CEO to CEO

The Unpredictable CEO’s Destruction of their Senior Leaders

What a waste when bright, competent senior leaders who report to the CEO hang back, and fail to lead their company assertively. When they tiptoe around the CEO and wait for permission to take charge. This is a particular problem for middle market CEOs, whose top executives typically rise through the ranks and have not held senior management positions at a number of companies and developed confidence about taking initiative at the highest levels.

Mid-market firms have small leadership teams but must get a lot accomplished. This requires all top team members to lead with confidence, working with each other as well as with their CEO.

Part II: Where’s the Boss? Driving Results in a Meeting

Last week I ranted a bit about how CEOs shouldn’t listen to the “time-wasting” bad rap that meetings have, but instead should make their meetings powerful, where they leverage the collective wisdom and experience of their top teams. This week I’m enumerating specific techniques to make meetings produce real results.

Specific Techniques to make meetings “work”

The key to making meetings incredibly productive is having the CEO (or a powerful executive on the team) require all meeting participants to follow these rules:

1. Every participant must prepare before the meeting. If everyone has received and read the handouts, there is no need to read them together at the start of the meeting. Your most disciplined execs will do this, so please don’t punish them by making them sit through the same material again because an undisciplined executive didn’t—even if it’s you, the CEO.

Debates without Decisions

By Robert Sher

After a blissfully distracting weekend I walk into the conference room for our Monday 8am top team meeting. The view of the San Francisco Bay distracts my attention as I wait for the last VP to arrive. Ever eager and feisty, Marie starts talking about the product launch strategy with the four others, bringing up contentious points that I could have sworn we had debated twice before. I notice a barge pick up speed on the water, and my mind drifts to thinking about the 1993 movie Groundhog Day starring Bill Murray, where he had to repeat the same day, over and over again. There was something he needed to learn before time would move forward again. I wondered what I needed to learn here to stop this re-debating problem, because it is maddening.

This topic, the fifth in the series, Debates without Decisions, will take you through some common issues and techniques to get just the right amount of analysis.

Data and Analysis Obsession

By Robert Sher

I hate making mistakes. They waste money, make me look foolish and I feel embarrassed. When I wore a younger man’s clothes, I would tirelessly dig for data, and analyze away. I remember with pride a massive spreadsheet I built in 1983 that held that detailed historical data and projections for three related entities. Recalculating took ten minutes, yet I waited with baited breath to see my new financial future each time. This topic, the fourth in the series, Data and Analysis Obsession will take you through some common issues and techniques to get just the right amount of analysis. To access the entire series written to date, click here.

Some organizations get obsessed with fact finding and analysis, and they keep it up until it’s too late. Too late might mean the decision was imposed upon them. Perhaps the market window closed. Perhaps the product failed horribly before the recall decision was made, and that meant it went legal and political both. These bad outcomes are in addition to the time, cost and effort of analyzing far in excess of what reality requires.

Spurring Government Bureaucracy to Action

Around the world, governments often slow the pace of business. What should take a month frequently takes a year. What should take three months might never emerge to see the light of day.

Eric McAfee, CEO of AE Biofuels, had been waiting for more than a year for his business to get funding from a grant program that had already been passed by the State Legislature and signed into law by Governor Schwarzenegger. The alternative energy bill had provided $120 million per year for ten years in grants to advance renewable energy technology and encourage innovation by aiding green energy companies. Many Californians, delighted that the bill was passed, assumed the funds had been dispersed and were being used to make the world a greener place. But the funds were not being deployed by the agency in charge of the program. As a direct result, investors were also being stalled because they were waiting for funds to be delivered before they could determine the amount of additional funding required to complete projects.

Eager and Able

By Robert Sher

The other day I visited one of my first clients. He admitted, “Sometimes I feel a bit bored”. Bored? With nearly 300,000 square feet of facility and a record growth spurt, how could he feel bored? The answer is that he has, over several years, worked very hard at building a management team that is eager and able to handle all the day to day issues along with aggressive growth. The boredom situation is easily and delightfully solved: This CEO will spend nearly all his time living in the land of opportunity, working to uncover strategic alliances, areas for diversification, new markets, acquisitions and other big picture strategies. What fun!

Imagine a leadership team several levels deep that is eager and able to pull the company up to the next level. All the CEO does is to align their energy. This dream of a team is too rare. Too often CEOs stay awake at night thinking about how to deal with a team that has some key managers topped out, some barely able to do the minimum and others in way over their heads. Insomnia would be running rampant.

To grow to the next level, you need leaders that are eager to dive in and able to perform well. If you have them now (good job!) you’ll need more leaders to get to the level-after-next. You must always be developing leaders throughout your organization.

Heaping on the Work--but will your team keep up?

By Robert Sher

We CEOs and our top teams will have to double-time it for a while in the early recovery period until new opportunities turn into free cash flow. Simply put, we will be asking our teams to tackle new challenges without giving them new resources to offload other tasks. But will your team keep up?

Encouraging Hidden Leaders

By Robert Sher
A tragic event occurred that I cannot get out of my mind. For me, writing helps process my thoughts, get them out of my head, and bring forth the lesson I need to learn. I’m hoping that if I write about the recent murder of Tom Cunningham, whom I knew and who influenced my kids and community, I’ll be able to reduce the amount of time my mind is spending thinking about it all--including times when I really need to be sleeping.

Three years ago, I discovered a hidden leader, and encouraged him. Tom was 35 years old and I wrote a letter to Tom’s bosses that made Tom feel ten feet tall. Tom was the janitor (officially the Head Custodian) of my kids’ elementary school. My kids started coming home talking a lot about Tom, and finally I inquired about who Tom was, and why my kids were so excited about the janitor. I asked a few questions around the school and of my wife and discovered that while Tom was indeed the janitor, he was in truth, a hidden leader at the school, having perhaps more influence than the principal, teachers, the PTA or any of the formal leaders.

Wrestling with a Rat

Summary: A COO is promoted to CEO just as the company goes public, with a board that has misplaced trust in an advisor that proceeds to manipulate the stock and hold the company hostage for four years. The CEO and her team fight back and keep the life-saving work of the company alive and moving forward until the Department of Justice takes the bad actor off-line. Five key takeaways are at the conclusion of the saga.

Team Fatigue

By Robert Sher
On a lovely beach vacation last month (Dillon Beach, CA) I chose to distract myself by re-reading Lord of the Rings, by J.R.R. Tolkien. Some distraction was gained, but still, it made me reflect on what I see many companies going through: A long, hard journey to achieve goals, much longer and harder than it was supposed to be.

In the trilogy (I read just one book, and watched the movies of the other two), Frodo and his team (the Fellowship of the Ring) set off to destroy an evil ring, lest it fall into the hands of a supremely evil wizard who would dominate the world. While stopping evil incarnate is a more compelling call to action than turning a profit, the techniques the Fellowship used to keep their spirits up and to keep driving forward (despite terrible odds) are useful for CEOs as well.