The Corner Office: How Top CEOs Made It and How You Can Too. Adam Bryant

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СКАЧАТЬ a great company?’ And he said, ‘It takes major setbacks and overcoming those.’ I hesitated for a minute, and I said, ‘Well, we did that in ’93 and then we did it again in ’97 with the Asian financial crisis.’ And he said, ‘No, John. I mean a near-death experience.’ I didn’t understand exactly what he meant. Then, in 2001, we had a near-death experience. We went from the most valuable company in the world to a company where they questioned the leadership. And in 2003 he called me up and said, ‘John, you now have a great company.’ I said, ‘Jack, it doesn’t feel like it.’ But he was right. While it was something I would have given anything to have avoided, it did make us a much better company, a much stronger company, a company that at times doesn’t take itself too seriously but also a company that doesn’t have fear. We have a lot of healthy paranoia about what can go wrong. So that’s a nice way of saying that it’s how you lead through tough scenarios that often determines where you go.”

      Quintin E. Primo III, the co-founder and CEO of Capri Capital, said his experience of surviving a near-death experience also taught him a lot about leadership.

      “Leadership, in my opinion, is best learned, or honed, through adversity,” he said. “And it’s in times of adversity that one must step up to the plate, and do something. You have to do this, or do that, but you just can’t stand still. You have to take action in adversity. And for me, probably the most poignant moment in my career as a leader was when my first business failed miserably. We were crushed by the real estate markets of the early ’90s. Back then we were a very young, emerging organization with no real business. We entered into a death spiral, roughly two years after I started the firm in ’88. And managing down, as the Titanic is sinking, you’re not even worried about the deck chairs.

      “It taught me a lot about who I was. It taught me a great deal about the folks I had selected to work with me on this sinking ship. It was a very frightening period for me, but what I’ve learned is that one must have faith, faith in something larger than yourself, or you truly will be sunk. Whether that faith is faith in the common good of man, whether it’s in universal rhythm or karma, or whether it is simply in God, there has to be something larger than you.

      “In that period of adversity for me, I discovered that my employees, as such, were really part of my family. And you will sacrifice, you will do extraordinary things to protect your family, and feed them, and clothe them. You will sacrifice greatly. And so, in this period of adversity, I had to move outside of me. It no longer was all about me, but about making sure that the hardship on those who worked with me was as modest, as low, as possible. It just shifted priorities. After graduating from Harvard Business School, and having success for eight golden years in real estate, I thought I was the next great thing since sliced bread. In abundance, it’s very easy to lose focus. But in adversity, one must have extreme focus.”

      Anyone with a blemish on his résumé or academic record may be tempted to paper over it, or wish it away. That may not be necessary. Many CEOs, and others who have achieved a measure of success in their lives and are in hiring roles, have probably had some rough patches themselves. If candidates can explain what they’ve learned from those experiences, and how they dealt with them, they may find their résumé goes to the top of the pile.

      Meridee A. Moore, the founder of Watershed Asset Management, a hedge fund, said that when she’s hiring she considers it a plus when she sees that candidates have suffered a dip in their academic performance at some point, then persevered to improve.

      “If you’ve ever had a setback and come back from it, I think it helps you make better decisions,” she said. “There’s nothing better for sharpening your ability to predict outcomes than living through some period when things went wrong. You learn that events aren’t in your control and no matter how smart you are, and how hard you work, you have to anticipate things that can go against you.”

      Understand what you can control. Don’t be a victim. Figure out a way to get things done. It’s a way of perceiving the world that will help you avoid the disappointment of failure, and stay in the right frame of mind for plowing through adversity. Challenges become learning experiences rather than disappointments. It’s often just a matter of attitude that makes people stand out. They earn the confidence of their managers that they will take on, and own, any assignment thrown their way.

      For bosses, a dream employee will eagerly accept a challenge, and say those words that are music to a manager’s ears: “Got it. I’m on it.” People who want more responsibility, with a confidence born of a track record of facing down challenges, will move up.

      Chapter 3

      TEAM SMARTS

      At some point, the notion of being a team player became devalued in corporate life. Perhaps it was all the rah-rah team-building exercises, the jerseys, the T-shirts, the buttons. They may be good for bonding, but improving teamwork on the job? That takes more work than trust-building exercises like falling backwards into a colleague’s arms. The notion of being a team player has been reduced to a truism—I work on a team, therefore I am a team player. It’s a point captured in a cartoon, by Mike Baldwin, in which an interviewer says to a job candidate, “We need a dedicated team player. How are you at toiling in obscurity?”

      The most effective executives are more than team players. They understand how teams work, the different roles of individual players, and how to get the most out of the group. They know how to create a sense of mission and how to make people feel like every-one’s getting credit. They know how to build a sense of commitment in the group. Just as some people have street smarts—they are savvy and know their way around a neighborhood, and they understand the unwritten rules for getting things done—others have team smarts.

      In a world in which work is increasingly done through collaboration, team smarts is an essential skill.

      “With most of the important things I learned about leadership, it was usually because we weren’t hitting our numbers,” said Teresa A. Taylor, the chief operating officer of Qwest Communications. “When things are going well, you think, ‘Oh good, everything we’re doing is right.’ When things aren’t going so great, that’s when you reflect and you say, ‘What am I doing that isn’t working, or what do I need to change?’ It’s very much on instinct and experience. Even the instinct is driven by watching people’s body language, watching how they’re presenting. I mean you can just ask an open-ended question, and if three people wiggle and one person doesn’t, you can figure, okay, they’re not working together. So I do spend a lot of time reading the room.”

      It starts with an understanding that teamwork is built on a foundation of one-to-one interactions between people, an unwritten contract that has nothing to do with business cards, organization charts, or titles. A big part of being team smart is appreciating that teamwork is developed by conveying a sense that you are looking out for a colleague, that you’ve got her back. It’s these small exchanges—a favor here, an extra mile of effort there—that become the connective tissue between two people. And that’s where team-work starts: with two people.

      Greg Brenneman, the chairman of the private equity firm CCMP Capital, said that one of the most memorable lessons he learned about leadership was from the future Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, with whom Brenneman worked at Bain, the consulting firm, long before Romney went into politics.

      “He said, ‘Greg, in any interaction, you either gain share or lose share. So treat every interaction as kind of a precious moment in time,’ ” Brenneman recalled. “And I’ve always remembered that, because I think it’s really true. So what I’ve tried to do is have more conversations where I’m gaining share than losing share, to try to add value to everything.”

      Gary E. McCullough, the CEO of Career Education Corporation, shared a story СКАЧАТЬ