9
Motivating High Potentials
The Four Transformations to Extraordinarily Influence the Best
My wife, Anne, and I call him Saint Ted. We are incredibly grateful that he stepped into our older son's life during a crucial developmental period. We believed Jim had tremendous potential to achieve a very high orbit in his life, and we did all that we could to help him fulfill that potential. However, there are some things that even the most well-intentioned parents cannot do for their children, and at those times, every parent prays that some important role model will step into the gap and help their child through a vital life transition. Saint Ted was the answer to our prayers.
Every year, Mr. Benning chose a couple of young guys to work for his highly regarded construction company. One night during Christmas break of Jim's first year of college, Mr. Benning called Jim and gave him the coveted invitation to work for him during the next summer after he completed his freshman year. Jim jumped at the chance and looked forward to the summer when he could don a hard hat and boots and work with the cool, big guys as they build impressive commercial structures.
Some vitally important life traits are better caught than taught. Emotional resilience is one of those. Understanding the dictionary definition does nothing to build those fibers of strength so vitally needed for a successful life. Anne and I were proud of all that Jim had accomplished to date and believed his trajectory was sound, but we also knew that new and more complex life challenges awaited him around the corner. There was no way Jim could anticipate the depth of resilience he would eventually need to be effective in the demanding world of business, and as a husband and father. Our only hope was that meaningful adversity would be served up in small enough courses that he would learn to bounce back and not become discouraged or disenfranchised as many young men do in our society. Mr. Benning believed part of his life mission was to use his company to build resilience in young men who sometimes missed the opportunity because of the ease with which many young people grow up today.
Jim showed up for work at the home office with his new work boots ready to go build a building. Mr. Benning wanted Jim to get some additional experience in the “working with his hands department” first. Next to the home office, a huge field reached toward the horizon. It was so overgrown with tall weeds you couldn't see across it. Mr. Benning's first job for Jim was to clear the entire lot of weeds—with a sickle—an assignment that took nearly two weeks. The first day, Jim came home so dirty and mad, he was beside himself. He immediately laid plans to quit and get what he thought would be a better job. Fortunately, he went back the next day. After two weeks of weed clearing, Jim was ready to receive his hard hat with the company logo and get to the real job.
Mr. Benning had other skills he felt Jim needed to master before moving up the corporate ladder. Jim spent the next two weeks using a hand-held scraper to remove peeling paint from a galvanized storage building. Each day Jim seemed to come home dirtier and more tired than the day before. It reminded me of the first Karate Kid movie where Mr. Miyagi required Daniel to perform an endless series of mundane physical tasks before he would train him to fight.
Every Friday, Mr. Benning asked Jim to stop by his office on Friday afternoon to give him a report on his progress. During these chats, Mr. Benning also talked about life, work, faith, and other topics he felt to be important in building a meaningful and successful life. Jim would sometimes give us a glimpse of what Mr. Benning said, and later, Anne and I would privately celebrate what Jim was learning. A particularly profound question Mr. Benning posed to Jim each Friday about his work was, “Is this the best you can do?” Jim interpreted the question not as a criticism, as in the quality of his work was poor. Rather, it posed a challenge to Jim to always measure himself against high standards.
On the fourth Friday, after a month of grueling manual labor, Jim graduated, and Mr. Benning gave him an official company hard hat. Monday morning, he was to report to a local job site, and “Goat” would be his supervisor. Jim's smile said it all when he came home. I've now arrived and get to hang out with the cool guys on a real construction site. He also received a small raise in his hourly wages.
At that point, Jim didn't know that the new guy must do the stuff no one else wants to do like shovel the loose gravel from the curbing and scrape dried cement from the places it spilled. Jim also learned the significance of his supervisor's name—Goat was not a paragon of interpersonal sensitivity. Jim's skin became thicker by the day.
Over the summer break, we gradually saw a beautiful quality emerging in Jim's life—emotional resilience—the ability to spring back from disappointment or adversity. None of us knew at the time how much Jim would eventually need resilience and other essential attributes.
Another benefit of Jim's summer job included working with and learning to respect some guys who had not and never would go to college; they might not have understood the details of the laws of physics, but they used the principles every day to build a quality building. They also worked hard in less than ideal circumstances—heat, humidity, dust, and danger. The great irony is that Jim now works as a real estate developer and builds commercial buildings. When he talks to guys on the construction crew, he understands their world. They respect the authenticity of his background.
The best part of the summer continued—the Friday afternoon chats with Mr. Benning. As he prepared to return to college, Jim was different. He had grown and the new school year showed it. He earned a starting position on the football team. His grades went up, and there was a new maturity and depth to him. The distractions he pursued during his freshman year no longer held such sway in his life. The unique difference Mr. Benning made in helping Jim to develop is why we call him Saint Ted.
A Great Test for Leaders
One of the great tests of leadership is the development of other leaders. The senior leaders of most organizations that I've served over the years know that some subset of their workers is more talented, smart, clever, hard-working, and has better people skills than others. It's not that other members don't make a significant contribution to the organization's mission, but some simply stand out. The strongly held belief is that senior leaders should expend extra time, energy, and money to make a difference in the lives of these gifted members. The conundrum for senior leaders is what to do differently with them and for them.
Many organizations refer to these individuals as high-potential employees/leaders or HiPos. As a rule of thumb, they are typically thought to be promotable at least two levels above their present position in a shorter period than normal. The general view is that HiPos should be given an enriched or higher octane set of job experiences and development or training resources to prepare them for bigger jobs in the future. While there are no guarantees that the investment will earn a dividend, paying special attention to these gifted members of the organization builds a pipeline of leadership talent vital to survival. Keeping and growing leadership talent constitutes a compelling need most organizations view as an indisputable need. The other convincing argument for developing younger high potential leaders is that they are significant retention risks. Word gets out. HiPos receive more calls from recruiters, and when a young leader is supplied with a steady stream of developmental opportunities, this provides strong reasons to stay put.
The question this chapter poses is how to exert extraordinary influence on these innately gifted individuals to bring out the best in them. Years ago, I conducted a research study and asked CEOs of large companies, “What was the most significant developmental experience you had on the way to becoming CEO?” I theorized that CEOs would place tremendous stock in their MBA or their extensive training, but what they unanimously agreed upon was their experience in different jobs. The challenge of the job itself was important, but what really made the job experience meaningful was the boss he or she had in each job—the unique influence of a boss who cared about their development! This chapter posits what we must do to bring out the best in those especially gifted individuals over whom we have influence.
Four Transformational Actions to Bring Out the Best in HiPos
In addition to whatever technical skills might be important to acquire, there are four actions we must take to accelerate our HiPos' development.
1. Affirm HiPos Style and Competence but Especially Their Core
- The numerous benefits of affirmation, based on scientific research, are amazingly high-octane fuel for HiPos. The list of benefits detailed in “Amazing Reasons to Affirm Your HiPos” contains an extraordinary set of qualities for aspiring senior leaders.
- Give HiPos Words of Life, as described in Chapter 4.
- Provide frequent Alliance Feedback and be sure to connect the feedback to HiPos' personal aspirations—their hopes and dreams.
- Encourage self-affirmation. I am not suggesting we promote narcissism or conceit, but the benefits of positive self-affirmation are considerable (nearby list). We foster self-affirmation by asking questions like, “Tell me what you feel you did well in the meeting today.”
2. Encourage HiPos to Actively Build and Guard Their Core
An ancient king said, “Guard your core, because it determines the course of your life.”23 While a leader possesses many attributes for success, I believe with every fiber of my being that a strong core comprises the most important element of great leadership. The condition of our core determines the course of our lives, in general, and our effectiveness as a leader, in particular.
Over the last 10 years, I studied the leaders we most admire and those who conversely went down a path of personal destruction. In most cases, a strong core is the differentiator between those who build a great legacy versus those who end up in cataclysmic failure such as those who were fired from their organization because of a breach of their core. For more detail on the topic of leader derailment, I documented six CEOs whose boards fired them for a compromised core in an earlier book.24
The risks of derailment are greater for the gifted.
In my observation, the stages of derailment are predictable. Knowing these five stages and how to protect ourselves from the forces that drive us toward derailment at each stage are especially critical for a high-potential leader to understand. The risks of derailment are greater for the gifted.
Stage 1: Lack of Self Awareness. Lack of self-awareness is a common denominator among derailed leaders. When we lack self-awareness, it reflects a failure to recognize, understand, and regulate the forces operating inside us. High-potential leaders must cultivate the skills to know themselves and self-govern wayward impulses.
Frequent and intentional introspection and honest self-examination are vital means to self-awareness. Most of the successful CEOs I know keep a journal. They take notes throughout the day and reflect later on their handling of the events of the day. These reflections peel back the covers of blind spots and sometimes even go down the stairs to the basement of our darker motives.
HiPos should relish feedback from important others. They must seek it out and ask for candid observations from others to get better. They use feedback to calibrate how they are performing vis-a-vis expectations.
Stage 2: Arrogance. By definition, HiPos ride on the fast track. Power, position, status, fame, influence, money, and success often arrive sooner and in larger quantities for these individuals. Individually and especially collectively, these elements potentially create arrogance. Arrogance is the mother of all derailers. After great victories on the battlefield, Roman generals rode triumphantly into Rome amidst throngs of celebrants. A slave accompanied each general on his chariot and whispered over and over to the victorious general, “Fame is fleeting.”
HiPos must stay grounded about any success. They need to be reminded over and over that humility is the mother of all safeguards. One CEO told me that in his organization, anyone who took too much credit for an outcome and didn't acknowledge the contributions of the team, “Got cut from the herd pretty quickly by other members of the organization.”
Arrogance is the mother of all derailers. Humility is the mother of all safeguards.
Stage 3: Missed Warning Signals. One senior executive I interviewed at a major U.S. company said, “I worry about getting caught up in my own importance and missing what I should be doing in leading my company and serving its members. I could easily wake up one morning blind to the path I followed to my own personal destruction.” This statement reflects a profoundly admirable acknowledgement of the vulnerabilities any successful person faces.
Most executives who derail had plenty of warning signs that they ignored along the way. Derailment rarely occurs because of a single cataclysmic event, but rather as the consequence of a succession of small compromises over time. A calamitous event may trigger a derailment, but usually much was going on before its occurrence. If we groom high-potential leaders, we need to keep very short feedback loops. We may need to interpret subtle cues in the organization that otherwise would be missed.
The executive level frequently operates via a set of unwritten rules. A mentor guides HiPos to pay attention to cues and not run afoul of the opaque rules that exist in many organizations.
Derailment rarely occurs because of a single cataclysmic event, but rather as the consequence of a succession of small compromises over time.
Stage 4: Rationalization. I like to think of rationalize as rational lies. Occasionally, we tell ourselves untruths, and these rational sounding lies lodge in our core as beliefs. As we said in Chapter 4, these beliefs guide our actions.
There are some lies to which HiPos are especially susceptible—lies that leaders love. Here are a few examples:
- I am the smartest person in the room.
- I am not subject to the normal rules that govern most people.
- I am irreplaceable.
- I add the greatest value to the endeavor.
If these four and a host of others take root in our core, it's just a matter of time before we head down that terrible path. Take number one, for example. This belief drips with arrogance. It causes overconfidence. It makes the holder of this belief contemptuous or disrespectful of those he or she views as inferior intellectually or of lesser value to the organization. The second rationalization led Tyco's Dennis Kozlowski to his catastrophic downfall.
Stage 5: Derailment. Stage 5 arguably constitutes the point of no return. Once a leader becomes heavily invested in rationalization, an impenetrable wall seems to go up. Logic and moral clarity become irrelevant. Recently, I watched a several-year-old 60 Minutes interview, during which Mike Wallace talked with Dennis Kozlowski at his prison. All Kozlowski discussed was his belief that the reasons the jury convicted him were simply wrong. He attempted to explain why taking hundreds of millions of dollars in “compensation” that the board of directors had not approved was justified—a truly dazzling display of rationalization on his slide to derailment.
HiPos Have the Same Backgrounds and Credentials as Those who Derail. As we mentor HiPos, it seems especially important to point out that the leaders who derail are not fundamentally different from us. For the most part, they grew up in reasonably normal families. They went to college, then later to business school for an MBA and worked their way up the corporate ladder. Then, wealth, fame, or power, or any combination of the three, eroded his or her core. The protective walls no longer protected them from arrogance and rationalization. A perfectly good person begins to act on those errant beliefs and starts moving through the stages of derailment.
The stories of most leaders who derail do not get splashed across the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Rather, the leader derailment occurs more quietly and without fanfare. None the less, a person with extraordinary promise slips into the shadows of disgrace.
The most important role a leader plays in bringing along promising, talented leaders is to help them place a priority on guarding their core. To accomplish this, the leader must also possess a strong core. Speaking truth to another, just as with Words of Life, requires we lead from a strong core. Otherwise, the mentor's hypocrisy and lack of authenticity torpedo any opportunity for extraordinary influence in another person's life.
3. Urge HiPos to Lead from Influence and Not from Position Power
When I meet with CEOs, I often tell them position power is overrated! After publishing one of my earlier books, I called a friend who was CEO of a huge consumer products company and asked him to help me get my new book into his stores. I considered him to be an outstanding role model for great leadership and thought, for sure, he would be able to make this happen with a phone call.
His answer surprised me. He first said, “I honestly don't know how that process works, whereby a book is approved for sales in our stores.” Second, “If I called the head of that department, she would be very respectful to me, but say something like, ‘We really appreciate so much your interest in getting great books into our stores, and it sounds like you have a good candidate for us to consider. Our books do well because we have a process that gets on our shelves the exact books our customers want.’” My friend explained that this was a very polite way of saying, “You do your job, and we'll do ours.” We both laughed, and he added, “By the way, if I tell her I want your book in the stores no matter what, she will do it, but your book will be doomed from the start. They will resent my exercise of power and will ensure it does not get the placement it needs to be successful.”
Leaders must thoughtfully place HiPos in positions that require they learn to lead by influence and not by position power. When my younger son finished business school and took his first civilian job after leaving the U.S. Navy, his company placed him in a role that I thought was brilliant. While in the Navy, he commanded a unit with 40 sailors. The military, of course, stresses position power for understandable reasons, although I hear from experts that even the military feels many units, such as special operators, deemphasize hierarchical forms of leadership.
When he accepted his first position in a large corporation, management assigned profit and loss responsibility to him for a large business unit spanning North America. They tasked him with the coordination of five different functions in the business unit; however, no one reported directly to him. He needed the cooperation of a variety of people in various functions but with no formal authority to lead them. The structure forced him to lead through influence, collaboration, and alignment with the mission, values, goals, and culture of the organization.
After four years in this position, he was promoted to a management role, which included direct reports, but he had learned a vital lesson. It's far better to lead through influence than position power. He learned how to lead with influence because he had no other form of power to use. Even though technically he now has position power, he elects to use it sparingly, because some very wise leaders in his company ingrained in him the importance of leading through influence.
We want to mentor our HiPos to lead with influence for one main reason. It engages those workers we lead to adopt higher levels of commitment to the mission, strategies, and goals. It creates ownership, whereby followers take ownership of the outcomes.
4. Help HiPos Develop Courage
Our affirmation of someone we mentor is highly effective in transforming that person, especially when we speak Words of Life into their core. In particular, we want to foster the development of courage, a vital attribute for senior management roles.
An influential leader called me recently and confided that, to this day, he regrets his failure to act while serving on a board of a highly visible and powerful U.S. company. The CEO of the company, by all accounts, was having an affair with his executive assistant. He was married, had two children in college, with one child still at home. The CEO was quite well regarded in his industry. Company earnings were consistently good, and the company was a darling of Wall Street.
Several board members talked privately with the CEO. His assistant traveled with him frequently on the company plane for no obvious business reason, but he assured them nothing was going on, despite the rumors and constant innuendos.
The subject was finally broached at a tension-filled board meeting, and the CEO said, “Fine, I resign,” and stormed out of the board room. Board members sat quietly, until one said, “We have to get him back in the room and calm him down. He may be a flawed human being, but we need his leadership.”
Two years later, company earnings tanked and company morale sunk to an all-time low. The CEO resigned after a prominent media outlet broke the story of his affair and the associated turmoil.
The man with whom I spoke said, “I didn't have the courage in that earlier board meeting to say what many of us felt. I should have said, ‘I move we accept his resignation.’”
When I asked him why he didn't speak up, he said, “I was afraid.”
“Of what?” I asked.
“Of being ostracized or removed from the board. I knew he might ask for my resignation if I went up against him, and no one would come to my rescue. I valued the prestige of being on a board of this well-known company … and the board member fees were significant.”
We do not want to get cut from the herd, and our need for acceptance is one of the most powerful forces on the planet. We struggle and toss and turn worrying about what to do, even though in our gut, we know what we should do.
By the very nature of the job, leaders must take risks, yet as in this story, many factors discourage risk-taking. G. K. Chesterton said, “The paradox of courage is that a man must be a little careless of his life even in order to keep it.”25 We discussed earlier in the book how certain parts of our brains prefer safety and work to avoid risks. The word encouragement is derived from the French word encoragier, which means to put courage and heart into another.26 Our HiPos will not achieve their potential without developing courage. To develop great leaders, we must encourage them. Words of Life result in the encouragement of the recipient.
Whether an executive who we believe can rise to a position of great influence, a gifted student, or an athlete with that rare potential for greatness, it is our privilege to help that person reach their potential. We must exert extraordinary influence to bring out the best in them!
We now turn our attention to a huge problem in the corporate world and in other endeavors, as well. Chapter 10 examines how we can bring out the best through more formal means of feedback, such as the dreaded annual performance review. There must be a better way!