From
the Macro to the Personal: Lessons from Five Top Leaders
In this opinion piece, Wharton Dean Geoffrey
Garrett writes about critical advice he has received from other
leaders – including former Dow Chemical CEO Andrew Liveris, University of
Pennsylvania President Amy Gutmann, American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault,
former Chancellor of UCLA Albert Carnesale and Vanguard CEO William McNabb.
“The five lessons I have sketched here have had a massive impact on how I try
to lead every day,” he writes. “I hope they will do the same for you.”
I was worried when asked to open the recent Wharton CEO Academy
in New York before Thanksgiving. What could I (dean of a business school
reporting to the university provost) tell a roomful of CEOs (hired and
fire-able by fiduciary boards of directors) about leading large companies?
After pondering this for a while, I realized I should focus on lessons learned
from leaders who have shown and shared with me how they do it.
So here are five great leadership lessons I’ve learned from five
wonderful leaders (three big business CEOs, two big university presidents),
which I try to remember and use every day beginning with the most macro, and
ending with the most personal.
Andrew Liveris, former CEO of Dow Chemical
CEOs must be creative and charismatic enough
to develop and communicate a vision, smart and broad enough to formulate a good
strategy, and be empathetic enough to help people implement it.
When Andrew first told me this, my initial reaction was that
it’s easy — just three things: vision, strategy, implementation. But the more I
thought about it, the harder the challenge became. Not everyone naturally does
the “vision thing.” Those who paint the biggest picture often find the
discipline of developing a detailed strategy tedious. And people who are good
at working their way precisely and causally through strategy tend to be less
comfortable walking the corridors, connecting with and motivating people.
Easy to say, hard to do: That is the only possible conclusion
regarding the trifecta of vision, strategy and implementation. Yet it is clear
that the modern CEO is expected to excel at all three. Maybe that is why good
CEOs are highly compensated, but also why they’re harder to find and keep — and
why the tenure of an average CEO is shorter than you’d think.
Amy Gutmann: President of the University of
Pennsylvania
CEOs don’t need to formulate “Strategic
Plans,” but they do need to develop strategic plans.
Soon after I became Wharton’s dean I realized one of my decanal
colleagues, who was a year further into the job, had just completed a year-long
Strategic Plan — engaging lots of stakeholders in lots of meetings, drawing
commonalities among different parts of his portfolio, and generating shared
goals. I asked Amy whether she thought I should do one. Her answer — based on
her Penn Compact from the mid 2000s that has now evolved into the Penn Compact
2020 — was “not necessarily.”
Amy told me that there are two critical things to get from
strategic planning: engaging and bringing together disparate stakeholders, and
developing shared goals regarding top priorities. Sometimes it might be important
to make this a formal process. But that tends to get complex and time
consuming. The process often becomes an end in itself. The final Strategic Plan
can be littered with unobjectionable platitudes. Better to do without the
capital S and the capital P — but only if you can bring people together around
shared priorities without a formal process. Amy has certainly done that at
Penn, and I hope I’m doing it at Wharton.
Ken Chenault, CEO of American Express
Meetings are really important for CEOs. The
more people from the more diverse perspectives from more parts of the
organization you listen to and learn from, the better decisions you will make,
and the more people will help you with executing them.
I had the chance to sit down and chat with Ken before he did a
Dean’s Lecture at Wharton last year. What an experience! Ken, who recently
announced that he’s retiring after a 35-year career, has an incredible personal
biography. What he has done at Amex, not only with technology but also with
diversity, is amazing. But what was most clear to me was Ken’s commitment to
his people, to communicating with them plainly, to earning their trust, to
generating trust among them all, to delivering great outcomes.
One key way to do this? The humble meeting, the bane of every executive’s
life and the butt of so much corporate disdain about managerialism. Ken turned
this concept on its head. The goal for every leader is to make every meeting
matter, from one-on-one to pretty large groups, by framing problems, listening
actively and synthesizing the thoughts in the room.
CEOs know that the final decision is inevitably theirs — as
Harry Truman’s famous desk weight said, “The buck stops here.” But this is what
Ken told me about the importance of meetings: You will perform much better as
CEO if you can create an environment where there is real diversity of
experience and perspective in the room and everyone has the confidence to speak
up, share their views and learn from each other.
You will make better decisions the more widely you genuinely
consult. And the more people you give a voice in making decisions, the more
they will help you implement them. Days full of endless meetings are a fact of
life for anyone in any management position in a large organization. But you can
turn them into your secret weapon for success.
Al Carnesale, former Chancellor of UCLA
When you’re CEO, you’re often seen as the
smartest person in the room, and others will be looking to you to show it. You
must resist that temptation. It is the only way to bring out the fullest
collective intelligence of any room.
Al Carnesale is one of the most intelligent people I have known.
I don’t think I am slow, but he was always several steps ahead of me in
thinking through any issue — even when it was my issue and one he hadn’t
thought about nearly as much as I had. Nonetheless, Al was acutely aware that
being seen as the smartest person in the room when you are the group leader can
badly damage group dynamics. When you are the leader, anything you say — even
if it’s only thinking out loud or consciously designed to stimulate conversation
— will be taken as gospel and given far more power than you intended.
We can only hope that people who make it to the top make it for
good reasons. “Smarts” is only one of those good reasons, but it is likely to
be one. Al understood that this could be very helpful, because it is great for
an organization if the CEO has lots of bandwidth. But it could also stifle
creativity, conversation and collective intelligence. That is why his “try not
to show it” admonition was so important.
Bill McNabb, CEO of Vanguard
CEOs often tell themselves and each other to
remember it’s a marathon, not a sprint. They are wrong. Being CEO is a series
of sprints, not a marathon. That makes recovery between sprints essential. No
matter how you do it, recharging is essential not only to personal well-being
but also to peak job performance.
Bill McNabb and I share a love of competitive sports, including
some Australian athletes I was surprised to know are his heroes: “the oar-some
foursome” in rowing, and Herb Elliot in middle distance running. Soon after I
became Wharton dean, he asked me how things were going. I said something like,
“I try to remember it is a marathon, not a sprint.”
That is when he corrected me. Of course you can’t be too
impatient as a CEO. Of course you should think about long-term goals rather
than short-term wins. But Bill was making a different point.
Big jobs can eat you alive. You need to give them your all when
you are working. But it is equally important that you recover from the latest
sprint — a busy day, week, month. When you can switch off, recharge, recover,
you can embark on the next sprint and perform at your highest level.
Recharging is a personal matter. We all do it differently. How
you recover doesn’t matter. That you do it is essential if you want to succeed,
personally and professionally, in jobs with lots of expectations and lots of
responsibilities.
I’m not sure how well I framed and catalyzed the conversation at
our last CEO Academy. But going through the process has reminded me how much I’ve
learned from the great leaders I’ve had the pleasure and privilege to know. The
five lessons I have sketched here have had a massive impact on how I try to
lead every day. I hope they will do the same for you.
http://knowledge.wharton.upenn.edu/article/macro-personal-lessons-five-top-leaders/?utm_source=kw_newsletter&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=2017-12-12
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