Friday, December 16, 2011

Get promoted, don't change your behavior - a mistake

This story is from "What to Ask the Person in the Mirror," by Robert Steven Kaplan, which discusses how to manage the complexities of senior leadership - not the complexities of business, but those of interpersonal skills, mentoring, communication and role modeling.

The CEO of a large consulting firm wanted advice regarding certain pressing strategy and leadership issues. He had spent thirty years at this company before recently being promoted to CEO. I had known him during my own career in investment banking, and had advised him at various points during his upward career climb. I liked him very much. He was always very bright and insightful. He had a very dry, sometimes off-color sense of humor. He had always been a bit of a cynic, but that was a humorous and generally appealing part of his personality.

The company was very large and - give its size and place in its industry - very high profile. The CEO called me one day and got right to the point. He was off to a "rough start" at the company, he said. First, he had done an in-person meeting with institutional investors and sell-side analysts, and he didn't think it had gone very well. In addition, he wasn't sure he had been approaching his direct reporters and company employees in the right way.... He asked whether, as a favor, I would meet with two or three of his direct reports and ask how they thought he was doing....

What I learned was that these direct reports had been thrilled that he had been named CEO. Having said this, they had expected him to recognize that he needed to behave differently now that he was CEO. The cynicism they used to enjoy now seemed inappropriate, and they wished he would stop it. For example, they didn't want him using the company town hall meetings as an opportunity to make cynical comments. They wanted their own subordinates to be idealistic about the company, and that required the CEO to show he was a "true believer." Even if it was only a role, they told me, they expected him to play it!

There was more - mostly variations on the theme of his new role. They wanted him to drop the off-color jokes, even in private settings. They thought that he needed to get in earlier in the morning. True, he had always been a late arriver - it had been the subject of much friendly banter, over the years - but they believed that because he was now the CEO, his tardiness was sending a bad signal to employees.... They suggested that he should think about driving a less flashy car to work and be a bit more mindful of his dress, even on casual Fridays. In short, they wanted him to look and act like the CEO of a conservative company.

When I sat down with my friend and relayed all of this news to him, he was both amused and perturbed. He explained that, for the past thirty years, he had never gotten any such feedback; now, all of a sudden, everybody had an opinion of how he dressed? He confessed that he thought the comments were off base, even ridiculous - and besides, how was he supposed to change his act at this stage in his life?

We had been friends for several years, so I felt free to talk to him in a fairly blunt way. He had to realize, I said, that he had made a major transition: from a 180-pound senior executive to the 800-pound gorilla the embodied the hopes, dreams, and aspirations of thousands of people. Like it or not, his every move would be closely observed, for the rest of his career. His statements would be parsed internally and externally. His moods would be observed, tracked, interpreted. How he behaved in restaurants, how he talked to the custodial staff, how he dealt with employees across the company - all would be closely scrutinized henceforth for clues to his character.

In short, he had become "role model in chief," and - I told him - this was part and parcel of accepting the job as CEO. Sure, he might feel the same as he did four months earlier, but to everyone around him, he was not the same. His words and actions all had more weight. Yes, he needed to be himself, but he also needed to recalibrate his behavior, taking into account his new weight and strength....

The good news is that, over a period of time, he took all of this feedback on board and eventually became quite comfortable with his new reality. But it definitely required a change in his mind-set.

Reprinted by permission of Harvard Business Review Press. Excerpted from "What To Ask The Person In The Mirror: Critical Questions for Becoming a More Effective Leader and Reaching Your Potential," by Robert Steven Kaplan, Copyright (c) 2011 Robert Steven Kaplan; All Rights Reserved.

I noticed something of this issue in my own experience, when I was hired as a senior executive in a tech company some years ago. I soon learned that the time I arrived in the morning became a subject of discussion around the office. My first reaction was to point out that I was usually the last one to leave except for the night operations team. But the point was that people looked to me as a role model. In this company, people arrived at 8am, and a VP arriving at 8:30 or 8:45 was notable.

The transition from individual contributor and manager causes the same need to recalibrate. You are allowed to criticize management, strategy, direction, etc., when you are an engineer. It's part of the camaraderie of the workplace. But when you are promoted, you are management. The same criticism sends a very different signal - that of disloyalty or lack of commitment. Take it from a cynic!

So, if you like the way you are, and you get moved up into a new level of the organization, prepare to change anyway.

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