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Typical Case Histories

Shifting Gears

Matt was in one of my executive business roundtables. Adopted at birth he showed an interest and in gardening and growing things as a child. He quite naturally grew into a business where he provided creative, interior plant designs to hotels, airports, office buildings and other public spaces. He had always been frustrated with the details of the back office and administration. His focus was on client relationships and solving there problems in creative ways. Over a period of a decade Matt searched for a strong number two person to take over these functions. He burned through at least three before he found a solid number two person. Over a year or two he became more and more confident that Harry would be able to take over the whole business. In the meantime Matt indulged his creativity by building a unique art gallery in his relatively large North Eastern city. Matt cherished the relationships with artists, loved the design of exhibits, and the opening nights where hundreds of people would come. This experience further motivated Matt to transfer the operations and eventually the ownership of his business to Harry.

Here were the issues that brought Matt to work intensely with The CEO’s Fulcrum:

  1. Moving the idea of succession from Matt to Harry into a real action plan with deadlines and dollars.  He wants hisbusiness to thrive without him, yet struggles to completely let go.
  2. Addressing Matt’s motivation to keep his finger in the creative side of the business even if he was not active in it’s day-to-day operations and sales.
  3. Orchestrating the financial payout Matt felt he was due after founding and leading his business for some 25 years, while at the same time ensuring that Harry could drive the business more than adequately in terms of supporting the financial terms of the succession plan, maintaining the companies stellar reputation with clients and in his city.
  4. Digesting and benefiting from the recent deaths of both of his adoptive parents, the discovery of who his real parents were, finding out that he had a sister he did not know about.
  5. Designing the second-half of his life where he would continue work as the creator and curator of important physical space that impacted the citizens in his city. Crafting a five-year detailed vision.

What We Did

Matt and Willing Phillips began regular dialogues usually on a bi- weekly basis, often by telephone and now and then in person. In the beginning the above 5 issues all tumbled out on top of each other in our conversations. As a sounding board and as an incisive question asker The CEO Fulcrum enable Matt to first of all create a sequence for addressing the above 5 issues. In some cases running parallel tracks. Always being careful that the dynamics of one issue was not in appropriately impacting the other issues. At the same time supporting Matt  in a variety of ways that gave him confidence in his ability to work through all of these.  Staying on track, and being held accountable move things forward.

Current Status

A variety of activities and conversations have moved Harry from being an immature CEO to a modestly sophisticated one. Financing, pay outs and safeguards have been built in to the succession plan which will take three years to complete its. Matt’s involvement will be in quarterly meetings on a newly composed board of directors to monitor progress of the business and the completion of the succession plan.

Matt has reconnected with his “new” sister several times and learned a great deal about his family of origin that was unknown to him. He was stunned to find out that his father and grandfather were in a very parallel business to the one he had founded 25 years ago. He has grieved some of the burdens of this personal history including the deaths of his adoptive parents while simultaneously learning to enjoy extraordinary blessings of what he has discovered about his biological family. Matt is currently exploring several options for the second-half of his life, but mainly a focus around being a creative instigator, broker and orchestrator of natural and found objects to create impactful public experiences.

Enjoying Work… At Last

James was the owner of a successful small service business. He had founded it over two decades ago, and it was thriving. When I met him, he felt overworked, stressed out, frustrated and at times mystified by the failure of key players to do things the way they should be done, often with some dire consequences with customers and financially. He felt like “the clown in the circus who was spinning too many plates at the same time”.  He had thoughts of getting out of the business.

What We Did

James and I began meeting on a regular basis. Just making time to slow down for an hour every week or two was a struggle for James at first. He had gotten to a point where he felt that he had to be on top of almost everything that was happening in order for it to be done right.

We began two explore several tracks simultaneously. One track was digging deep into his philosophy and beliefs about people in general; how these were shaped by some of his unfortunate childhood experiences, and how he was inappropriately using childhood strategies to manage his business. James slowly embraced the idea of trying some experiments of doing things differently to see how they might work. One of them was learning the specifics of successful delegation through having very structured conversations in terms of setting expectations. When these expectations were set well and when short falls were not blasted as failures of character, commitment of his employees, but rather is unclear expectations, James began to see progress in his employees taking more and more responsibility and him being able to back off.

A second track was examining the quality of his direct reports. We revieweach one in terms of their current performance future and in their potential. James was slowly learning to see potential in his employees under his new philosophy. Of five direct reports three were  more than satisfactory, one was outstanding and one was not satisfactory. This unsatisfactory employee was filling a very important role in the company that involved a great deal of detailed information about suppliers, customers and costs. He was outstanding in this capacity. This shortfall showed up in the way he interacted with other people, and the impact he had on meetings. James had gotten stuck in the fear of letting this employee go with all of his extraordinary knowledge of the business. He had gotten so fearful over the last few years he had never had any conversations with this disruptive employee about his impact on others including himself.

This led to having several three way conversations. With preparation and support, James was able to say in clear specific words how this employee was impacting the business and himself. It took some counseling before James was able to do this in a way that was not discounting or blaming. It turned out that the disruptive employee thought that James actually approved and supported his aggressive confronting style particularly with other employees. This began a shift in behaviors. The disruptive employee is now no longer disruptive.

Additional work with James was done to strengthen his executive team by using a powerful team assessment, folloeed by debriefing and follow up actions by all team members. In addition, James has enthusiastically begun coaching his direct reports in their own leadership skills and cascading these further down the organization. All of this reduced the stress and frustration  on James ; improved the performance of the business; and allowing James to take several one to three-week vacations away from the business and with his family in the last year.