That said, there's no denying that Casselman herself has benefited from the WebBoard's creation - even if things did not turn out exactly as she expected. In February, she became executive assistant to Mark Myers, the head of corporate research and technology at Xerox. She travels the world as a liaison between the company's senior staff and its research operations. "The WebBoard raised my profile and proved that I could follow through on an ambitious project and form the relationships needed to support the project," Casselman says. "It definitely helped me win my new job."
Tom Hicks of Discovery skillfully navigated the aftermath of his success. When he began his campaign, Hicks was running the company's magazine division. Today Discovery has only one magazine left in its stable. But Hicks is thriving as publisher of Discovery Channel Online, a respected Web site that gets 75,000 visits a day.
"The key to winning a campaign like this," Hicks says, "is to consider your personal ambitions separately from your strategic goals for the company. You'll be validated personally at some point. Meanwhile, you will have moved the company to a place where it might not have gone without you. We helped take the Discovery Channel to another dimension."
Michael Warshaw mwarshaw@fastcompany.com is a senior editor at Fast Company.
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Recent Comments | 2 Total
June 20, 2009 at 9:13am by Peter Freeth
An organisation with around 200 employees working in the public sector asked us to develop a coaching program for their senior managers which would accelerate the implementation of their new strategy.
An ambitious 10 year business plan needed strong leadership to guide an underlying culture change, shifting the focus of the business from a public sector mentality to one of business and commercial awareness. The CEO had been in place for only a short time, having been promoted rapidly from company accountant to Finance Director to CEO.
We coached the CEO to develop this strategy, and this evolved into a coaching program for the senior managers, supporting them in implementing the strategy in their own areas of the business.
From the beginning, the CEO avoided key issues during coaching and inconsistencies began to show during conversations between the CEO and the Directors. During a strategy workshop, Directors closed ranks, recited rehearsed statements about the strategy and looked to the CEO for approval.
After just two months into the coaching program, it was clear that some managers' ideas to implement the strategy were being blocked, whilst others were contradicting themselves and avoiding accountability. The CEO was continuing to avoid key issues and was making very little progress overall.
The main issue appeared to be the avoidance of accountability. Staff would avoid work that they were not interested in and their managers would take on extra work rather than make individuals accountable for their actions, so work flowed up the organisational structure rather than down and managers took on a higher workload resulting in longer working hours, greater stress, mistrust and resentment .
We called a meeting with the CEO and told her that we were closing the coaching program.
The fundamental issue was that the CEO was manipulating her managers and the board in order to support her own hidden agenda; her early exit. She knew that she did not have enough experience as a CEO to secure her next position, so the only option was a significant achievement in the form of a merger with another organisation which would give her an instant successor from outside the organisation, enabling her to block succession from within. She had already removed two Directors and had identified a third who she was setting up to fail in key performance areas. She influenced board elections to ensure support from new members and gave the impression that she was protecting her team from the board in order to control communication between them.
This complex system of control and manipulation bred mistrust, avoidance and dishonesty throughout the management team and began to create a barrier to the CEO's own hidden agenda. The business was disintegrating faster than she could orchestrate her exit, and at some point the board would take the exit decision away from her, leaving her with neither the experience nor the achievements to move forwards yet equally unable to move backwards.
At our final meeting, we told the CEO that we had identified all of this, and that we were no longer part of the game. Although she was surprised at our withdrawal from the program, she admitted to everything that we said. She recognised the risk that she faced, and the danger that she was putting the company in. If we had said nothing and continued to coach her, the coaching would have been ineffective because of her manipulation and avoidance. By admitting to her behaviour, she had taken responsibility for it and no longer needed coaching. Either way, our feedback was more valuable than any coaching ever could be.
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