Do You Have CEO Disease?
(P.S. Feedback is the Breakfast of Champions)
How frequently do you hear about yet another hospital system needing to cut millions of dollars out of their budget NOW?
A physician executive was telling me recently how the healthcare system in which he works had gone from making money to a substantial loss in a relatively short period of time, resulting in a mandate to cut tens of millions out of the budget. The organization has made sizable investments over the past few years in training to drive quality improvement and consulting for an organization-wide culture change initiative. But in the face of short-term losses, as is so often the case, these initiatives have already met their fate on the chopping block.
Since both initiatives were incomplete in the implementation, ongoing investment in these very things that had been determined to be critical for a successful future are still exactly what’s needed to move forward to that future.
As an executive coach, I couldn’t resist asking if his boss had had a coach. To my surprise, my colleague said “Yes”, at which point I asked if 360 feedback had been an integral part of the coaching process. Once again, my friend said “Yes……..But….he wouldn’t listen to it.”
Such is the nature of CEO disease.
In order to be persistently successful, people and organizations need to adapt continually to their environment. This requires information from the environment. The more active and open the feedback loops, the more effective and efficient the adaptation and change can be.
Feedback is like oxygen to a system. An organization is a living system and just like oxygen, all living systems need it in order to flourish. The measurement of patient satisfaction, employee satisfaction, even physician satisfaction is fairly universal. So why do we not routinely measure satisfaction with leadership? As we know from the Sears Employee-Customer Profit Chain study, the behavior of leadership is what drives 50-70% of employee satisfaction which drives customer (patient) satisfaction and 20-30% of the bottom line results.
It’s as if we assume that donning the cloak of leadership confers some state of perfection or super-human prescience. Yet, Collins, in Good to Great, documented that Level 5 leaders, in fact, have an attitude of humility as well as ferocious resolve and fearlessness – all qualities that enable leaders to solicit and respond to feedback.
When we look at organizations there is a pandemic of feedback-poor environments, and the problem only worsens when it comes to leaders receiving helpful feedback, specifically about their own performance. What better way for top leaders to assess their own performance than by getting feedback. And this feedback should address their leadership style, their behaviors and actions, their impact and their results.
Just what is CEO Disease?
CEO Disease is the information vacuum around a leader that gets created when people, including his or her inner circle, withhold important (and usually unpleasant) information. This leaves the leader being out of touch and out of tune. This condition can also be true for other leaders within the organization, not only the CEO. (The term was first coined by John Byrne in an article in Business Week in 1991, and later described in Primal Leadership)
Since a leader’s first task is to uncover the truth and an organization’s reality, CEO disease can be fatal, both to the individual leader and to their organization. Leaders who are women or from a minority group generally get less useful feedback about their performance than do men. And top executives typically get the least reliable information about how they are doing.
Why don’t leaders get the feedback they need?
Typically, they don’t build the kind of relationships or organizational culture that results in deep dialogue about what’s working and what is not. Sometimes, when the leader has a commanding or pacesetting style, people are reluctant to share “negative” information for fear they will be shot as the messenger. These two leadership styles - for whom the moniker is “Do as I do or tell you to do” - with their emphasis on outcome, can overlook process and the impact of their style. If a leader has this kind of blind spot, they don’t see the gold available to them in getting feedback frequently.
Many subordinates as well as peers want to appear upbeat and optimistic and don’t want to be the one to rock the boat. And the more personal the message is, the less chance it has of getting delivered at all.
How To Get the Feedback You Need:
The most successful leaders actively seek out negative feedback as well as positive. They let it be known that they are open to receive critiques either of their ideas or their leadership style. Almost all successful leaders are adept at self-assessment and seek out self-directed learning opportunities through mentoring, coaching, or other leadership development tools and methods.
One way to get feedback is to simply ask for it from people whose feedback would be useful to you, including folks on the front lines, middle managers, peers, and supervisors. If you are asking for feedback on y our leadership style, you want to ask folks whom you know will be comfortable in being honest with you.
Here are some questions you can ask:
- What do you see as my strengths?
- What do you see as my opportunities for development/improvement?
- What do I need to learn to be/do in order to be more effective?
- What could I do more of? Less of?
- If there were one thing you’d like me to do differently, what would that be?
Since subordinates can feel put on the spot when their boss asks for feedback (and they aren’t always sure of what the consequences will be, especially if your leadership style hasn’t previously invited feedback), it can also be extremely useful and helpful to enlist an objective 3rd party to solicit 360 data. This can be done through an assessment instrument or through interviews. Since the data are typically aggregated and anonymous, sometimes this is the only way that leaders can get honest feedback and see their blind spots.
This was the case with one leader I coached, whose pacesetter style had gotten him promoted to turn-around a troubled high-profile product development team. Yet his drive and high expectations exacerbated existing team morale issues and productivity. Using the data from a 360 assessment, he realized that 1) he wasn’t doing as well as he had thought and 2) what he needed to change. With that information, he was able to develop a more productive, participatory leadership style that re-engaged his team.
Staying mindful of learning opportunities when they arise and spontaneously seizing them is a hallmark of the emotionally intelligent leader. What inhibits growth and innovation, both personally and in organizations, are attachments to habits (what has worked in the past) and blind spots (which we all have). In order to survive in a rapidly changing environment, you must continually update what is working. Unless you get data about the quality and effectiveness of your interactions, you will become a prisoner of the status quo.
Manya Arond-Thomas, M.D., Certified Business Coach, is President and Chief Catalyst of Heart of Healthcare, LLC, specializing in leadership coaching, team-building and change facilitation. For more information, visit http://www.heartofhealthcare.com or call 734.480.1932.
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References:
- Collins, Jim. Good To Great, Harper Collins, 2001.
- Goleman, Daniel, Boyatzis, Richard, McKee, Annie. Primal Leadership, Harvard Business School Press, 2002.
- Rucci, Anthony; Kirn, Steven; Quinn, Richard. “The Employee-Customer Profit Chain at Sears,” Harvard Business Review. January 1998.