Stephen H Baum Leadership

These are my notes for an internet radio conversation this morning with Jim Blasingame, The Small Business Advocate, who is a treasure trove of advice for business owners.

THE CHALLENGE

 Leaders often fear replacing people they know in their hearts must go.

 SITUATIONS

 I have been CEO coach in more than a few such situations. Often, there is a history of earlier performance and relationships that makes the boss hesitate well beyond the point where the enterprise risk of not acting is far greater than the risk of separation/termination.

 Objections range from:

• S(he) is too valuable
• He will be too hard to replace
• We don’t have time to go through a search
• No one can pick up the slack while we are shorthanded

 They are often derivatives of fear and just wrong.

Balaji Krishnamurthy, business consultant and former CEO,  led a workshop with my Vistage peer advisory Board offered a way to think about this: assess the “life-chits” owed to such a person, decide if the person can be repositioned to a different job and, if not, determine the amount of severance and outplacement help which, if given, would allow the CEO to sleep at night.

Such a framework helped more than one member work his way through such a situation.

In some cases, a member of the senior team is the outlier and is actually toxic —dispiriting the senior team by negative comments, constant criticism and sometimes passive aggressive behavior or worse. Such a person cannot be repositioned. The longer the CEO turns a blind eye to the situation the more respect he loses and the more damage is done.

 AN APPROACH

 One such CEO knew the person in question for 20 years before hiring him two years ago. Their wives were friends. Henry, as we will call him, was deeply dissatisfied with the role assigned to Henry and with the company strategy. A series of efforts by the CEO to give Henry alternative roles and great counsel all failed to change Henry’s behavior. At this point, the CEO wrote his Intentional Leadership Agenda. I will address the content but first say that having completed his own, he asked each senior team member to prepare theirs, redacted sentences too sensitive to publish and distributed the documents among the senior team. They then had a meeting to review each other ILAs. It made absolutely clear that the toxic person was indeed an outlier on an otherwise unified team. A week later, the CEO arranged severance at life chit levels and took action to separate him from the company.

The senior team has been liberated, morale has soared and the team is on a roll toward higher performance.

Outline of an ILA (must be done in 3 or fewer pages), whether the CEOs or a senior team member:

1. A paragraph with your definition of your job (scope and major impact on the company

2. Your Legacy (what difference your having been in your job will make by the time you depart (a) in the minds and hearts and organizations affected by your presence, (b) in the results achieved and (c) in the positioning of the enterprise beyond where it is today)

3. Your leverage (the people through whom you will achieve your legacy) . Relationships (whom you must help and must help you and how)

4. Your presence (how you need to show up to achieve your legacy: roles played, engagement, enlistment, demeanor)

5. How and through whom you intend to find out how your are doing on this agenda

That’s just my view. What’s yours?

For more on this topic, visit:

Krishnamurthy on Leadership

Jim Blasingame