8

Becoming a Higher-Ambition Leader

WE HOPE THAT THE examples of the CEOs portrayed in this book will help raise the level of your own leadership ambitions. It is hard to imagine a more energizing, meaningful way to spend your professional life than to play a central leadership role in building a higher-ambition company. But this work is far from easy, as should be clear by now. As Doug Conant suggested, higher-ambition leaders must earn the right to lead. Success requires a mastery of not just the hard disciplines of business—strategy, financial analysis, operations, marketing—but intangibles, including the capacities to see yourself and your organization with a clear eye, to unleash the latent capabilities in others, and to lead from values and purpose.

Most of all, higher-ambition leadership requires an extraordinary level of personal integrity. By integrity, we mean something that includes, but goes beyond, honesty and ethics. The leaders in our sample worked as hard as possible to integrate their decisions and actions with their values and beliefs. Even when engaging in the difficult work of downsizing or restructuring, they did not emotionally distance themselves or abandon their humanity. Higher-ambition leaders are also uniquely skilled at integrating actions in different domains of business, from strategy to finance to people; they were always moving to find the “simultaneous solve.”

What essential things must managers do to become higher-ambition leaders? In this chapter, we outline the state of mind and heart required. Higher-ambition leaders would counsel you to:

• Find your anchor.
• Choose your teachers well.
• Learn from experience.
• Engage in honest conversations.

Find Your Anchor

Higher-ambition CEOs were able to exercise the sisu leadership we describe in chapter 6 by staying anchored. That means they developed a philosophy and personal goals that enabled them to find in their work a larger purpose that could inspire not only themselves, but others. And they relied on family, friends, and trusted colleagues to help them stay centered and maintain their integrity. To keep their integrity, they did not compartmentalize their roles in life, as CEO, spouse, parent, and community member. Flemming and Tobias asked Volvo’s Leif Johansson how he coped with the enormous stress during the economic meltdown of 2008 and 2009. He said that he maintained his equilibrium by thinking about his family and friends and how they were more important to him than his job. He came to this realization early in his career, he said, when he was in his first CEO job as head of Electrolux. He felt, as did Nestlé’s Paul Bulcke, that if he had to choose between job and family, he would not hesitate: family came first. Also, Johansson used his family for what he termed the “kitchen table test”—running ideas by them—to stay anchored and to ensure that he made difficult decisions with regard to human values. He explained that in order to test a potential course of action, he would ask himself whether he would be comfortable sitting at the kitchen table on a Saturday morning explaining to his wife and children what he had done and why.

Finding your anchor is a process that begins early in your career and requires the courage to discover who you are and to shape yourself into the person, and the leader, you would like to be. Peter Dunn, former CEO of Steak ’n Shake, told us, “If you are not strong enough as a human being to withstand a fair amount of heat, and basically know why you’re doing what you are doing, and to energize and inspire yourself in a very grounded way, the odds of your coming out of this alive are almost zero, because it’s too hard.” Leaders cannot achieve high performance or real commitment to building a social institution, he said, when they “do not know who they are and what they are trying to do.” The ability to lead and inspire others, he continued, “stems directly—and I mean directly—from the ability to lead and energize and inspire myself. In those moments when I am crystal-clear about what I stand for, and what I’m doing, and why I’m doing it, and why it matters, I can talk to anybody and get them fired up. I have to speak from the heart.”

Bill George, former CEO of Medtronic and now a professor who teaches leadership at the Harvard Business School, suggested that to become anchored and learn who you are requires self-awareness: “You can’t have self-confidence until you have the self-awareness that can lead to self-acceptance. Those three things are so tightly tied together, it’s hard for me to tease them out. That’s an extremely important chain for every leader to go through. Those who don’t are extremely vulnerable to making bad decisions under pressure.”

George noted that self-awareness, in turn, leads to the emotional intelligence that is so essential to successful leadership, especially in large, global institutions. “I’ve seen dozens, if not hundreds, of leaders fail, and everyone has failed for lack of emotional intelligence,” George said. “The key to emotional intelligence is self-awareness. Short of self-awareness, you can keep making the same mistakes over and over and again.” George suggested that self-awareness must be developed and needs to be grounded in regular habits and practices. For him, those habits include jogging three or four times a week, meditating twenty minutes twice a day, talking with his wife about important issues, and mentoring and being mentored. Leaders need such practices, so that when they find themselves under extreme pressure, they will be ready to manage the stress and lead with integrity.

Choose Your Teachers Well

Higher-ambition leaders also understand that learning from others and leveraging their strengths is not a sign of weakness, but rather is essential for their development.

Many of the higher-ambition CEOs said that they had had bosses with the right values and practices at critical points in their careers, and they had served as invaluable sources of development. Johansson, who spent the first part of his career at Electrolux as unit head and CEO for a number of subsidiary companies, told us that he had “the good fortune of having had extremely good bosses.” Among them was Hans Werthén—a “legendary figure”—who made a comment to Johansson that he has never forgotten and that has “shaped his philosophy of management.” Johansson, then thirty-one, had been charged with turning around a troubled subsidiary of the company. After some investigation, Johansson made some harsh observations about the employees in the unit. Werthén listened and then said, “Leif, when you start thinking that half the people around you must be bloody idiots, you need to think about which of the two halves you belong to yourself.” Johansson remembers that Werthén was angry with him, which hurt, but the advice was good. “He was just taking me to task,” he said.

Many higher-ambition leaders, including George and Conant, looked to mentors and coaches to support their development and talked about the importance of finding the right ones. Mentors can serve almost as a personal board of directors.¹ George suggested that the key to learning from mentors is trust: “You have to know they care about you, before you’ll take the advice.”

Coaches can help leaders deal with what Allina’s Dick Pettingill called “flat spots.” He said, “I’ve always been a strong proponent of executive coaching, of having the sounding board that you can use and consult with and bounce ideas off of in the solitude of the moment. I’ve always had somebody at my side.” He believes that the coach should come from outside the company, so that he or she is not beholden to either the leader or the organization for his or her livelihood.

Higher-ambition CEOs were also adept at learning from members of their own leadership teams. Carl Bennet, who developed a small company, Getinge, into a world leader in its markets, spoke more than once about how the people you have in your team psychologically grow with you and spur your growth as well. He was convinced that you can only be as good as the people you surround yourself with. Christian Clausen frankly told us how he gains strength from joint problem solving with his team at Nordea: “All this uncertainty and worry! Every day, there is a new thing about which I think, ‘Oh what’s all that about?’ But my experience is that, if I’m put together with the right people, I always come up with solutions that are very good.”

Many of our leaders said that it’s important to identify your weaknesses and find one or more team members whose strengths offset your weak points. For example, in discussing the turnaround they co-led in the 1990s at Asda, the British grocery retailer, Archie Norman and Allan Leighton told Mike Beer that neither of them alone could have turned the company around. As CEO, Norman brought discipline, intellect, and a sure sense of strategy, while Leighton, first hired as marketing director, brought great people skills. As a result of their working relationship, Leighton became more analytical and task-oriented, while Norman got more adept at engaging with people and shaping culture.

Learn from Experience

Many of our CEOs told us that “lessons of experience” were the most powerful source of their development.² Some of the higher-ambition leaders, like Paul Bulcke and Ed Ludwig, who spent their entire careers in one company, learned from different assignments within a single organization. Ludwig explained that these built confidence, which is a necessary ingredient for successful leadership. Ludwig grew up in a blue-collar family and was the only one to go to college. He joined Becton Dickinson and, through a number of different roles, ended up as CEO. “There’s a little bit of ‘My God,’” Ludwig said, “that makes you wonder if you got there by mistake.” But along the way, he said, “I grew more confident. I’m willing to express myself a little bit more now. I’m stepping out.”

Like Ludwig, many of the CEOs we interviewed did not think of themselves as fully developed when they took on the CEO role. Several told us that the challenging prospect of the job was scary (we heard the phrase “holy shit” more than once in this regard), but that coping with the challenge—experiencing both successes and failures and using those experiences as learning opportunities—enabled them to develop their leadership repertoire.

To add to the complexity of leadership, careers in the twenty-first century are more likely to be protean than in times past. There will be even more twists and turns, a larger number of shifts, possibly higher highs and lower lows. So we recommend that aspiring leaders take charge of their learning by always choosing the job that will challenge their capabilities and demand them to increase their knowledge, refine their values, and develop their leadership capabilities. In this kind of job, they will be forced to figure out how to relate to their team, how to work with them to solve problems, and how to leave behind the idea that the leader has to know all the answers.

Given the importance of learning from the right experiences, the choice of employer is critical. When considering a job, aspiring leaders should determine if the organization and its leaders possess higher-ambition values and believe in a higher purpose. They should evaluate the culture to see if it is one in which performance is assessed rigorously and where only the best succeed. And they should learn what values and principles underlie the culture of the organization. Do those values and principles embody the human values and ethics of higher-ambition companies?

In addition to choosing the right and properly challenging job, higher-ambition leaders also have a remarkable capacity to acknowledge and learn from difficult, even traumatic, experiences. Conant talked candidly about how he got through the experience of being fired from General Mills, after ten years with the company, with the help of coaches and counselors. “I developed a ton of humility around that experience,” he said, “and a whole new view of how fortunate I was when I was working. I didn’t really appreciate it until I lost it.”

Getinge’s Bennet remembered a dramatic learning experience that came early in his career, when at Electrolux. He was still in his twenties when the company tapped him to make major changes to a unit based in France. During his first days there, a group of radical union members had hung a doll bearing his name, with a noose around its neck, off the roof of one of the company buildings, “just to show me who was in charge.” Bennet had to find the courage to continue undaunted with his assignment, which he completed successfully over the following year and a half.

Recall also Anand Mahindra’s encounter with union workers who wanted to throw him from a balcony and the lessons he took from that encounter. Emotionally laden experiences like these can be powerful learning opportunities.

Engage in Honest Conversations

The leaders in our study used many mechanisms—including team-building meetings, various forums, and social media—to help themselves, their teams, and members of the larger organization and surrounding community engage in honest conversations from which they learned to confront reality and find ways to deal with it.

In chapter 4, we saw how Ludwig, when he became CEO of Becton Dickinson, faced up to a problem of his own making: the limping implementation of a $100 million enterprise software system that he had championed and led as CFO. His dramatic mea culpa came about because one of his first acts as CEO was commissioning a task force to interview managers across the globe about BD’s strengths and barriers to implementing its strategy. This effort made him see just how badly the execution of the enterprise system was going, something he had been unable to fully face when he was leading the project. He accepted the task force’s findings, admitted his role in the failure, and made a commitment to the task force—and later to the entire company—that he would fix it.³

At Medtronic, George employed periodic team-building sessions to develop trust and get unvarnished input on how to improve his leadership effectiveness: “Almost from day one, we went offsite for three days once or twice a year. I always used a facilitator because I wanted to be a participant, not the leader, and to give people the opportunity to give me very critical feedback that we could really talk about.”

Hewitt’s Russ Fradin captured the essence of these learning processes when he told us, “In every forum, you try to listen. You ask others, ‘What’s on your minds?’ ‘What would you be worried about if you were me?’” Such forums required leaders to listen and be open to what they heard; they also enabled them to develop their capacity to receive feedback without being defensive—to learn uncomfortable truths about the business, organization, and their leadership without loss of confidence in themselves as leaders—a skill that we find too few leaders possess. Fradin stressed the importance of honest conversations and the benefits of admitting errors. It can be both helpful and cathartic, he said, to look people “in the eye and say ‘I was wrong’ or ‘We made a mistake.’ If you’re always right, there is no trust. Nobody’s that smart.”

Conclusion

Higher-ambition CEOs are as concerned about people and the larger good as they are about financial results. They spend time developing trusting relationships with people across many constituencies, creating an emotional bank account they can draw on when times get tough—as they almost certainly will. Yet these relationships are deliberately not intensely personal, because such ties can cloud the decision-making process.

The CEOs in our sample also do psychological work to strengthen themselves as individuals. By looking inward, they become more aware of who they are and of their values and purpose. They often seek coaches and mentors who remind them to reaffirm what they stand for and, when a crisis comes, to keep their eyes on what really matters. These leaders seek to inspire themselves and thereby inspire others.

The most important way our leaders develop is by learning and growing from experience. They find that success offers useful lessons and that failure, if allowed, can be an even more potent teacher. Bosses also make strong teachers. Great learning can occur in open, honest conversations with almost anyone in the company. The education our CEOs cared most about was not the technical and business learning they had gathered, but the deeply personal lessons. All the higher-ambition leaders started early in their careers to work on the “soft stuff” and to develop a clear philosophy of management and leadership that guided them on the path toward achieving their goals.

You may find the following questions useful, as you consider your development as a higher-ambition leader:

FIND YOUR ANCHOR

• Am I anchored in a philosophy of life, family, and work that enables me to find and serve a higher purpose, check my ego, and know what is right?
• Am I developing habits for life and work that will enable me to stay centered so I can make wise decisions?

CHOOSE YOUR TEACHERS WELL

• Do I have leaders from whom I can learn?
• Am I comfortable accepting and using help from others?

LEARN FROM EXPERIENCE

• Do I have a career plan that will provide me with the lessons of experience I need to develop my leadership and management capacity?
• Does this plan include diverse jobs that will stretch my capabilities—jobs where I do not have the answers and where I am required to engage others in problem solving?
• Am I working for a higher-ambition company with the right types of colleagues and a strong performance culture? If not, how can I find such a company, join it, and learn?
• Am I finding ways to exercise my capacity to be honest with myself and with others and to take responsibility for my actions? Am I discovering what makes this difficult for me?

ENGAGE IN HONEST CONVERSATIONS

• Do I ask for and receive honest feedback? Have I developed the trusted relationships with peers, coaches, and bosses to give me this feedback?