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| Why the Boss Got Fired |
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Dr. Merom Klein, director of The Courage Institute, examines why presidents and CEOs are asked to step down. Is it just a case of great ideas but lousy execution, or is it more?
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| Dr. Merom Klein founded The Courage Institute after a long career in consulting to clients that include world leaders in biotech, computer and communications technology, engineering, military equipment, financial services, insurance and managed services, as well as government agencies. Klein earned his Ph.D. in in organizational behavior and experiential education from Temple University. Klein's book, The Courage to Act, explores the skills needed to embrace change and inspire courage in others and respond to your own personal moments of truth. It is co-authored with Klein's former professor, Dr. Rodney Napier.
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Chief executives aren't fired because they lack vision or business acumen. If you're lazy, you don't get the top spot at all. Executives aren't fired because they lack charm, the right connections, technical knowledge or aggressive determination. Ultimately, no president in the study was fired because his/her vision didn't work. They were fired because the people around them did too little too late, and their visions simply didn't come to life. They didn't have enough of the right stuff to get more than a small inner circle to execute the vision.
Ideas and execution, we've found, take different brands of courage. Ideas take the courage to defy conventional wisdom and conventional logic, listen to your own inner voice and a small inner circle of supporters and push against the grain. In Hebrew, that brand of courage is called chutzpah. It's a know-it-all, lone-wolf, brash, go-for-it attitude — to envision commercial and technical possibilities that no one else yet believes are viable.
Execution takes the brand of courage that, in Hebrew, is called omets lev. Literally, omets lev means "strength of heart." It's what happens in a family when a health crisis or financial emergency requires people to pull together, pool their collective resources, orchestrate their efforts and do more than individuals could do as individuals. Leaders with omets lev push just as hard as leaders with chutzpah. But they aren't pushing critics or cautious, detail-oriented technicians out of the way. They're drawing them in, energizing, mobilizing and orchestrating their efforts.
In one overseas biotech company it was clear that the President and his inner circle had chutzpah. They took a good idea and pushed hard enough to bring their concept to the attention of prominent investors and research partners. It took them two years to raise the capital that was needed to move the company forward from being a garage-based enterprise. Having achieved a capital reserve of over $100 million, it was time to switch from chutzpah (championing a novel and unpopular idea) to omets lev and execution.
By the time the Courage Institute was contacted, the company employed 300 scientists and engineers on two continents and its operations spanned eight time zones. The founders and the "inner circle" still had chutzpah. But they still hadn't mustered the omets lev to draw a critical mass of their entrepreneurial organisation into the inner circle.
When technical problems arose, the founders would hold court and try to work on the technical details themselves, or would send in a "swat team" of scientists who were bold and loud enough to inspire the founders' confidence. As a result, the rest of the company stopped thinking, improvising, problem-solving and challenging themselves. They waited for direction.
When one course of action didn't take them forward, the swat team and the rest of the company would point fingers at one another. The climate was contentious. Things came to a head when it was clear that a major milestone couldn't be achieved, no matter what the "swat team" suggested. It became clear that they had to find a different way of pushing, challenging and inspiring one another.
But how do you make the shift from chutzpah to omets lev? Here are some strategies recommended by the Courage Institute:
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| |  | Make sure the direction is clear. If you asked members of the inner circle, they could tell you what was mission-critical. But if you asked four scientists, you'd get at least as many answers — and one who'd say, "It varies from day to day." The President and his inner circle needed to learn how to deliver a consistent, focusing message, like a mantra within the company.
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Inspire, don't micro-manage. A system of positive reinforcement and appreciation was needed to replace the checks, double-checks and the questions that asked people to justify "why you've only accomplished X, when X+1 is what needs to be done." Ideally, that system of positive reinforcement starts at the top and works its way down. But it can also start in the middle and work its way up, down and out. And there's no law that says you can't remind people why their work is important, and serves a higher purpose than the profit motive.
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Establish codes of conduct and company ethics. "Whatever it takes" might have worked when team-mates could gather in one room, or knew one other well enough to anticipate one another's moves. But it didn't work when a group on one side of the Atlantic undid and redid work that had already been done on the other side of the ocean. The last thing that any nimble, innovative enterprise needs is bureaucracy, red tape and meaningless restrictions. But there was no way to ensure omets lev unless the right hand could rely on the left hand to keep commitments, and follow the disciplines that would enable them to orchestrate their efforts.
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| | | Control competitiveness and internal politics. "Who got the credit" had to become less important than "what got accomplished." Blame and blame-avoidance had to be eliminated from the lexicon of problem-solving. So did dividing the organization into stars and slugs. Team leaders had to be shown that some parts of the research program were more mission-critical and required more resources and more visibility than others, without making people feel that their personal value to the company was lower (or greater) because of the projects they'd been assigned.
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Recognize and legitimate different styles and approaches. It was hard for the president and some members of the inner circle to accept the fact that everyone isn't an entrepreneur — even if they work in an entrepreneurial company. It wasn't easy for them to accept the fact that different people seek a different work/life balance. They had to learn to give people permission to say, "No" or "Not now," rather than suffering in silence and growing more resentful about the company's insistence that "enough-is-never-enough." And they had to enable people to get to know one another well enough to pull together in a crisis.
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Omets lev requires a reconditioning of mental and emotional instincts from chutzpah. It requires a different reaction, when things don't go as anticipated or when someone tries something new and makes an honest mistake. It requires an interest and concern for the people you rely on to execute, not just the technology, budgets and profit motive. Some people are born with the sensitivity, insight and emotional intelligence to make the switch from chutzpah to omets lev quickly and easily. Others have to practice and learn those skills.
Fortunately, omets lev can be taught and learned. But first, CEOs and their inner circles need to realise that they are powerless to execute a vision by themselves. They can empower all they want, but empowerment only works if new members of the team decide to accept the mantle of empowerment. You can't make people think, innovate or take initiative, no matter how much you pay them or what their stock options could be worth. You can't threaten them into caring. If team-mates want to join the inner circle, they will — and if they want to sit on the sidelines while others take control, they'll do that as well. Widening the inner circle gets ideas executed; keeping it narrow preserves your power, privilege, chutzpah, and ownership of the idea, but it won't bring the vision to life — and may even cost you the enterprise you helped to create. The choice is yours.
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