It's a common occurrence, a CEO leads a company to record
earnings, retires and in months, those once high-flying earnings
are dropping like shot ducks.
Observers blame the new leadership team. But most likely
the observers are wrong. It's not just the new leaders who are
screwing up. Instead, it was most likely the former CEO. Yes,
the former, supposedly great CEO. Look to him for what went
wrong — and what went wrong provides lessons for leaders at all
levels.
The reasons are clear but seldom recognized. They get
back to the raison d' etre of leadership — which is not the
performance of the individual leader but the improved results of
those being led. The problems lie in the definition of results.
For when results are defined narrowly, i.e. in strict terms of
share, margin, shareholder value, profits, organizations lose
their elasticity.
And the quality of organizational elasticity is linked to
its culture of leadership, leadership with a broader vision of
results, encompassing the necessity to hire and develop people
who lead others to get results.
So when decline follows the departure of great leaders,
the safe bet is that those "great" leaders haven't hired and
developed leaders — and so really weren't great at all, no
matter what results they got. In fact, they were quite poor.
To paraphrase Vince Lombardi on winning, getting good
leaders for your team isn't everything, it's the only thing.
The moment that you decide to hire, that very moment, is the
living, breathing future of your organization.
A curious chemistry takes place in the hiring process.
We don't just reach outward, we also reach inward. In hiring
leaders, we invariably hire ourselves — our strengths and
weaknesses. So the hand we reach out to shake is not just the
other person's hand, it's our hand. Hire to our strengths, we
hire strong leaders. Hire to our weaknesses, we hire weak
leaders.
I know a brilliant, young executive in a multimillion
dollar manufacturing company whose ambition to become CEO of
that company may founder on his maddening propensity to hire
leaders who may be good but who are none-the-less not the
very best.
That's because the leaders he hires must have what is an
unstated but at the same time real skill: the ability to curry
his favor. Those leaders are ostensibly qualified. But they
are often not the very best of the pool because they come
equipped with that extraneous skill.
Since results on his teams are also defined as the care and
feeding of his ego, that executive is hiring to his weaknesses,
so he continually makes what may ultimately turn out to be
garbage-in-garbage-out hiring decisions that can ultimately
wreck his ambitions.
On the other hand, I know another young executive, not
nearly as brilliant, but whose hiring dictum may very well get
him farther along in life.
The dictum is: Hire leaders who can not only do well in
this position but in the next position and maybe even the
position beyond that.
In other words, he hires to his strengths, his inner sense
of self-confidence, which allows him to surround himself with
people who are smarter and in some ways more capable than he —
and so is creating a rising tide of action and results that
will further his career in powerful ways.
As Steven Jobs said, "I don't hire people to tell them
what to do but to tell me what to do."
Yet hiring people who are capable of supplanting you isn't
enough. Do more. Actively develop the knowledge, skills and
careers of those leaders to give them the best possible chance
of supplanting you.
An epitaph on a 1680 New England gravestone speaks to this:
What I gave, I have.
What I spent, I had.
What I left, I lost.
By not giving it.
That can be an epitaph for failed leaders. By not giving
to your leaders, not developing their skills and careers, you
lose them, lose the opportunity to have their riches enrich
you.
Nobody is a success unless others want them to be. And
when you have a passionate desire for their success, for helping
them improve and achieve their goals, when they know that
working on your team will be a defining experience of their
career — then you will have people who want like hell for you
to be a success.
The decline following the departure of "great" leaders
indicates that those leaders were most likely control-monsters,
commanders not convincers, great at getting jobs done
themselves but not challenging others to do them.
And when those others are ignored, they become inept.
So let's take an additional yardstick to our leaders and
measure their total value, both when they're there and after
they have left. Link that value to deferred compensation,
bonuses, stock options for executives and to partially-delayed
evaluations for middle managers and supervisors — or whatever.
When leaders define their performance beyond their tenure,
they will most likely pay more attention to those two factors
that are absolutely necessary for any organization's continued
well-being: getting and developing exceptional leaders.
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2004 © The Filson Leadership Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
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