A Strategic Partnership How to Harness the Idiot Power

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It's important to understand the high-level antics of organizations because they engender the organizational atmosphere in which you work. The shenanigans taking place on Mahogany Row flow to the rest of the organizational population, sometimes in a trickle, other times like a busted dam. Much of your success in tapping your Idiot Boss's power will depend on how savvy you can become with the unwritten, unspoken, and disavowed rules of engagement that actually govern organizational life. Let's begin with some high-level issues and work our way down. Non-idiot top executives who find themselves saddled with idiots in management positions below them on the food chain are faced with a complex problem. How do they make the company work in spite of these people? This was not such a difficult question back when everyone knew each other. In my father's day, you joined a company right out of college and stayed there until you retired. Among other things, that meant you knew people. You came up through the ranks together. If certain people were idiots, you had 40 years to figure out what to do with them, 15 years if they were recent hires. Today, fewer and fewer executives near the top of the corporate food chain worked their way up through the ranks. Now, for-profit and not-for-profit organizations recruit most top brass from outside.

They recruit much of their middle brass from outside. The single-employer career many of our parents knew has faded into history. In today's rapidly changing and unstable corporate landscape, top executives must deal with how to organize, motivate, and lead the idiots in their workforce in such a way as to maintain a productive working, environment for the non-idiots. The dynamic nature of upper management presents a series of new problems, not the least of which is what happens when the newly recruited top executive is an idiot. Recruiting and hiring top executives is a dicey business. If you stop and think about it, why would executives who are wildly successful in their present situations want to pull up stakes, fold their tents, and move to other organizations? Why would effective leaders who've cleaned up messes, turned losses into profits, fine-tuned their present organizations until they're firing on all cylinders, and built confidence and morale to the highest levels ever, want to leave their accomplishments behind and move to an ailing organization? We've all heard the legendary stories about empire builders who get bored after they've done it all and long to roll up their sleeves, find some raw clay, and build another empire from scratch. That happens more in the movies than in real life. It's far more common to find chief executives on the move who aren't getting much accomplished despite an incredible salary, bonus, and benefits package. Why so eager to leave? Why are their boards not more intent on keeping them? If a top executive does for her company what Jack Welch did for General Electric, she will retire from General Electric, as did Welch. If a top executive does for a company what Michael Eisner has done for Disney, you won't see another entertainment firm hiring him away. Executives hop from one firm to the next when they're vertically blocked and the jump opens the ceiling again. What about those executives making essentially lateral moves for a compensation increase their current employers could easily match? Methinks the executive with suitcases packed is either unhappy where she is, has a family or lifestyle need to consider, or is not doing a very good job and is smart enough to get out while the getting is good. In the latter example, it makes sense why the present employer doesn't fight to keep her. So, what does the new employer get? Someone with all of the right credentials for sure. Someone who can look and sound the role she's been hired to play. What else? Could the new firm be hiring the former employer's problems?

Is it possible the unsuspecting new firm has just taken on an idiot? As an executive, I have unloaded idiots on unsuspecting employers and had idiots unloaded on me. If the truth be told, it might save everyone money just to have companies build a people-mover to shuttle idiots from one office building to the next. Do happy people move? Are these executives happy in their present positions? Apparently not. Are they people who are given to loyalty and revel in healthy, long-term relationships with their coworkers? Definitely not. Are they willing to wave goodbye to their team members and say, "Have a good life, I was just offered a bigger payday?" Apparently so. In many cases, the hot,new executive was available and anxious to make the move because she failed to move the previous organization purposefully forward, was starting to worry when the non-standard accounting practices making things appear better then they were would be exposed, and knew it was just a matter of time before someone pointed out the empress had no clothes. I know one fellow who is in his fifth or sixth corporate presidency, each one lasting approximately two years before he is canned. He is disemployed from every presidency after proving himself completely incompetent. Yet, there is always another firm ready to hand him the key to the president's office. At the first sign his new firm is on to him and his rationalizations won't hold up any longer, he calls the headhunters, lets them know he's back on the market, and winds up stepping straight out of one executive office into another without getting his feet wet. I doubt seriously if the headhunters ask, "By the way, why are you available again so soon?" Hear no evil, see no evil, and speak no evil. Power Many companies produce eloquent mission statements, manifestos, and mantras. Would you believe me if I told you most of them don't operate by those principles? Very few organizational value systems are primarily about serving the customer, the community, or the corporate population. It's not even primarily about money. The occupants of Mahogany Row are preoccupied with power. Power is more than mere money, it's the ability to make or influence major decisions that make or break careers, build or lose fortunes, install or over throw governments. In Las Vegas, the executive suite would be called the high stakes room.

There are several reasons why power brokers become power brokers. By power brokers, I mean board members or anyone with the authority to negotiate high-level positions and commit significant portions of the organization's treasury, not their own. The behavior of the board members at the retreat with the weeping president was admittedly over the top. But board members everywhere are notorious for acting just as stupidly, even if they don't get quite so melodramatic. It's human nature to want someone else to fix things. Wealthy southerners say it like this: "If you don't want to do it yourself, hire it done." Board members do that with the leadership of the organizations they govern. They hire it done. There's nothing wrong with hiring it done until they abdicate their role in leading the leader. But that's human nature, too. As children, when we had a boo-boo, we wanted Mommy to kiss it and make it all better. As adults, when we have an ache or a pain, we want the doctor to make it go away. When our automobiles stop running perfectly, we want the service technician to make it run like new again. As children, we didn't pay Mommy for loving ministrations. Our tears were sufficient motivation for her. As adults, with the exception of the not-for-profit president I coached to tears, crying doesn't get us very far. We expect to pay people to make our problems go away. Plumbers and power Plumbers know they have you between a rock and a hard place when your kitchen faucet becomes a geyser. Although they mask it well, plumbers' inner plumbers must grin from ear-to-ear when they walk into your house and see a toilet overflowing. They know you're out of your league and desperate. You'll pay nearly anything to get the problem solved. If it weren't for capitalist competition, plumbers would be among the highest paid people on Earth. Not that they aren't already, but the fact that there are other plumbers in the yellow pages helps control plumbing prices. Plumbers don't do much on the lesser-skilled end of a plumber's list of services most people can't do for themselves.

That's one thing you learn when you decide to become a do-it-yourselfer kind of person. Instead of paying a plumber to come and fish an obstruction out of your toilet, you roll up your sleeve, reach your arm way up there, and pull it out yourself. You even learn how to fix leaks, change faucets, and a host of other home improvement activities that bring you no pleasure except to save a lot of money. Plumbers and big-money executives have more in common than large incomes. Board members with dysfunctional organizations and homeowners with overflowing toilets also have much in common. Board members are capable of making sound decisions and hiring leaders who will come into companies and build their organizational populations into highly effective, profit-generating teams. But most Board members don't look at organizational populations as potentially effective, profit-generating teams. They look at low-functioning organizations as stopped-up toilets. Not wanting to roll up their sleeves, fish around, and dislodge whatever is stopping everything up, board members hire a new plumber. The new plumber, knowing the board of directors merely wants someone to come in and unclog the organization, charges an arm and a leg, and promises free-flowing pipes in no time. The directors, who aren't

spending their own money, keep their sleeves rolled down and quickly agree to pay an arm and a leg. The press releases announcing major corporate appointments are couched in very contemporary, corporate-sounding, positive, futureoriented language. But the release is not describing anything more sophisticated than the plumber analogy. Do the research, track the comings and goings of chief executives, chart their compensation, and match it to the performance of their companies. You'll wind up nodding your head and mumbling, "plumbers." The free flow of accountability Sometimes the new plumber/CEO is able to fix the problems, sometimes not. Most of the time it really doesn't matter. The new executive might be most talented at making it appear the problems are being solved and things are turning around when they're not. That's usually enough to satisfy the board. My weeping president didn't even need to convince his board that he was capable of solving problems. They seemed to be satisfied that he was trying so hard. Board members often deny the ineffectiveness of their new executives, which makes it much easier for ineffective executives to fake it. Sometimes new executives putter around for awhile, take the money, and then take a hike, without ever unstopping the toilets. You'll swear wonders never cease when you read how another board at another organization has hired the same ineffective executive, probably for more money than she left behind. How much confidence can you really have in a top executive who negotiates a royal ransom before doing a doggoned thing, and receives her ransom whether she makes the boo-boos go away or, worse yet, causes more pain?

You have to wonder what goes through board members' heads when they realize the super-executive they just hired is holding the organization hostage, just waiting to be handed the bag of gold to go away and repeat the process somewhere else. Do the board members think, "Gee, we just made a huge mistake?" It's doubtful. More likely, the Board members say, "This problem is obviously more complex and challenging than we originally thought. We need to retain a search firm to help us identify someone better suited to making our pain go away." This is how some boards take their avoidance and denial to another level. They escalate their ivory tower thinking and raise the stakes. They will spend even greater amounts of other people's money to locate an executive who will demand even more money before she lifts a finger, including signing bonuses negotiated by the search firm. It sounds insane, but it happens every day. Other factors Board members are also impatient. They look primarily to shortterm financial indicators to justify their moves. Serving the long-term interests of their organizational populations comes well down the list. They will claim that external stakeholders demand the financial performance. However, most external stakeholders, as well as employees with ownership interest in the firm, are in it for the long haul. This means the people the board members are claiming to appease would prefer to see long-term growth, not knee-jerk, expensive, quick fixes. Historically, organizations that invest first and foremost in the growth and development of their team members perform better on their bottom line than those that don't.