Remember Who You Are

15 Harvard Professors Tell Life Stories That Inspire the Heart and Mind

Daisy Wademan

• Publisher: Harvard Business Review Press
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781633690363
• Topic: Betriebswirtschaft
• Subtopic: Leadership

Leadership requires many attributes besides intelligence and business savvy—courage, character, compassion, and respect are just a few. New managers learn concrete skills in the classroom or on the job, but where do they hone the equally important human values that will guide them through a career that is both successful and meaningful? In this inspirational book, Daisy Wademan gathers lessons on balancing the personal and professional responsibilities of leadership from faculty members of Harvard Business School. Offering a rare glimpse inside the classrooms in which many of the world's prominent leaders are trained, Remember Who You Are imparts lessons learned not in business, but in life. From the revelations on luck and obligation brought by a terrifying mountain accident to a widowed mother's lesson of respect for people rather than job titles, these unforgettable stories and reflections, shared by renowned contributors from Rosabeth Moss Kanter to former HBS Dean Kim Clark, remind us that great leadership is not only about the mind, but the heart.

MANAGING YOURSELF

A Bad Meal, and the Truth

Stephen P. Kaufman

STEPHEN KAUFMAN joined the school’s faculty as a senior lecturer in business administration in January of 2001. He teaches the required first-year course in technology and operations management.

For fourteen years, he served as chief executive officer of Arrow Electronics, Inc., an NYSE-traded company. Prior to joining Arrow as a business unit head in 1982, he held executive positions at Midland-Ross Corporation and worked for global strategy-consulting firm McKinsey and Company, where he was elected partner in 1976.

A graduate of Harvard’s M.B.A. program himself, he has returned to the school in part, he says, to “give back” by helping to train the next generation of leaders. It is a task he accomplishes not only in the formal classroom context, but also in office hours and casual conversations with his students, as he shares his own candid, commonsense observations on life in the business world.

GO look in the mirror.

I mean that literally. Go stand in front of a mirror and look yourself straight in the eye. The man or woman you see staring back at you is the same one you’re going to see one, ten, or even thirty years from now, when you’re at the top of your organization.

Certainly, during that time you’ll grow and develop in many ways: You’ll have more experience and gray hair, for example, and your skills will get broader; your career interests may shift; and what seems most important today may not seem so tomorrow. But becoming a business unit head or CEO is no transforming thunderbolt. A lofty title in and of itself doesn’t change you as a person.

What it does change, however, are your circumstances. The moment you become a senior manager, you’ll be treated very differently than before. And one of the keys to being successful at the executive level is to be conscious of that treatment, and of how it affects you. You can’t let it go to your head. You have to stay grounded and accessible.

I learned this lesson through an incident in my first really big management job as division president within a decentralized, diversified manufacturing company. For the first time in my life, I was the Boss. In my early days on the job, I hunkered down in my office to start familiarizing myself with how the unit operated: I looked at the P&L, the roster of key employees, and the performance targets for the year. In examining how the sales force was organized, something caught my attention: We had one office in St. Louis with five salespeople and another in Kansas City with three. Those cities are only a few hundred miles apart, and offhand I didn’t see why we needed both. I assumed there was a good reason: Maybe there was a very high concentration of companies in that area that used our products, or maybe we had a big customer in Kansas City and needed a local link. Because the answer wasn’t immediately apparent, I asked my VP of sales.

Two weeks later, I saw a memo from him posted on the bulletin board announcing that we had closed the Kansas City office, laid off two of the three salespeople, and transferred the third guy to St. Louis. I was stunned—I thought I had asked a question. Taking the memo off the board, I walked back to my office and my secretary’s desk.

“Jan,” I asked, mystified, “What happened? Why did we close the Kansas City branch?”

“Kurt said that you told him to close it,” she said. “He assumed from your question that you wanted the office shut.”

Now, Jan was a very smart and experienced professional secretary, and she had worked for each of the five division presidents over the past twenty-five years. As it gradually dawned on me where I had gone wrong, I knew she was probably one step ahead. “What would happen,” I asked, “if on my way out of here today for a long lunch, I told you, ‘I’ve been wondering how the office would look if the walls were painted green?’” She smiled. “When you came back two hours later,” she answered, “you’d have green walls, and the painters would just be gathering up the drop cloths.”

AT THAT POINT I realized that I was in an entirely new game, and it wasn’t one for which I knew all the rules. My previous jobs and my business education had taught me most of the skills I needed to be division president: how to market a product, interpret the income statement, or solve a supply-chain problem. But nothing in my background had prepared me to take on the role itself. No one had explained to me that while I was still the same old Steve Kaufman as three weeks ago—same skills, same flaws, same sense of humor—the people I worked with were going to react to me entirely differently now because I was the Boss. No one had mentioned that my questions were going to be perceived as orders just because I had a fancy title and an office with a decent view.

Moving from employee to executive involves more than a change in status—it involves a major transition in how you’re treated, in the fiber of your day-to-day life. As a regular rank-and-filer, you’re used to working in a hierarchy, eating lousy airplane food, and constantly trying to please the guy up above. But when you become a senior manager— particularly a division or corporate president—something strange happens: The corporate world structures itself around you. You get great perks like an administrative staff, a company car, and first-class airline seats. You don’t have to deal with unpleasant logistics, like trying to fix your own computer, because there are people around you striving to make sure your day-to-day life goes smoothly.

In addition to the material element is a human one: You get treated—and perceived—differently by those you work with. Employees interpret your questions as orders, almost always say “yes, that’s a great idea” rather than pushing back or asking questions, fear your reactions and comments, and go to great lengths to shield you from bad news. A friend of mine summed up my later transition to CEO perfectly when he said, “Steve, there are two things you’ll never get again—a bad meal, and the truth.”

Of course, fine dining and good news are in and of themselves quite pleasant. Yet they have a negative effect on anyone in a senior management role. They cut you off from what’s really going on inside the company, obscure the impact of your position, and diminish your effectiveness as a manager. When eating at five-star restaurants seems standard, it’s easy to become self-important, to start imagining that life is really like this, or to think that your good treatment is due to who you are rather than to the job you happen to hold. When everyone around you bows and scrapes and tells you only what you want to hear, it’s easy to become blind to the problems facing the corporation. You forget what it’s like to be the junior guy, the low man on the totem pole, and you lose touch with people who run the business on the ground, facing those problems day to day. Wrapped up in your protective little CEO cocoon, you stop recognizing the impact of your position and title and start believing what you’re told without applying critical judgment. And when all of that happens, your organization is going to have bigger problems than green walls.

In retrospect, I was lucky to go through the Kansas City incident when I did. Early in my career, before I began to take the perks for granted and become a victim of the white-glove treatment, I was forced to think, hard, about my new position. The experience demonstrated the new role’s effect on me, on the people I was supposed to manage, and ultimately on the business itself. And I realized that if I didn’t want to have any more unintended office closures—or worse—I needed to develop a plan to get beyond my office (in both the literal and figurative senses), stay grounded, and remain accessible to my employees. And I needed to do it fast.

On the personal side, I had to remember that while I now had the big-time job, I once was down at the bottom of the pyramid. I wasn’t any different now than I had been then, and I’d better remember what I used to think about the pronouncements, memos, speeches, and videos I saw from the Big Boss. I shouldn’t suddenly start believing my own BS, and needed to seem more human around people like Kurt—not to mention the guys out in Kansas City. And on the institutional side, I had to create a culture that encouraged open interchange across levels, in which people could ignore the chain of command, disagree, and bring company problems out into the open so they could get fixed. The workplace needed to function so that I and the people running things at the nuts-and-bolts level had free access to each other.

During my next few months at the company, I started developing a strategy to do just those things. Over time, as division head and later as CEO, I continued to hone my skills and tactics. And as you look ahead into your own career, I suggest you start honing them, too.

TO KEEP A SOLID GROUNDING and not get too swayed by the good treatment I got at work, I used one of the best resources available to me: I listened to my family. Now, your home life may not seem a natural environment in which to sharpen your business skills, but in this particular instance, it is. Nothing brings you down to earth as quickly and effectively as spending time with your spouse and kids. In that regard, I was fortunate: My wife was always willing to remind me that while I may have been lord and master of all I surveyed at the office, at home I was just the guy who took out the garbage on Tuesdays and picked up the dry cleaning on Saturdays. It’s difficult to get too impressed with yourself when you’re taking out trash or shoveling snow each weekend. Children, particularly teenagers, are also effective tools in this regard. Between the ages of twelve and twenty-five, your kids think that you’re both dumb and embarrassing. Those years are likely to be ones in which you’re hitting your full stride professionally. As you reach senior positions, it will be helpful to have an adolescent around to deflate your self-importance with a roll of the eyes, a prolonged sigh, or a caustic comment. Spending time with your family—and perhaps certain very close friends—is one of the most effective means of staying immune to “CEO disease.”

Which, in turn, will form the basis for what’s needed on the professional side: first, a few key colleagues willing to disagree with you. To be truly successful as a leader, you must have people around you who will challenge you, argue with you, and disagree with you. But it is incumbent upon you, the leader, to make this happen. You must bring people in who have the intellectual honesty and the emotional courage to do this, and then you must encourage them to do so. This means, for example, that when people push back at you or raise uncomfortable issues, you need to thank them publicly for doing so and visibly give serious consideration to their concerns, rather than reacting with impatience or blowing them off with a frown, scowl, or sharp rejoinder. It’s good if they can disagree without being disagreeable, but it is critical that they be willing to disagree.

Second, you need accessibility to the frontline troops. There’s been much attention given to the idea of “management by walking around,” to managers putting themselves on the same plane as their employees, but there’s been relatively little advice on how to actually execute it. Meandering around the office and talking to people doesn’t come naturally to everyone, and doing it the wrong way can backfire. One of our executives used to walk around the building with a frown of concentration on his face, head down, forgetting to greet people as he passed their desks. As a result, he got the reputation of being unapproachable, and he made middle managers skittish: Seeing a senior guy coming down the hallway looking that unhappy, they assumed budget cuts and layoffs weren’t far behind. I didn’t want to have the same effect. I wanted people to talk to me, rather than being scared off by my title, so I developed certain habits of getting out of my office, seeming more friendly, and spending time with employees in a more natural setting.

To make myself less intimidating, I took my jacket off and rolled up my sleeves when I left my office, and let myself look a little rumpled. And I went to where employees spent their time, rather than expecting them to come to me. I ate in the company cafeteria as often as possible, and not with other executives. I would find a table where I didn’t know everyone and take my tray over. Since no one would get up if I was still eating—I remember people lingering over a slice of pie for forty minutes—I’d look for a table where people were just starting their meal.

Of course, as soon as I sat down everyone would tense up. So to break the ice I’d crack a joke at my own expense: Did you see that memo? Geez, I wish I could write in English. My third-grade teacher would be embarrassed! A little self-deprecating humor goes a long way. Then I’d try to ask about people’s lives, their children, their passions outside work—and to be genuine, I had to be specific: Is it your first child? Do you know yet if it’s a boy or a girl? What are you hoping for? The goal was to demystify me and get people to open up. After some small talk, I’d ask gentle but probing questions about their work. Had they even seen my memo? Were my messages reaching everyone? Were there ways to save money in their departments? I tried to find out if they were happy with and in the organization, and looked for insights that could be used to improve and strengthen it.

And I didn’t limit my mingling to meals: I wanted to be accessible outside my office a short time in the middle of each day. So that I couldn’t get too wrapped up in my own work and forget what I needed to do, I asked my assistant to remind me, nag me, and even schedule me to get out of the office, even if it was only to walk to the end of the building and back. And I put a yellow Post-it note on the inside of my doorjamb that said “Smile.” As I walked around I’d stop, stick my head in people’s cubicles, and say hello. When I saw a candy jar or donut box on a desk or table I’d stop, grab a piece, and talk for a few minutes. If there was a conference-room birthday party I’d stop in for cake and some casual conversation. Eventually, I didn’t have to be reminded to walk around; it became folklore that I liked chocolate snacks, and I was invited to stop by when a department was having any kind of celebration. My methods became habit, and self-reinforcing.

IF YOU CAN MASTER these techniques and use them consistently, they will have a powerful effect on your business in a bottom-line way. Problems will filter up through the organization, and if you yourself have made poor choices as a manager, you’ll hear about that, too. A case in point: As CEO I determined that the various operating units and staff departments of the company should be charged for use of the marketing communications department’s services. I didn’t want our managers constantly asking the advertising group to “pretty up” simple presentations or organize small meetings just because it looked like a free service. Great idea—in principle. Some time later, I was at lunch in the cafeteria with several middle managers, one of whom told me that the advertising department, which owned all the audiovisual equipme...