Career Lessons

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The Slippery Slope of Integrity

When you see lists of the most important personal characteristics in a CEO (or senior executive), the most common criteria is impeccable integrity. Integrity is more important than past performance and/or future vision, and it is easy to understand why.

Trust is a huge factor in granting responsibility and fiduciary obligation. Most CEOs have little direct daily oversight and must be trusted to set the tone of integrity for all others in the company. The consequences of dishonesty can destroy a brand reputation, and eventually, the entire enterprise.

What is integrity? 

Integrity is far more complex than the dictionary definition of “adherence to ethical and moral principles.”

Each time I find myself losing trust in someone, I ask myself, “are the symptoms an indication of incompetence or a lack of integrity?” The actual outcome might be the same, but in my mind, a flaw of integrity is a more unforgivable sin. And rightfully it should be, because integrity issues result in problems continually being repeated and lack of a learning curve. Integrity, or lack thereof, is an embedded issue that is extremely hard to change.

My “integrity ladder” rates this trait in executives from fatal to marginal.

Stealing or direct lying for personal gain: This is a no-brainer—there is no reason to spend a large amount of time trying to figure out how to fix this issue even in the most talented individuals. Regretfully, there are organizations that value the individual’s results more than this moral principle; however, it eventually catches up with them.

When Justice Department investigators create sentencing guidelines, they often rate ‘tone at the top’ highly, which is the executive tolerance to dishonesty in return for profit. Not only should you avoid promoting this behavior, but you should also get rid of […]

By |August 4th, 2022|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Large Jobs Can Kill You

 

In the consulting services industry, companies are made up of a combination of a network of local offices doing recurring activity with repeat customers, with an occasional overlapping potential to perform larger and ‘one-off’ jobs. As companies grow in scale, they depend more and more on winning and delivering large jobs even if they come from different offices and clients. Large jobs are longer in duration and have more intense manpower loading that leads to higher chargeable time, and thus, much higher profit. Depending on the allocation process, they also absorb a disproportionate level of overhead from the regional and corporate levels.

If the company includes network of offices spread out geographically, one of the key missions of local offices is to detect and help sell large jobs through local relationships and knowledge. But those large jobs only come along occasionally for any given office. Therefore, the more geographical offices a company has, the greater probability of finding the next large job.

For larger jobs, companies often combine known local trust relations with corporate level delivery capability. Many clients would prefer to give their work to local qualified companies and known client server relationships, in order to reduce performance risk.

Branch offices, which routinely live off small and medium projects, occasionally discover and bring projects to the attention of the corporation that are above their usual scale to perform. In fact, a common strategic role of the corporation’s branch offices is to cover their costs with routine business and serve as “watch towers” for larger jobs.

When a large project is detected, the marketing resources, expenses and required systems are too much for the branch office to handle, resulting in corporate having to step in, if not take over […]

By |April 4th, 2022|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Leadership Diseases and Their Cure

Two executive leadership management styles I am occasionally requested to consult on are by-products of the base motivation of the individual leader. The problematic symptoms are very different, and one needs to address the ‘disease.’ Unless you can get the executive to understand their particular disease and have the desire to want to modify the behavior, you cannot mitigate the symptoms.

Popularity

The first disease is an underlying need to be popular while supervising people. This need is rarely admitted, but clearly manifested by actions. Executives that want to be liked have trouble making timely decisions that would upset anyone. They even go so far as to physically disappear so that decisions are delayed or solved by others. These executives rationalize that time will cure the negative emotions a decision may cause. Delayed response may even make a needed, yet unpopular, decision immaterial as it becomes stale. This is not a person who makes principled-based decisions, but one who tries to come up with the most diplomatic answer that puts them in a good light. Their decisions are made with their interest of staying popular in mind, without regard to consistency or what’s best for the company.

An executive whose personality requires approval is vulnerable to one-on-one lobbying resulting in decision reversals. I often hear when dealing with these popularity seekers, is that there is a competition to be the last lobbyist in order to be the most influential before a critical meeting. Lobbyists learn that if you cannot get the leader to a decision you want, the fallback is to request to freeze the decision to another meeting. The executive concludes that it is better to have a late decision rather than an unpopular one.

Investors don’t pay […]

By |August 14th, 2021|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Turning Fear into Success

About six months after I stepped down from being CEO of a global company for nearly a decade, someone asked me how I was doing. I said the first thing that popped into my mind: “I am celebrating sleeping again.” It was true. I was sleeping at least eight hours a night for the first time in a very long time, and it felt very different. My burden of fearing failure was dramatically lowered with the absence of the responsibility that comes with being in that position.

On the other end of the spectrum, I was coaching another CEO. I asked him how he slept, and he answered, “I have always had no trouble sleeping. Frankly, I sleep like a baby.” Eventually his company stalled, and in short order, he decided to sell his business before its value totally collapsed.

Another client requested me to talk to a promising lieutenant who seemed de-energized and unmotivated. I asked the lieutenant how he slept, and he said: “Great.” In both this and the previous case, I was stunned at these individuals’ answers. I asked myself how they could not worry at night when they had such a responsibility to make things happen? Yet, looking back, I too, was always fearful that my subordinates were not worried enough!

It made me ponder why I felt my burden of the office was so heavy 24 hours a day. I was not frozen by fear but instead motivated by it. Was fear actually an important success driver? Why did it not have the opposite reaction by freezing me in my decision making?

Since my childhood, I feared failure. It manifested itself in worry and a resultant effort not to shame myself or my parents […]

By |July 6th, 2021|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Saving Private Ryan Companies

 

Last month I had a very lucrative, but sad day.

I spent nearly four decades in the same private employee-held service sector company, the final eleven years as its CEO. Over my career, I witnessed it achieve world-class status in its focused sector of global water infrastructure. Three years ago, I left the management for an independent consulting practice but, as did other senior retirees with large holdings, retained a stock position in a multi-year sell-down allowing the company continued use of my investment capital.

Since I left the management team, the firm repeatedly told its employees of its exciting future as evidenced by its ever-growing record backlog, strategically enhancing acquisitions and improving internal efficiency. They credited much of the success to the dedication and care of employees who were also the sole owners.

But last fall, the Board quietly self-initiated a structured sales process with about a dozen self-chosen firms and sold this spring to a public company—to the surprise of its shareholders, employees and the industry. When the deal closed I benefited through my residual stock’s escalation, but it was a depressing day for me. Another mid-sized, privately held, services company was gone…this time; it was the firm to which I had dedicated my career.

As a result of the acquisition, many of the latent ambitions of both individuals and the company’s leadership, that was not possible before the sale, may now be achieved with the new configuration. The buyer is an established public company in the infrastructure space with proven leadership and better accessibility to growth capital. All this may be true, but sadly, the merger results in the rapid evaporation of my former company’s enterprise legacy and independence. And that change is irreversible. There is […]

By |May 3rd, 2021|Career Lessons|0 Comments

Finding a Support Base for Change

How many times is a new leader asked to change the status quo of the unit they inherit? If not, how many new leaders think they have to change the status quo just to symbolize taking charge?

In the course of management succession, a new leader is constantly elevated and expected to show immediate competency with equal-to-better ideas than the last person. Not only is the new leader asked to come up with a different strategy or changed environment, they are expected to carry it off with majority support as the first test of their abilities. The test sets the tone for their tenure.

Every unit can be improved in some way. The strength of one leader is usually matched by some weakness in the last individual in that position, that got less attention. So, coming up with a set of changes to ‘take charge’ is not as difficult as it would seem. When you have no good ideas to improve your market position, try re-branding with a logo or ‘refreshed’ color combinations…just kidding, as you must have something better than optics!

Seriously, change is stressful for all. It shakes the power structure into the unknown. Obviously identifying change issues that improve your business competitiveness or performance culture would be best, but you will really be remembered by whether you could sell your idea and overcome resistance to take charge. Mediocre ideas that are ‘sold’ well are superior to the greatest idea changes you never get concurrence for. New leaders, especially if coming from outside the organization, usually do not have an established constituency. Most all inherited subordinates are polite and act politically supportive in their surface behavior to a new leader. But there are a wide […]

By |May 2nd, 2021|Career Lessons|0 Comments