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Infographic: The life and times of Steve Jobs
October 17, 2011 By Leave a Comment
Lessons from CEOs: How to be a better leader
May 10, 2011 By 1 Comment
Adam Bryant
I make it a point to read Adam Bryant’s Corner Office column each Sunday in the New York Times. Each column is an interview with a CEO. Most run businesses, but Bryant also features leaders from nonprofit organizations on occasion.
He’s been writing the column since March 2009, and now, he has distilled the lessons of leadership he has uncovered into a new book, The Corner Office: Indispensable and Unexpected Lessons From CEOs on How to Lead and Succeed. He summarized the book in his column on April 19.
Bryant says there are five traits that many successful CEOs have in common. Learn to emulate them, and you might become a better leader yourself.
The five traits are:
- Passionate curiosity. The best CEOs are always learning more about why things work the way they do, why things succeed or fail, how things can be improved, how people think, and on and on. Bryant notes that CEOs aren’t necessarily the smartest people in the room, but they almost always are the best students. From this constant questioning come new ideas for innovation and improved productivity.
- Battle-hardened confidence. CEOs have had their share of failures, but they’re not beaten by them. Instead, they bounce back, take away a few lessons and move on. Over time, they develop the confidence that comes with overcoming adversity. They learn not to make excuses and not to walk away from tough situations. And of course, they look for and admire the same trait in others.
- Team smarts. This refers refers to the ability to recognize the players a team needs and how to bring them together around a common goal. A good CEO looks for reliable team players who can be motivated and mobilized to work with others toward common goals. They don’t have to get along or like each other; they just have to know how to set aside differences to work together. Successful CEOs know how to find people like that and form them into teams.
- A simple mindset. Good CEOs aren’t impressed by wordiness and long analysis. They want people who can focus their thinking, get to the point and identify a viable course of action.
- Fearlessness. Effective CEOs look for people who aren’t afraid to step out from the crowd, make surprising career moves and operate without a road map. They want the kinds of people who aren’t afraid to shake up comfortable situations because they know that change must be made for an organization to keep growing and succeeding. They don’t want people who pursue change just for the sake of change, but if a person can demonstrate wisdom and show that he or she has the organization’s best interests in mind, a good CEO will reach out to lift that person up.
So, if you’re looking to be a CEO, or just to keep moving in your career, those are five traits you can start to adopt now. Do you know people like this? Are you one of them?
For CEOs, the more they make, the meaner they become
March 28, 2011 By Leave a Comment
(Originally published July 16, 2010)
Tales of mean rich people have sold well over the centuries. Even today, it’s not unusual to see yet another telling of A Christmas Carol and its sour, stingy main character, Ebenezer Scrooge. Despite his change of heart in the Dickens’ story, his name is still associated with miserliness and meanness.
Now there’s a new study suggesting that the higher paid a CEO is, the more likely he and his organization are to treat rank-and-file employees meanly. The study, conducted by Sreedhari Desai at Harvard, Jennifer George of Rice University and Arthur Brief of the University of Utah, concludes that “increasing executive compensation results in executives behaving meanly toward those lower down the hierarchy.”
To conduct the study and make the claim, the authors had to define meanness. To do so, they assigned “strength points” and “weakness points” to companies. Companies that offered employee profit sharing received strength points. Companies that have been penalized for employee mistreatment got dinged with weakness points. The authors then looked at each company’s executive compensation for correlations between executive income and meanness. They found a positive correlation; as executive income rose, meanness rose.
In the study, the researchers cited everyone’s favorite whipping boy, Walmart, which has a large gap between executive pay and worker pay. “Walmart continues to make headlines year after year for violating wage laws, failing to provide adequate health care to employees, exploiting workers, taking an anti-union stance, and violating human rights in foreign countries. Some of the gory details involving its overseas operations include denying workers minimum wage, compulsory overtime, failing to provide adequate safety equipment to workers, and hiring child labor. Back in the U.S., Walmart’s executives’ behavior toward their employees has been just as mean.”
Read the study and draw your own conclusions. I’ve worked with highly paid CEOs and other senior executives. My experience has been that each is an individual case. I’ve run across my share of Scrooges, but I’ve also worked with a number who are decent, motivating team builders.
I’ve observed over the years that those who come up through operations, such as plant managers, seem to be more concerned about the concerns, needs and well-being of workers than those who spend their career in the ivory towers of law, accounting and finance. It seems to be easier to think of workers as pieces in a game if you haven’t spent much time with them.
What do you think? Does money breed meanness in corporate life?
