Tom Finegan - Amplifiers

Virtually all organizations have bosses and titled executives. In an ideal world, the people who fill those positions are also leaders. Employees carry out the wishes of these individuals either because of their position power or their influence. Most humans don't want to be told what to do. They want to be led or inspired to take the next right action. It's this basic human instinct that effective leaders need to understand.

Most companies have a formal organizational chart with predefined job titles and promotion criteria. They evaluate employees across a broad spectrum of competencies. However, many capitulate and promote employees because they have been in a particular position for such a long period, or they put pressure on their managers so that they will look elsewhere if they don't get the promotion. Publicly, companies deny they promote based on these real factors, but privately they admit that is what happens. We engage with some of the best and most respected firms, yet we see this practice in action far too frequently. The Peter principle is alive and well. There is a gap between the espoused courage to make disciplined promotion decisions and the capitulation to employee pressure. Each time a company compromises a promotion decision or a crucial performance management discussion, they erode a bit of competitive advantage or slightly increase the odds that their next transformation effort will fail. The compounding effect of these suboptimal decisions is astounding.

Titled executives or bosses lack some or most of the leadership traits necessary to be an effective leader. Therefore, they need different tools to get their subordinates to act. The primary tool they turn to is fear. Fear is an easy human emotion to tap into. Most people are afraid of not achieving something they don't have or losing something they do have. In the business context, this translates to fear of not being promoted to the next level, with the additional recognition and monetary rewards associated with the move. At the extreme, it can mean the fear of losing a job. Another tool these bosses use is a high degree of control, as they rule with an iron fist. These bosses are referred to as micromanagers. They feel the need to be involved in every decision, review every piece of work before it goes out, and other non-empowering and nonproductive behaviors that waste time and resources.

The fascinating reality of titled executives is that in a quiet moment by themselves, they often recognize their lack of leadership. They have a high ego with an inferiority complex. The style becomes one of lashing out to squash an uprising among dissenting voices and reassignment of star performers who might make them look bad. They surround themselves with “yes” people to reinforce their own ideas and positions. To be fair, many executives do not intentionally choose this path. But somehow, their ego and high need for power drive them into this operating style.

Tim Hassinger, introduced in chapter 1, spent three decades with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership within the same company, ultimately becoming the CEO of a major division. This led him to being recruited and accepting the CEO position of a publicly traded company. Joining a new company after such a long tenure at the previous employer provided new opportunities for learning and growth. He no longer knew the large numbers of employees who worked for him, nor had deep institutional knowledge of the culture and how change would need to occur. He knew he needed to learn these dynamics and learn quickly. Likewise, the organization itself needed to come to terms with the fact that a new outside CEO had been brought in to effect change and set a new direction for the company.

In this situation, Hassinger was immediately placed in a position where the answer to the question “are people following me because of my role or my influence?” was clear. For new leaders appointed from the outside, the initial set of followers are following because of position power. The challenge then becomes how to quickly gain influence throughout the organization and how to determine the composition of followers on staff. It's natural in a leadership transition that many alienated follower holdovers will leave. Many pragmatist followers will also leave with a leadership change at the top, especially one where stated change is necessary, which undermines the very safety that pragmatist followers require. The exemplary followers under the previous leadership likely have loyalty to each other, the organization, or the mission. However, these exemplary followers will quickly size up the new leader to determine whether or not they will follow them.

When new CEOs are appointed or promoted, one of the first activities they do is to replace key team members. Jim Collins emphasizes the necessity for great companies to have “the right people on the bus.” 3 How then do companies find themselves in this position where the new CEO needs to make these replacements? Great companies are constantly adjusting the team at the top to have the best possible executive leadership—or in management teams throughout the company for that matter. But, far more commonly, teams evolve and settle into their operating ruts, and before you know it, there are weak links in the chain.

Cross-functional teams and matrixed organizational structures create more of a challenge for the titled executive. In this construct, their straight-line chain of control is pierced by the matrix. In situations when the executive lacks leadership experience, infighting and turf wars emerge. It is amazing to see how many companies have these unnecessary internal skirmishes when the real adversary is a competitor or product substitute.

Instead, the most successful organizations also create dynamic, or in some cases permanent, cross-functional teams. Assembling these cross-functional teams is as important as assembling a proper organizational chart. One of the traps leaders have is that they pick the same people for high-profile teams. This is dangerous for many reasons. Selection bias is an issue for most companies, and many are trying to address this bias with varying degrees of success. Executives and managers within companies tend to select people who are like them to fill positions on teams. This perpetuates narrow thinking and prevents the true diversity of thought and ideas that is necessary for the best decision-making to occur.

Some professionals are driven entirely by status. Status can be achieved in many different ways. Status can be achieved by the position you occupy in the organizational chart as well as how many teams you've been chosen to participate in. There is a real risk in assigning the same people to too many teams, letting teams become too large and unwieldy or not sunsetting teams when their stated purpose has been accomplished. The best leaders and executives shared a common theme with me in how they peer into critical team composition and assignments to ensure that each team member actively participates and quickly jettison team members who seem to be observers only. They look at a network analysis of the core strategic teams in the company. This conscious effort to analyze and remove people from teams is as essential as ensuring that the teams themselves are composed of key decision-makers and influencers to be successful. Finally, although it's impossible to limit the size of certain teams, smaller teams with a clear objective seem to fare better in any organization.

Early in my tenure as CEO of our firm, I was agonizing over another seemingly big decision that I needed to make that I knew was not going to be popular with everyone. I say seemingly because in hindsight I can't recall most of the decisions I agonized over. But I would stew over them desperately wanting complete approval from the hundreds of consultants who worked for us. After sufficient discussion and review of our options, the time would come when we made the decision, and I would communicate the decision to the broader company. Feedback would come back to us and even in situations where I felt the decision was entirely negative yet necessary, I would get emails or texts from people letting me know they appreciated the decision and were fully supportive of the direction. The more this occurred the more I realized that in most big controversial decisions, people fall into the “20-60-20 rule”. Twenty percent of the people think the decision is genius, 20 percent of the people think the decision is a disaster and wonder how we ever got to the position we're in, and 60 percent of the people trust that it's probably best and move on. This realization lets us sit back and weigh the decisions we're making and filter them through the 20-60-20 rule so that we could ask ourselves, “Will this decision or direction skew the distribution?” As a leader it's impossible, and in fact not wise, to never piss people off. As is frequently referenced by Colin Powell, sometimes it's necessary to piss people off. Once I no longer felt the need to have everyone's approval for every decision we made, it liberated me to make decisions much more effectively.