Category Archives: Career

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Those Thin Blurred Lines

The more I watch this year’s election unfold — especially the Presidential Debates — the more I am reminded of that old axiom I wrote about early in the life of this blog, “Our greatest strengths are our greatest weaknesses.”

Campaigning for office is no small trick.  A candidate enters the race with a set of convictions, values,and ideas, as well as a personal communication style and inescapable personality quirks.  That individual has to maintain authenticity while winning support from those who might not be all that easy to convince. We play by the rules in a democracy of representation, where majority rule determines our elected officials and they determine our laws, ostensibly voicing the will of the people.  Yet we also seek leadership from aspiring candidates and those elected, to help the electorate understand and embrace new concepts and styles they may not initially support, but leaders believe they may come to support.

How jolly is that?  Be yourself, but not so much that non-supporters rule you out, then enact the will of the people, while helping guide them to points of view they don’t necessarily embrace.  Lots of contradiction.  You’d wonder why anyone would want to do it — yet hardly unique to electoral politics.

Anywhere there are people, there are politics.  If you don’t think you have office politics all around you on the job, perhaps you work under a cone of silence.  There are politics in families, politics in communities, politics among friends.  Our very individuality — those special and defining ideas and elements that make us unique — ensure that we will not always agree with one other individual, let alone a pack.  John Stuart Mill famously wrote about the Tyranny of the Majority, one of the more challenging aspects of democracy, where a single brave voice is sometimes necessary to dissent from common agreement and be willing to be right, however unpopular.

And there you have it, the individual in conflict who has to win support, yet be true to self or risk critique of being a phony.  That individual — whether President Obama, Governor Romney, Vice President Biden, or Representative Ryan — knows most of all that their greatest strengths are surely their greatest weaknesses.  As I have watched them in the debates, well-prepared but under extreme pressure, I have seem them dart in real-time between polar opposites, showing us who they are and what they think, but attempting to course correct for acceptable balance where too much polarity will ensure ultimate failure.  Here’s a short list of what I am seeing push and pull for the proper outcome, like so many other people I know in uncountable contexts:

Confidence vs. Humility.

Courage vs. Recklessness.

Introspection vs. Salesmanship.

Creativity vs. Predictability.

Flexibility vs. Resolve.

Idealism vs. Realism.

Humor vs. Gravitas.

Accountability vs. Deniability.

Talking vs. Listening.

Watching vs. Acting.

Thinking vs. Doing.

Responsiveness vs. Perspective.

Candor vs. Diplomacy.

Attributes as well as ideas always create balancing acts, with true and effective balance so rare, so hard to find.  Perhaps that’s why it is easy to point the finger at our elected officials with accusations of their flip-flopping and being two-faced.  They try to be themselves, yet they try to appeal to those who might find them objectionable — just like the rest of us in our working and non-working interactions.

No one wants to elect or work for a hypocrite or a say-anything, do-anything, be-anything competitor.  Yet maybe we are missing some of the point, that there are those among us who can find balance, slide across the middle and back again, and master the manner of dialing back some of their strengths while bolstering their weaknesses as one and the same act.  Tough to even think about, but where you see a true winner, it is possible you may be seeing someone so in touch with their diverse attributes that they cause you to embrace the unfamiliar and unsuspecting in ways you hadn’t imagined.  Call that person a master politician — or someone who knows how to lead by bridging the resistance of those around them and inspiring the imagination that builds a following.

What are some of the Yin-Yang qualities that you observe in the candidates, good and bad?  In those with whom you work?  In yourself?  Please share them, let’s see what the list looks like when we build it together as recognition, with a keen focus on impact, implication, and outcome.  Where style is content, look for the bridge to consistency and authenticity.

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The Art and Science of Coaching

Most great athletes wouldn’t think of stepping into competition without a coach, both in practice running skill drills and on the sidelines during an event for strategy and encouragement.  Where you find a great business leader, there is often a similar proxy — a mentor helping guide them, either a current boss, a past boss, or a colleague who just cares enough to help.  When you want a coach and aren’t lucky enough to have a mentor, where can you turn?  Some have tried executive coaches, paid professionals hired to fill the role, sometimes successful, sometimes not.  Because I find the role of being a mentor the most satisfying aspect of my career, I have taken up an interest in coaching over the past few years and learned through experience some stuff worth sharing.

John Vercelli, with whom I teach the Executive Coaching Workshop at Coaches Training Institute, recently sent me an article from Human Resources Executive that largely captures why we created our new program.  The article, by Andrew R. McIlvaine, pretty much says everything I was intending to write in a post here, not the least of which is:

Too many executive coaches lack the business experience necessary to help clients.  But others say such experience isn’t necessary to effect real change — and in some cases, it may even be a hindrance.

John and I are somewhere in the middle (surprised, huh?).  We believe it is virtually impossible to be an executive coach if someone hasn’t developed empathy for the job of the executive.  Yet we also believe that just because someone has significant executive experience, that may not qualify them to be a world-class executive coach.

That’s why we decided to lead the Executive Coaching Workshop together, and are having a blast doing so.  John is a longtime member of the faculty at CTI and now serves as Director of Corporate Programs.  I have taken courses at CTI, but I am not a certified coach.   I have immense respect for the work of the coach, but that’s really John’s expertise as one of the senior curriculum designers for CTI.  My role in this program is to help prepare a new wave of coaches to step into the corporate arena by placing them in real world simulations that illustrate the weight of walking in an executive’s shoes.

We can no more substitute a lifetime of making business decisions in a few intense days of training than we can alter the personality of someone who doesn’t appreciate empathy to exhibit it.  What we can do is paint a picture of what high level business decision-making is like day-to-day as well as year to year, and how a good coach can add value to that decision-making by helping frame the context of situations as a resource and sounding board rather than an “answer machine.”  The combination of John’s co-active creativity and my goal oriented pragmatism — both tempered by true commitment to human potential and respect for the individual as well as the team — seems to be working.  Here are a few things we have learned in the initial trials:

1. Role-Playing Creates Memorable Models: When we take prospective executive coaches and load them up in exercises with the burdens of time bound goals, intense competition, market forces, unforgiving shareholders, management hierarchies, and corporate politics, they start to understand the client by becoming the client.  Of course this is no substitute for the reality of the client’s struggles, but it’s a good start down a path toward empathy.  If you have a little high-octane improv you want to try out, there’s nothing quite like giving your material a no-fault test run.

2. Intellectual Curiosity Can’t Be Faked: If you want to cheer people on, you need to be interested in what they do.  As obvious as it may sound, an expressed interest in business is prerequisite to being a recommended executive coach.  Reading the Wall Street Journal regularly, digging into corporate annual reports, subscribing to industry email newsletters, participating in webinars — all of these help to build a shared vocabulary around profit and loss, return on investment, and growth opportunities.  Where prospective executive coaches don’t find the subject matter naturally interesting, easy flowing dialogue is not easy.

3. It Takes a Toolkit: There is no single path to success for the executive, and there is surely no single connect-the-dots methodology for successful executive coaching.  The dynamics of today’s business environment are fierce and opaque, creating a landscape of ambiguity that has to be constantly reevaluated and balanced.  There is no reward without risk, and helping the executive to consider risk requires an establishment of trust and credibility that constantly has to be reinforced.  We believe empathy is possible through extrapolation of life experience, but thin analogies will only get you so far.  Experience and knowledge compound over time to broaden the context of dialogue, convincing us that process is your friend to the extent you have the personal resources to chart new paths under immense pressure.

How deep can organizations go with coaching?  A recent post in Psychology Today suggests that even a CEO can benefit strong from an executive coach, although building that level of trust and empathy is no small task.  The point is that everyone can benefit from a sounding board, and in a perfect world everyone would have one that embodies a level playing field of shared knowledge.  Since that business utopia is unlikely to emerge anytime soon, we think great executive coaches will be increasingly in demand, but like anything worth the money, the difference between good and great can be considerable.

The science of coaching is most likely to be revealed through improved business results, the scoreboard of performance upon which the client’s metrics will be formally evaluated.  The art of coaching may seem more abstract, as each coach will undoubtedly develop his or her own style for working with the client to achieve the anticipated metrics, but without concrete improvements in financials, style won’t much matter.  John and I believe you can’t have one without the other, and it is the integration of this vision that motivates us to help fill that toolkit.

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A Little More on Loyalty

Following up my last post on the strange phenomenon of willing senior-level turnover, one of my colleagues suggested I expand on the following:

How do today’s companies inspire, and enact, loyalty within the shifting parameters and instabilities of the contemporary business world? This is the question that gnaws at me.

It really is a quandary in the world of “at-will employment.” Downsizing, right-sizing, presumed right-sizing, grading, rating, ranking, bottom 10% trimming (yuck!), all of these are the strident tools of Management Consulting—not to mention Fear and Loathing in the Workplace, to borrow from the late Hunter S. Thompson. But what are the tools of inspiration, engagement, and leadership for everyday folks?

Many of us remember the phrase Getting to Yes from the 1981 tome by Roger Fisher and William Ury about straightforward negotiation. Let’s try to eke out a pathway for Getting to Loyalty, or at least identify the mismatched needs that most open the door to conflict. Here’s the rub as I boil it down from my experiences—the priorities of individuals and companies in the hiring decision funnel are not necessarily aligned.

When I coach an individual on the job-changing decision, I ask him or her to focus on three core needs in the following order before pulling the trigger, those things that I think matter most in building a long-term career:

1) What you do—is the work itself compelling, satisfying for the sacrifices you will make, a set of diverse tasks that will lead to continual growth and learning?

2) Who you do it for—is your boss sane when it comes to managing authority, a reasonable mentor, and a decent leader?

3) How much will you be compensated—is it fair pay for what you produce, or would you be valued more highly elsewhere given conditions 1 & 2 are equal. Note that I put pay level in position 3 of 3, when it will almost always be the #1 tactic someone uses in trying to poach you. You are likely committing about half of your waking hours. Beware the trade, Mephistopheles.

In juxtaposition, here’s what I think most companies focus on in the final offer process, not necessarily thinking long-term, sometimes just filling a box with a warm body to knock down a set of tasks:

1) Are you competent—does the individual arrive with the necessary skills to do the job?

2) Are you affordable—will you create rather than consume value given how much you are paid?

3) Are you a culture fit—do your needs, work style, and world view remove or add friction to the work environment.

If you agree with those contrasting three points as a premise, you can see where loyalty can become an issue, because both sides don’t want the same thing, beginning with tenure and commitment. The individual is idealistic, human, fragile, creative, hungry, in search of self-realization and interpersonal relationships, emotional bonds that can be reciprocal. The company is pragmatic, an inorganic construct that is valued on metrics by objective third-party measures that are entirely unforgiving of missed opportunities in the form of creative destruction. Individual rewards can be intrinsic (good feelings) as well as extrinsic (take home pay), while corporations and their owners are rewarded on a much simpler scorecard by the optimized deployment of capital and management of risk, often avoiding complex human interplay in pursuit of a level playing field and legal fairness.

You can’t have a puzzle without puzzle pieces, but getting the puzzle pieces it fit in real-time is no small challenge. Hence the nuts and bolts that often don’t snap into place:

• You want interesting and fulfilling work. The company wants you to do what you have proven you do best. You may want to grow, they may want to pigeonhole you.

• You think you’re worth more. They want to pay you less, but more than that, not disturb the status quo for the pay grade into which you fit. If you get a raise, others will come asking, no matter how quiet you promise to be. Leaks are everywhere, because confidential knowledge exchange inside companies is a currency all its own.

• You want to be you, not wear a suit of conformity. They say they want out-of-the-box thinkers, but only if they play nicely. People are who they are, not who the company wants them to be. Both individuals and companies know they must change to survive, but naturally resist it. Creativity is not nice.

Starting to see the problem about how hard loyalty is on both sides of the equation? Now let’s think about some ways to close the gap. Let’s go outside the corporation for a proxy, to those we love rather than those beside whom we labor.

Any sense of loyalty within a family or among friends has less to do with a verbal pledge than it has to do with shared values. We don’t choose our families, but we choose our trust levels, often on the basis of belief sets. We do choose our friends, initially on the basis of common interests, but over periods of time those interests bridge to commonalities of caring. When values are shared and reinforced, bonding is enhanced, we have reason to heal more quickly from conflict. When values are misaligned, it is much less painful to sever a relationship, sometimes with notions or actions that can be punitive.

Values are not necessarily unique to people (and no, companies are not people, if you think that, you never worked for a real one). Too many companies state their values in their mission statement, then file it in Human Resources or post it somewhere obscure in the About Us or Recruiting sections of their website.

Believe it or not, some companies take their values very seriously. I have worked for companies where core values were a big deal and discussed all the time, and I have worked for those where they never came up except for copy approval in a brochure. You can often tell when you hear senior executives speak publicly about their companies, they lead by example and choose their words deliberately not for public relations, but for accurate representation of the company culture they champion. They know a company is just an artificial bureaucracy meant to produce profit, but they want it to be more and are willing to reach beyond the bounds of the normal to make that happen. If you don’t see a reflection of the values that matter to you in the vision of a company’s leading evangelists, I promise you it won’t get any better deeper in the organization.

Values—integrity, honesty, customer service, creativity, responsibility, intelligence, diversity, compassion, respect—can’t be faked. If a company treats its public image as a distinct entity from its actual operating behavior, turnover will be high. That might be okay for you if all you want is a paycheck for as long as it lasts, but just like a company cannot be something it is not, you cannot will it to be something it only pretends to be. You need to know what those values are, and whether they are words or realities. If you get a fit, there’s a chance that loyalty can happen. At the very least, the relationships you build will be more likely to follow you through your career than the accrued value of a pension.

A final word for now on values, loyalty, knowing when to stay and when to go—one of the first truly important maxims I learned in business was that given a choice, most employees don’t quit jobs, they quit bosses. Let’s end there.

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Built to Launch?

I aspire in this post to be among the elite—one of the few business bloggers on the planet currently not commenting on Marissa Mayer becoming CEO of Yahoo. I have never met Marissa, but her reputation speaks strongly for her. I wish her well because I always want good people to succeed, and in this case I also want to see Yahoo succeed. I hope she reads my article about Yahoo from last year that predated her last two predecessors and figures out a way to restore much-needed competition to the landscape of search. Hmm, seems I’m writing about her. Okay, enough said. Got get ’em, Yahoo! Stop.

Now my real topic for the week—not surprisingly, also about succession.

Venture investors Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz have been steadfast in their support for keeping Founder/CEOs at the helm of the companies they back, from early blog posts on their site that state their philosophy to more recent comments in the Wall Street Journal that reinforce their sometimes contrarian assertions. Not only do they believe most deeply in the Founder/CEO success model, they have championed multiple class shares that keep CEOs in authority with majority control even without majority ownership. Their point of view is clear, consistent, and well-argued—and thus far their financial returns in aggregate have been extraordinary. They want vision, they want independence and long-term creative thinking, and they want continuity.

I am not sure I have an absolute opinion yet on absolute power for a start-up CEO; we’ll have to see how those play out over the next ten or twenty years. I do worry that without senior team loyalty and continuity, it may not matter whether a CEO stays or goes. Teamwork is what matters in today’s intellectual property centric companies, and if your team is not stable, I wonder if your company can remain so. Surely new blood is a great infusion when parsed appropriately, but it needs to be in balance, at equilibrium with a set of players we can count on.

What about the top-tier executives, perhaps a level down, who seem to jump freely from ship to ship, following their own personal muses, particularly after liquidity gives them the ability to set themselves free? Is this good for companies and long-term shareholder value, for companies with massive capitalization that are taking on investment—public or private—ostensibly with some hope of being Built to Last?

Clearly within our pressured and fragile economy, the bonding relationships between employers and employees have become increasingly tenuous. “At-will employment” is not just boilerplate in an offer letter, it means what it says, that jobs are temporal. Employees not under contract may depart a gig when they wish without much obligation, and employers may equally freely dismiss them (to the extent those decisions are not discriminatory) without much warning or explanation. Companies are predisposed to protect earnings and cost-cutting can be a tactic to achieve those goals, the favor of which gives employees good reason to always be in the market. Although there are any number of topics I can extract from that thread and will do so in the future, that is not my key focus here. This is not about everyday turnover and the anxiety it creates, it is about senior level turnover as a litmus test for investors.

Reality is, a lot of high-profile employees in high-profile start-ups seem to jump ship early these days. I am not so sure that they are cashing in as much as their attention spans or personal desires lead them from one thing to the next. Some examples:

• Two of Twitter’s co-founders who served as CEO left the job and their day-to-day roles, although one returned, not as CEO, but as head of product. The third co-Founder also left day-to-day responsibilities.

• Facebook’s most recent CTO, who joined the company in 2008, departed voluntarily almost immediately following the IPO. Facebook also lost an extremely high-profile CFO in 2009, and a number of other prominent C-level executives have churned through in the years leading up to the IPO.

• Groupon’s former COO, a Silicon Valley veteran brought in to steady the ship, spent about a year on the job day-to-day before moving to an advisory role.

• Yahoo continues to make headlines with five CEOs in five years, although the situation here is different. The last one to leave on his own timeline was media veteran Terry Semel, who preceded the five. Perhaps more curious at Yahoo is the level below CEO, where the turnover has been even more active, voluntary or otherwise.

• Google is now being celebrated as iCEO University, for which it has reason to be proud with strong executives like Sheryl Sandberg, Tim Armstrong, Dick Costolo, and now Marissa Mayer all willingly accepting significant challenges. My sense is this is sustainable as long as founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin stay on the job (guided by the advice of Eric Schmidt), but at some point the spinning off of entrepreneurs may take a toll as it did at once great legendary giants like Sun and Silicon Graphics (also keep an eye on HP).

It is hard to fault someone with talent and wealth for leaving a position with an “old company” to tackle a brand new start-up concept. They have the creativity, they have the yearning, and they can absorb the personal risk. Yet these aren’t exactly old, mature companies they are leaving, even in internet time. If talent retention is critical to continuity and leadership is demonstrated by example, what does it say about loyalty to the “rank and file” millionaires of Silicon Valley hungry to pursue their dreams when so many of the top dogs or near top dogs are endemically antsy?

Can you build a company that is Built to Last when many of your brightest employees—especially those made wealthy with capital they can reinvest—are thinking Built to Jump? Should shareholders in emerging high-valuation private and public companies be concerned with the New World of high turnover that is largely viewed as the way things are? There is already risk enough in holding stakes at the high valuations these companies will need to grow into, but if these are essentially knowledge-based companies where the key assets go home to their families each night, how much should owners worry whether they come back tomorrow or start a new company that’s more fun? Are these companies Built to Last or Built to Launch—launch themselves to early prominence, and launch the careers of the stars who emerge from their ranks?

Retention and the war for talent are surely talked about a lot, but I wonder if these are just buzzwords now, if key stakeholders really are losing sleep over the next spun-off employee or just prepared to roll with the punches. For anyone who has ever led a company, the notion of culture is no small issue, and companies where the culture is strong have a heritage of continuity that gives them a shot at longevity. Do we now assume Creative Destruction is such a powerful force that short-lived companies are a norm, regardless of culture and continuity? I wonder, and look forward to checking the Fortune 500 again for a few more decades to see how this plays out—not to mention the long-term trend on aggregate net job creation we so desperately need for our economy to go the distance.

I am not suggesting that employees should stay past their welcome or interest level, and in no way would I ever want (or tolerate as a manager) any form of stagnation in the form of tenure-based retention or retention for continuity’s sake. The case I am trying to make is for a tiny bit of balance in an Old World concept known as loyalty—which has been very good to me on both sides of the desk for most of my years on the job. It has been said that in today’s world loyalty is between individuals, not within companies, and there is every reason to understand how that has come to be. Yet if companies are not loyal to employees and employees are not loyal to companies, can these kind of companies really be long-term investments for shareholders? Said another way, if the system and talent are not demonstrating loyalty and commitment, should investors?