“When I’m faced with a problem,” says Steven McMillan, chairman and the CEO of Electrolux Corporation, “the odds are that I’m going to solve it.” These are positive words and McMillan has good reason to be optimistic. In the three years since he took over the number one spot at Electrolux, the company has achieved three straight record years in sales. On top of this, 1,000 branch managers in the U.S. and Canada have racked up an impressive 25 percent rise in income.

On the profit side, the picture is even rosier for McMillan’s door-to-door army. “But,” warns Harvard Business School trained management specialist McMillan, “I am as capable as any other CEO of making any set of numbers look good in the short run. The real test of the success of my management team is what happens three years from now.”

“I may be right, and then again, I may at times be entirely wrong in my solutions to problems,” McMillan says with a candor that characterizes his total professionalism, “but I take tremendous comfort in knowing that I am capable of dealing with issues.” This then is Steve McMillan’s motivational forte. He knows he doesn’t have to worry about problems, that he can face them head on because he has a methodology for dealing with them. “The most frightening thing in the world is not knowing what to do next,” he says.

His position as the top decision maker seems to have benefited both the CEO of Electrolux and the sales team he supports. When asked how he motivates others around him, McMillan is quick to point out the weaknesses of pep rallies alone: “We do a lot of what I call the hype meetings like the big rally we did recently in Bermuda. I was even the first CEO of this company to enhance the image of the Electrolux mascot, the tiger, by coming out on stage with a real 500 pound Siberian named Bombay. I stick my head in his mouth and everything. So I agree that there’s a place for hype. But without a methodology for solving problems and facing issues, the hype alone will backfire.”

In this exclusive interview with PSP, chairman and CEO McMillan discusses his motivation techniques and his methodology for success.

PSP: Who motivated you when you were young?

Steven McMillan: My parents were very supportive yet had high ambitions for me. But I always felt that most of the motivation I had came from within. I actually feel that if you want to motivate yourself the best way is to go out and try to motivate someone else.

PSP: Did you have any experiences as a boy growing up that helped to motivate you?

Steven McMillan: I remember feeling very concerned about making transitions when I was young. Moving from junior high to high school, moving to a new town, I wondered would I be as popular as before, would I have any friends, would I be a good a ball player? I was nervous that the competition would be much harder and then I wondered would I fail? Fear of failure was a great motivator for me.

PSP: How did you overcome that?

Steven McMillan: Well, when I went from a high school that graduated 120 people to a university with 15,000 students, I focused on my own need for self-expression – which was really a need to have an impact on things. The great fear was that I was now out of my league. This was even stronger when I went to the Navy Supply Corps school where I had classmates from Yale, Harvard, and Princeton. They read the New York Times from front to back every day. It was the biggest newspaper I had ever seen. I was very intimidated by these students but I was still motivated to find my position.

PSP: What has been the most motivating experience so far in your life?

Steven McMillan: I remember one in particular when I was up in Edmonton in Canada. I’d only been up there as president of Electrolux Canada for six months or so and was not acclimated to the extreme cold in the winter. One morning we were going to drive out to a branch where I had to give a little morning talk which was supposed to be inspirational and motivational. We had to get up at five in the morning to get there in time and I remember having a sense of depression about having to get up that early in the pitch-dark and drive an hour and a half in the bitter cold. I got up and showered and when I came out of my room, I must have had the look of a totally defeated and disgusted soul. My head was down. I was dragging my suitcases:

Just as I walked through my door, a guy coming out of the room across the hall said, “Good morning, how are you?” in this tremendously upbeat, enthusiastic voice. My reaction was a typical Scrooge type and I looked up at him and suddenly remembered the wake up call I had gotten and the cheerful female voice that had said, “Good morning, Mr. McMillan, it’s five thirty and the temperature is fourteen degrees below zero – have a nice day.” And I said to myself “You’ve got to be kidding. How can you have a nice day if it’s fourteen degrees below. I could die just walking to the car.” But this guy was so upbeat that I took a shot and said, “You’re up awfully early, aren’t you?” And he answered, “Yeah, I love to get out there before the sun’s up.” “Do you realize,” I asked him, “that’s fourteen degrees below zero and you could die of wind-chill in probably a minute or two out there this morning?”

And you know what he said to me? He said. “Yeah, I’m going to have to move quick today.” We then walked down the corridor together and got into the elevator on the eighteenth floor, and then stopped on the sixteenth, and this guy got in who looked just the way I must have looked when I came out of my room. And we both greeted him enthusiastically, as we did another on the twelfth floor and one more on the eighth, and one on five. When we got off at the lobby the bellhop said to us, “Boy, you guys must have had some party last night!” The enthusiasm of this one man had rubbed off on all of us and we were all ready to “move quick out there.” I think the moral is that you can impact other people and very frequently it involves no more than the positiveness of your own attitude.

PSP: What is positive thinking to you?

Steven McMillan: To me it is to always look for the good things. If there is a single message that I try to communicate and to live by it is that you’ve got to find the positives. It is totally a waste of your time to dwell on the negatives even though they will always be there.

PSP: What do you do with the negatives?

Steven McMillan: There are problems that we deal with all the time. We don’t ignore them. We have to face those problems head on. But there is a difference between letting the problem overwhelm you and operating under the assumption that you will win.

PSP: So you are saying that positive thinking is more than just putting a positive face on in any situation.

Steven McMillan: That’s right. For instance, I don’t think I would be effective as a motivational speaker because I wouldn’t be able to track the results. As a CEO, I’ve got to think about my business and my people and how they are going to do two, three, five, and even 10 years from now – not just whether they are fired up immediately after a talk. They need enthusiasm, clearly, but my job is to give them much more.

PSP: At the present time, how many salespeople does Electrolux have?

Steven McMillan: Right now we have about 28,000.

PSP: How do you see your obligation for motivating those 28,000 salespeople?

Steven McMillan: Our most important obligation to motivate our salespeople is to make sure there is sufficient opportunity for them. There is nothing less motivating than a tremendous amount of rhetoric that is not supported by a genuine opportunity.

PSP: So the opportunity comes first?

Steven McMillan: Yes, The fundamental structures have to be there first. History is full of companies that overinvested in inspirational rhetoric. There has to be an economic basis so that if the salesperson is genuinely motivated and applies him or herself, and follows the steps, that the rewards will be there in the end.

PSP: And once the realistic opportunity is there, what are the next steps?

Steven McMillan: To achieve genuine motivation, you’ve got to marry several things together. First there’s the opportunity as we’ve discussed. Second, a clear business objective has to be there. Third, the how-to skills have to be there. And finally, comes the hype.

PSP: By hype do you mean sales contests and the like?

Steven McMillan: Yes. Our meeting in Bermuda that was organized by Radio City Music Hall Productions is a perfect example of hype. I think it’s fun and exciting, but alone it will not get the job done.

PSP: Is this practice of adding selling skills to the hype an Electrolux concept?

Steven McMillan: Here at Electrolux, we often say that motivation without education equals frustration.

PSP: Where do goals fit in with your motivation picture?

Steven McMillan: In the business objective – that’s where you put the goal setting. You have to make sure that the business objective is not too difficult but it also has to be defined in such a way that it stretches the individual. Our salespeople, as well as management, have a role in defining that. But if they don’t stretch themselves, they’ll never learn the process of managing themselves.

PSP: How do you know when you have been successful in motivating someone?

Steven McMillan: What I want for my salespeople is for them to find the level at which they are comfortable and then move above it. But they need to define the satisfaction they want – we are all different in what we define as success. If the tools are provided and we can stimulate meaningful action, then we have been successful. My objective is to insure that all elements of motivation are present.

PSP: Who are you more interested in, the heroes of sales, or the ordinary salespeople who are having a hard time of it?

Steven McMillan: I’m concerned about the majority of people. The superstars will always rise to the top. But we, as a company, should focus on making it more likely that the majority will raise their performances to higher levels. I want to give them something that they can use. I want to tell them some specific things that they can do to sell in this business. They all need a game plan.

PSP: What is the most demotivating thing that salespeople can do?

Steve McMillian: Worry. It is the single most unrewarding of all human emotions. It does not accomplish a thing. There is absolutely no positive result from worry yet all of us do it from time to time.

PSP: Why do you think salespeople worry?

Steve McMillan: They worry because they come up against a problem and they have no methodology for dealing with it. Worrying won’t solve a problem. But if you say. “I have identified a problem, or an issue, or here’s an obstacle we have to get over,” I’ll say, “Fine, let’s look at that from an analytical point of view. Let’s think about what our options are.” Thinking through the process is what’s important. It is very rewarding if people have a methodology for dealing with problems. This usually involves nothing more than thinking through them rather than panicking.

PSP: From your experience, do most salespeople face problems squarely?

Steven McMillan: Most explode problems way beyond what they really represent. The reason these problems really become overwhelming is because there is no methodology to define what the problem is. You cannot solve any problem without analyzing it. But worrying about it just wastes your time and energy.

PSP: And once a salesperson has learned to approach problems from this analytical point, what happens then?

Steven McMillan: Once they have learned an approach they can then solve their own problems and that is very rewarding for them and for me as a motivator. There is nothing more frightening than fear of the unknown.

PSP: What are other demotivators that you see?

Steve McMillan: Obviously the pressures of life can weigh on people. Or they can be physically tired. You have to learn how to pace yourself. And then to develop a certain comfort level in dealing with recurring situations.

PSP: When you are motivating salespeople, do you have a total picture in your mind of what you’re after?

Steven McMillan: I want the company to grow and I also want our people to grow and prosper individually. I care about them as individuals; but it would be wrong to call me a humanist because I know that if they don’t prosper, we as a company do not grow. The two are inextricably linked.

PSP: What have you learned in your years of running a direct sales company that would be helpful to other sales managers?

Steve McMillan: The importance of a broad definition of what motivation is can’t be minimized. I was very much on the hype side before. When I first started out, I thought that you just go in there and wave that flag and rally the troops. We still have hype, like the 500 pound Electrolux tiger I carry around to meetings and rallies. I stick my head in the tiger’s mouth, we fly off in hot air balloons, but I know that by itself, the showmanship won’t help sales.

PSP: What will?

Steven McMillan: Market research, improved selling skills, better problem solving methodology, management training. These are all integral parts of motivation.

PSP: Do you think that sales is a career with a high degree of self-worth attached to it?

Steven McMillan: If I were to do a survey of all the high schools in any state, I’m sure that not a lot of young people would list selling vacuum cleaners door-to-door in their top-ten priorities for the future. And not everybody is willing to pay the price to make a very high income. But in selling, it’s really up to the individual and that’s the major benefit. If I can help my salespeople to see that, then I’ve motivated them.

PSP: What is your measure of success?

Steven McMillan: I guess more than anything else, I am addicted to influence. It is very important to me to be in a position where I can have a major impact in terms of people. The motivation to expand that influence is rather constant.

PSP: Thank you.

In 1924 Gustaf Sahlin arrived in the United States from his native Sweden. He carried with him his Swedish made Electrolux vacuum cleaner, a tank type machine viewed at the time as revolutionary. Sahlin was looking for an American company that would import and sell his superior machine. In 1933, the first facility for the manufacture of Electrolux, located in Stamford, Connecticut, is the coordinating arm for 1000 branch offices which oversee about 28,000 direct sales representatives. The company currently boasts a total sales volume of a half billion dollars. Gustaf made a clean sweep!

The Electrolux Motivation Machine

When the Electrolux Corporation motivates the top performers from its sales force of 28,000, it’s no holds barred – everyone walks away excited. At two recent rallies, one at the splendid Hyatt Regency Waikiki, the other staged at Bermuda’s plush Princess Hotel, dancers, singers, and musical extravaganzas topped the bill. But don’t get the idea that it was all sit back and be motivated. With awards banquets, fireworks, and songs from the hometowns of some of the top producers, everyone got into the act.

Barnett Lipman, producer of this year’s Electrolux motivational super rallies, explains, “Our services for the convention run the gamut from theme and script development, stage direction, original lyric composition and choreography – all put together for a custom stage event relating to the Electrolux theme of ‘cleaning up a dirty town and cleaning out the competition.'” Radio City Music Hall Productions, long known for its electric and professional productions, went all out to feature state-of-the-art audio-visual and video support systems as well.

The Electrolux Hawaiian and Bermuda rallies marked a new high in motivational rallies for the purpose of rewarding a hard working bottom line producing sales force. From the DC9 or 727 chartered just a bring the show and its equipment to the rally site, to top talent performances by Loretta Lynn and Glenn Campbell, the shows never missed a beat. The awesome figures involved make an inaugural day in Washington look like a kiddy show. The cost – over one million dollars, the people – 65 for production and stage crew, and then the sales people who are the honored guests have to be worked into the entire production.

In the end, what holds the whole show together is the mimic. Music makes them cry, and gets them to their feet applauding. Music from their home towns makes them proud, and music makes them feel at one with each other. Husbands and wives, who’ve traveled to the rallies at the company’s expense, stand next to each other, sing, cry, laugh, and applaud their own and everyone else’s efforts. It makes for great memories and great motivation, too. And, in case you’re wondering how you top all of this for a dynamite finish – try two tigers flanking the chairman of the board center stage followed by a tremendous fireworks display.

A Letter To The Boss

“Recently I got a letter from one of our salesmen who had just retired after working for 32 years for Electrolux,” says Chairman McMillan: “This man took the elements of what we have to offer and he molded them to what he wanted to accomplish in his own life.” Although McMillan is sure that this salesman’s name would never have appeared on the company roster of the top ten salespeople, he is proud that his company offered an opportunity for this salesman and any others who want it to make a contribution and to live a full life. “To me,” says McMillan, “that’s the essence of what we want to do in motivation.”

Dear Mr. McMillan,

Since I retired last year, I’ve meant to write you to express my gratitude to the company. For nearly 32 years, almost half my lifetime, I was a member of the sales force and held no other job. For 18 or those years, I was an assistant sales manager and field manager. I was a branch manager for one year.

I derived great satisfaction in helping others to success. Though never in the high income brackets, my earnings were sufficient to enable me to make outside investments and retire in comfort. Electrolux offers three kinds of opportunity. One is much higher than average income, another is the opportunity for rapid advancement, and the last is the opportunity for personal freedom. I opted for personal freedom. I believe that I was most successful; I was able to live a life I wanted. What greater success could there be?

My goal in life is to travel. The joy of travel is the main binding force of my marriage. In the past years, my wife and I have visited all 50 states, every province and territory of Canada, plus Guatemala, the Bahamas, and half the states of Mexico. We have sailed around Africa, and around the world, traveled across Europe, through France, Turkey, Greece, and visited every one of them. We explored Australia’s outback, and have journeyed to China and Tibet. Thanks to Electrolux, it has been a good life and my wife and I wish to express our sincere appreciation.