I was young and an inexperienced CEO when an ugly incident upended my beliefs about leadership. It made me realize that what I thought I understood about leadership was entirely insufficient \u2013 and wrong.<\/p>\n
My father led the company for many years before me. He felt responsible for putting food on the tables for the employees and their families. He would share his concerns with my mother over family dinners, defending the long hours and weekends he worked and sharing his worries about the business. He thought of \u2013 and treated his employees as if they were family. While my mother appreciated his caring, she felt it came at the expense of his actual family.<\/p>\n
Working for the company, I saw how my father treated people and how he was beloved and respected. Employees would do anything he asked, and many of his clients felt he was part of their executive team. His warmth, generous spirit, gentle humor, and conscientiousness were apparent to everyone. When I took over as CEO, I wanted to emulate what I admired about him.<\/p>\n
Everything changed on a Friday afternoon when I was drawn from my office by a loud, heated screaming match that devolved into an exchange of ugly personal attacks. My VP of Sales, a woman, urgently needed a presentation for a potential client, but the art department was overwhelmed. The Art Director, a man who grew up in India, told her she needed to wait in line. Angry at feeling dismissed, she snapped back that \u201cwomen in \u201cthis\u201d country have equal standing with men.\u201d He saw this as a racist dig and called her out before leaving the office in tears. She stormed off indignantly back to her office \u2013 and I stood there in shock.<\/p>\n
I found my art director pacing outside on the street corner. We sat together as he shared that he had never worried that people would judge him based on the color of his skin \u2013 but that now felt it is precisely how people see him. He was unwilling to work with the sales VP again. She was perfectly OK with that.<\/p>\n
I didn\u2019t know what to say or even think. I spent the weekend struggling for answers. My mother was right. I concluded that my mistake was viewing employees as family. Clearly, they were not. Shared blood and identity bind together family members. They don\u2019t need to get along or even like each other, but they can still love one another.<\/p>\n
I realized the company was a diverse community of people who didn\u2019t love each other or share a common identity. They needed to be led by social norms and rules that were clear and enforceable. I was not their parent, and I needed to be their leader.<\/p>\n
Looking back, I see that, like many CEOs I work with, my desire to be liked clouded my understanding of my responsibilities to the organization. Earning respect is much harder than having people like you. It takes courage, clarity of purpose, and understanding that communities, like companies, are organisms that beg for order and demand effective leadership.<\/p>\n
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I was young and an inexperienced CEO when an ugly incident upended my beliefs about leadership. It made me realize that what I thought I understood about leadership was entirely insufficient \u2013 and wrong. My father led the company for many years before me. He felt responsible for putting food on the tables for the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":5,"featured_media":77867,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_price":"","_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_header":"","_tribe_default_ticket_provider":"","_tribe_ticket_capacity":"0","_ticket_start_date":"","_ticket_end_date":"","_tribe_ticket_show_description":"","_tribe_ticket_show_not_going":false,"_tribe_ticket_use_global_stock":"","_tribe_ticket_global_stock_level":"","_global_stock_mode":"","_global_stock_cap":"","_tribe_rsvp_for_event":"","_tribe_ticket_going_count":"","_tribe_ticket_not_going_count":"","_tribe_tickets_list":"[]","_tribe_ticket_has_attendee_info_fields":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[22,17],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-77866","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-cohort-reading-resources","category-leadership-matters"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77866","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/5"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=77866"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77866\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":77870,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/77866\/revisions\/77870"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/77867"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=77866"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=77866"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/alpsleadership.com\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=77866"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}