit about coaching. It goes way beyond saying a few words to someone once in a while. It's really a sacred trust between two people. I do something I call the Leadership Letter, where I write letters to my employees. I tell them what I think they are doing well and I point out areas where I would like to see improvement. The whole point of the letter is to establish a relationship with an employee, to establish a vision with that person. At the end of each letter, I offer my support as they strive to become a better leader.

A coaching relationship should result in higher performance and continuous improvement. The letters I write require candor and open and honest communication. You can't write the letter hoping to make yourself look good. You have to be willing to look bad.

You have to acknowledge the things that don't work. A lot of times we make an effort to achieve something that misses the mark. Too often, we look at that situation as a failure and we give up. Instead, as a coach, I want to help you correct your aim. You can always correct your aim a little. As I said before, there is always room for improvement.

Great athletes know this and are very coachable. Most people don't look at correction; they look at failure. Good coaching can change that and help people see what they have to do to succeed.

The letters I write are aimed at the vision of where I want that person to go. People need to know what they are being coached toward. Any correction I suggest is aimed toward that vision with the goal of continuous upgrades until the vision is achieved. You can't coach or be coached successfully without a vision or a goal to strive toward. The fact that I single someone out for coaching doesn't mean that person has failed. It means there is some area where that person is not meeting the mark, which is true for each one of us. We all have weaknesses. We all want to reach our goals, and coaching is a big part of doing that.

The goal is to encourage employees to continue honing what they have already mastered and then move on to the next opportunity. It starts with a vision of where we are going as an organization, then for your department or division, then what I need from you personally. I ask where your division is going, what are your strengths, what's working, what isn't, and what we need to do to achieve your goals. I offer examples of what other managers have done to reach their visions. Finally, I offer my support, and I mean it.

Everyone who gets a letter is asked to write one back. I show the letters to my boss and set up meetings between the person being coached and my boss. Some people have been afraid this process would ruin their careers. Instead, it actually helps people's careers. My boss isn't stupid. He knows what's going on with my top people. He knows the issues they struggle with. Now he knows they are working on the issues that stand in the way of greatness. Coaching works because the people above you have gone through it themselves.

It can go both ways. You can ask your supervisor for coaching. Maybe you don't phrase it that way. Just let your boss know it's OK to intervene if he or she see something that needs correcting. Sometimes that's all it takes to open the door to a better relationship.

I'll tell you a couple of stories about people I've worked with in a coaching relationship. Both of these were before Ford, by the way.

One manager had a real problem with being macho and it was preventing him from receiving any further promotions. He was a great manager in many ways; he just couldn't get past this one personal issue. It was the central issue in a letter I wrote him. He was petrified when I told him I was giving the letter to my boss. He just knew it was curtains for his career. Well, the CEO acknowledged he had had similar problems with being macho. It turned out to be a very rewarding experience for this person, whose career got back on track as a result.

Leaders need to drive people toward a vision of their leadership. Help them reach that next level. I had one leader who criticized everyone and every program at every meeting. I wrote him a letter about it, and it was the first time anyone had told him this, and he changed completely. A leadership letter can be a blueprint for the future. What issues get in the way of the vision? How do we get from here to there? The letter should include concrete initiatives to get there.

Coaching will build your strengths and align your value systems. This is where the rubber hits the road for leaders. You can't coach everyone. You may only be able to coach one person each year. It is better to coach one person well each year than attempt to coach many and miss the mark.

Put each person in the right spot. People have things they are not capable of doing. And you can't change that with coaching. What you can do is find four or five things a person is good at and make them great at those things.

I had a guy once who had long nose hair; everyone made fun of him behind his back. I told him to get a weed whacker for his nose, and I was the first one to say anything to him about it.

You might think such personal things are off limits. They aren't. Anything that gets in someone's way, that prevents him or her from achieving their vision is fair game. A lot of times you can form positive ongoing relationships by getting in someone's face. Tell people what they need to hear. We all respect the person who will tell us, discretely, when our fly is open or we have pizza sauce on our face.

Telling people the truth is a very simple concept, a core value that most of us hold. It can be applied to nose hair or bad tires.

When Jacques Nasser had to make the decision whether or not to talk about the tires, I said "Jacques, read our values. This is about the decision you have to make about whether to go on TV. If the customer is job number one, the decision has already been made."

Our values almost always start with what our parents taught us. This is the baseline we come back to. Our behavior is dictated by our value systems: personal, corporate, business, customer, supplier, third-party, and competitors. If you say, "This is what we are going through today. How do our values inform the decisions we need to make?" you'll be on your way to making the right decisions and implementing the correct behaviors.

How do you get the people that you are responsible for to look at these behaviors and make them part of their value systems?

According to a recent survey, 71% of our people live in fear. Our culture today includes a lot of mistrust and fear. People want to believe that I have conversations with Jacques and other people throughout the company. They don't believe it, though, because there is a lot of mistrust that has been built up over time. When I talk about getting rid of the silos and operating and communicating as one company with one set of shared goals and values, people don't believe me. They say, "Don, you don't know how it really works here yet."

My own people don't believe certain conversations even take place. How do you transform that? You start by examining the causes of this disbelief. It is a result of the fear that is caused by a weak unaligned value system.

If you coach to the right behaviors, you can, in fact, change the behaviors of your team. Appropriate coaching leads to properly aligned values. You see, when you change behavior, you also change values and culture. A corporate culture is created by behavior and experience. Observe the behaviors and you understand the culture. Change the behavior and you transform the culture. That is the only way to change a culture.

Cultures change through experience. How can we cause an experience change here at Ford? Developing and living the values. There is nothing on this piece of paper that needs to change. Carlos Mazzorin is developing these for his people in South America. The same thing is occurring in Europe. They are taking this and turning it into their own piece of paper that anyone on the line can understand and implement.

It is important that everyone at Ford have a copy of this piece of paper, or one like it. Everyone in the organization should be able to coach the values.

As management, we need to be very clear on what our values are. We can use that clarity to identify behaviors that need to be changed to support our values. As leaders, if we announce or publish a set of values and then do not change our behaviors to be consistent with our values, employees will notice that and will become cynical, or should I say, more cynical. If, however, a company's leaders alter their behavior to support their values, employees will notice that also and they will follow because they want to do the right thing, they want their behaviors to match their values and the company's values. When leaders exhibit the behaviors that the values call for it leads to a radical realignment with employees who notice what we do and want to do the same. You will be watched to see if you live the value system. You can't preach work/life balance and then brag to everyone you only sleep two hours a night.

You learn values from experience. When you change your values, you change your experience. When you change your experience, you change your culture.

Our corporate values really stood up well with the tire situation. The way we handled that led to pride. It led to truth. Make no mistake, though, our value system proved that having a consistent message and a consistent set of values works. That is breakthrough leadership from the standpoint of values.

I promised to talk to you about inner conversations. As we sit in these meetings all the time, do you ever experience the inner conversation of "What's going to happen next? Why is he saying that? What groceries do I have to get tonight on the way home? I have so many other things to do. I hope my kid is doing well on that test today."

Do we all have inner conversations? This room is full of inner conversations. I can hear them without listening. They track your true feelings. They can keep you in the moment. They can also take you out of the moment.

There is no fear with inner conversations. No one can look inside and find little Donnie Winkler. He's in there, though. He was beat up as a kid. He was German and dyslexic and lived in a post-war community where being German wasn't that great. You can't see that kid. I can BS all I want in there and you can't see it or hear it. Little Donnie is safe in there.

It can be tortuous, though. It can drive you crazy. It can hold your ego back or put it out further. It can be your conscience. Your values are in that conversation. That little person in there can help you or hurt you. Take that inner place and let it be safe for others as well as for you. Get the inner voice to be positive, not just the kid who's been beat up and picked on and doesn't trust anyone.

I'm going to tell you a story about my inner voice. I was 17. I was a senior in high school, in a town very heavy into football. People lived, ate, and breathed football. I was a right tackle. Now, right tackles, unless they get a fumble, don't ever get a chance to touch the football.

Our previous season we were undefeated, and I was getting a big head because I had been one of the few juniors who had played on the starting team all year. So I walked in at the beginning of the season a little overweight and said, "Coach, I have a play. This could be a secret touchdown play." He asked me what it was. I told him that if you take the right end and move him to the other side, the right tackle becomes eligible to catch a pass. I told him nobody would ever expect a 225-pound guy to go out there and catch a pass and run for the winning touchdown.

My inner voice told me this would make me a star, take me from going to the Naval Academy to USC or some other football power. They'll really notice me now.

So nothing happened. We played a few games, and then all of a sudden, the coach said we were going to practice it. He changed it a little. I was supposed to go a couple of steps out and the quarterback would throw me a little buttonhook pattern pass. I was supposed to catch it and fall down on it. No touchdown run. No glory.

So he told little Donnie Winkler this, the guy who was always on second team at everything his whole life, second reading group, third reading group, and wanted the big time. Four more games go by, and he never calls the play. I'm wondering when he is going to use this. After a few games this becomes my whole life and I want to go, "Ooh ooh, call it coach."

So there we were, third down, biggest game of the season. We're down on the 15-yard line and need two yards for a first down. The clock is running down. The play comes into my best friend, the quarterback. He called the play: thirty-six tackle pass on two. I'm stunned.

That little voice started perking up. When you play football, that inner voice doesn't do much except go, "Ooh, ouch" when you get hit. The voice started in slow motion, "This is your big chance." When I was in the huddle I looked up and all I could see was the goal post. We were losing by three points; we needed two yards for a first down. Billy looks over at me and says, "OK thirty-six tackle pass on two."

I could barely move. I could see that goal post. I could see my destiny. My voice was saying, "Donnie this is your big chance for stardom. This is it. You're going to make it happen. This is it."

I got in position, set, hut one, hut two, three, all in slow motion. I went out three, four steps and the ball hit me in the back of the head.

Ladies and gentlemen, that little voice you have, that you have had your whole life, it can betray you or it can keep you in the moment. That learning experience for me took me out of the moment. Psychologists would say that was an ego trip. It was an inner conversation between Don Winkler and Donnie Winkler that didn't keep me in the moment. So as you go through this today, all I can ask is for you to get your inner conversation totally in the moment so that greatness can occur.

Many things have to come together to achieve greatness. Keeping your inner voice positive and in the moment is one of them. Having a positive, constructive set of values and acting accordingly is another. If you want to cast a shadow that others can walk in to become great themselves, you need to be mindful of every action because everything you say or do will be noticed and your example will be followed.

If you want your team to achieve greatness, you need to coach greatness. If you see greatness as the exception that only a few can achieve then that is how it will be in your group. If you set greatness as the standard, if you expect it and enable it, you may just get it. A lot of people have greatness locked inside just waiting to be discovered. Finding it and enabling people to achieve it is your job as a leader and a coach. Really, that's what coaching is all about.

I've always tried to hire people who are smarter than I am. Don't be threatened by greatness in the people who work for you. There are no great leaders of mediocre people. Hire the best people and help them become even better. That is the essence of leadership.

Going from good to great is difficult. It is possible. It is worth it.