Agent of change

Chris Majer has run the gamut, beginning with political radical and ending with innovative corporate trainer, with a stop along the way as adviser to the U.S. Army Special Forces. Indeed, the founder and CEO of The Human Potential Project has taken an unconventional path to success.

The Spokane resident and Lewis and Clark High School graduate said the social revolution of the late 1960s and early ’70s inspired him. As a militant anti-war protester, he wanted to change the world.

“I originally set out into politics. That was going to be my career,” Majer said. After graduating from the University of Washington, he worked on a variety of political campaigns, including that of former Washington Gov. Dixie Lee Ray.

However, he eventually discovered politics wasn’t the agent of change he’d hoped for. “I came to realize most of the people I was working for were much more interested in getting elected or re-elected than they were in actually doing anything,” Majer said. He grinned and added, “This was a sobering realization.”

Sobering because he’d just turned 30. While his contemporaries were building careers and starting families, he’d been working on political campaigns. “I tell everybody I have a lost decade.”

About that time, Majer met a sports psychologist in a class for aikido, the Japanese martial art. This was in the early 1980s, when sports psychology was viewed by many as something like voodoo or black magic. Majer noted that the Russians and Germans were using these techniques at the time to help rack up gold medals in the Olympics.

He became fascinated with pushing the boundaries of human potential. “If we weren’t going to change the world politically, we had to change it by changing individuals,” Majer said.

He and a business partner launched SportsMind in Seattle and began working with athletes. They wove Eastern philosophy with Western psychology and physiology. Training athletes seemed a logical choice. In sports, performance is easily observed and measured, and athletes constantly strive to push themselves.

However, they discovered a flaw in the business plan. Majer said their work proved extremely effective, but they were dealing with amateur athletes. As he put it, “Great work. No revenue.”

So they turned their focus to team sports and tackled a persistent problem faced by many organizations: “You could take a group of individual players, who would be terrific, but you put them together on a team and the team would stink,” Majer said.

On to greater things

While working with USA Rugby and the U.S. Ski Team, among others, he discovered ways to change dysfunctional group dynamics and, in 1984, coined the term “team cohesion.”

He knew the methodology used at SportsMind had greater application than athletics, but he never imagined where that work would lead them: straight into the U.S. Army. The former war protester soon found himself at Fort Hood, Texas.

“This base had been tasked with innovative new ways to train soldiers. The reason they called us was because they had all these soldiers who couldn’t pass their physical fitness tests,” Majer said.

In addition, the troops struggled with low morale, increased sick calls and drug and alcohol abuse, he said.

Majer believed the problem was that the Army trained soldiers the same way it had since World War II, and those philosophies didn’t mesh with contemporary troops. The military, he believed, had lost sight of the difference between leadership and management.

“We told them, you’re never going to manage soldiers into fighting and dying for you. That takes leadership,” Majer said.

The Army awarded his company a contract to develop an experimental training program. “Six months after the program was completed, sick calls were down by 50 percent,” he said. “Drug-alcohol abuse was down 60 percent, the number of overweight soldiers down 66 percent, the average (physical fitness) test score went up 25 points, and commanders reported morale was higher.”

That success led to an exclusive contract with the Army Special Forces. While he found the work rewarding, Majer didn’t want to train soldiers for the rest of his career. He turned his attention to a more difficult game: business.

“It’s more challenging by our standards because they don’t do any real training, there’s no off-season, and there’s a vast gap in the level of competence and commitment on the part of the players,” Majer said. He also found a difference between creating a team and creating a company. “You have to go deeper than just getting people to work together.”

The second client for The Human Potential Project – the company Majer spun off from SportsMind in 1999 – put the company on the map. It was AT&T Corp., the company that was the precursor to today’s AT&T Inc. “We put 6,000 managers through this intensive program that we developed,” Majer said. “And it worked.”

In four years, AT&T’s product services division went from breaking even to generating more than $3 billion in profit, he said.

Dubbed by AT&T as Project Miracle, the success generated national attention for The Human Potential Project. Majer fielded requests from businesses all over the world.

The key is to keep it simple

Allianz Life Insurance Co. was one of them. Former CEO Mark Zesbaugh said he asked Majer to work with his senior leadership team. “It wasn’t a high-performance team,” Zesbaugh recalled. “My assessment was we had a lot of individual talent, but we weren’t working effectively as a team.”

Zesbaugh said he’d never been keen on using consultants, but he knew he needed to see changes in his leadership. “Majer brought a level of discipline to the team and helped them move forward. It was all about results.”

After the training, Zesbaugh said, “I could clearly see a different dynamic. We were able to resolve conflict much quicker.”

Likewise, Doug Berquist, vice president of strategy and organizational effectiveness at RWD Technologies, contacted Majer when his company faced significant structural changes. RWD works with companies around the world to boost worker productivity, product quality and financial performance, and Berquist wanted input as his division went through restructuring. Majer led them through a series of workshops, called “intensives,” and Berquist said his team learned to speak a common language.

“The Human Potential Project takes things down to a very fundamental level,” Berquist said. “Simple, fundamental changes can have a big impact on the corporate culture.”

Berquist said Majer and his team addressed RWD’s restructuring by focusing on how to help the team work together. It began with an intensive five-day workshop off site, including outdoor exercises. As they learned more about team building, Berquist said they discovered a successful work environment is all about managing and keeping commitments.

“We learned to clarify expectations,” he said, and for this division of the company, that translated to higher performance.

Murray Huppin, president of Spokane’s Huppin’s/OneCall, also found working with Majer and The Human Potential Project to be beneficial. When the company’s Internet and mail order division experienced rapid growth, Huppin said, “I knew my team couldn’t keep up, so I engaged Chris.”

Huppin discovered his own responsibility to manage the mood of his organization. “Chris helped me develop my fledgling CEO skills,” he said. “It can be difficult for an entrepreneur to become a CEO.”

New way of doing things

In an effort to spread the word about his findings in the realm of human potential, Majer has written a book, “The Power to Transform: 90 Days to a New You.” But just reading the book won’t transform anyone, he cautions.

“You’ve got to do the book, not read the book,” he said. “It isn’t about tips, techniques and motivation – that’s all peripheral stuff. It’s about building new practices.”

Majer also plans to conduct public workshops and seminars. But he hasn’t abandoned corporate America. He said businesses face a more daunting challenge than a struggling economy. “We’ve lost our traditional titans of industry,” he said. “We’ve got a bunch of risk-averse bureaucrats running businesses.”

He paused and shook his head. “They’re deer in the headlights in the face of this current crisis.” The reason? “We’ve fallen under the sway of analysts because they’ve got charts and graphs,” Majer said. “We get stuck thinking that’s the stuff that really matters. It doesn’t. It’s important but it’s not the stuff that matters.”

Majer’s philosophy is that the definition of “work” has changed, and business leaders need to learn new management styles.

“In the old view, work is a set of activities that we do our best to coordinate for the sake of getting things done,” he said. “In that old world what I do as a manager is supervise people’s activities. In today’s world, all it does is annoy people. Today what we call work rarely involves manufacturing anything.”

Instead, Majer says employees “design what gets made, market and sell it, keep track of it and innovate new ways to do it all. For these people what matters is commitment, not activity.”

He believes his message goes against the grain of traditional thinking and can strike a discordant note in the corporate climate he hopes to transform. He admits he hasn’t traveled far from his political activist roots.

Majer remains passionate about influencing change. “As much as it’s screwed up right now, our corporate sector is the real engine of change on the planet.”