High Hurdles: The Challenge of Executive Self-Development

H arvey was just what the board had been looking for in a CEO. He had a strong track record in turning around failing businesses, he was a marvelous strategic thinker, and he understood the company's products and markets. There was only one problem with Harvey: He was a loner. Harvey got along poorly with just about everybody. He was by turns cold and distant or downright abusive. "That's just me," Harvey once said when someone found the courage to bring this up with him. "I'm not trying to win a popularity contest here, you know. " And so the company tolerated Harvey because they desperately needed his skills. He had inherited a vice-president who was good at working with others, and who began to act in Harvey's place at staff meetings and so forth. Eventually Harvey worked his managerial magic and the company turned around. A year later the board dismissed Harvey-his abrasive personality was no longer tolerable in the smoothly running organization-and he went off to save another company. It was too bad, as it turned out, because not long after Harvey left, the company got into trouble again. They really needed Harvey and what he could do for them. A board member said of him: "Damn Harvey! We couldn't live with him and we can't live without him. " We tell this story to illustrate some of the issues of managerial development at the highest organizational levels. Perhaps the most important of these is why Harvey's organization did not try to help him improve his interpersonal ability. In general, why is it that when performance problems arise in high-level managers, the solution organizations usually prefer is to transfer, demote, or fire the executive? In effect, a game of "musical chairs" is being played in corporate executive suites. ' Organizations may also try making up for an executive's performance problems by hiring associates with compensating strengths, but either way the solution of choice is to move (or remove) the executive or to change those around the executive; in other words, to use selection instead of development. Much less frequently do organizations attempt to create, in a manner of speaking, movement within the executive-that is, to encourage the executive's personal and managerial growth. This paper is about self-development-the efforts of the executive to improve himself or herself, efforts that other people may well aid or hinder. By self-development we mean the conscious, deliberate effort to come to terms with one's limitations. We do not mean the kind of development that springs almost automatically from the new experiences that bring out latent abilities in the executive. We are also not concerned here with the considerable development executives have undergone on their way up.2 Our interest is in self-aware, self-directed improvement once managers have reached the highest levels. This paper explores the hypothesis that executives avoid coming to terms with their limitations and that the executive's organization and the people who work directly with the executive shy away from attempts to help. It is based on interviews we conducted with 40 individuals-22 executives and 18 experts on executives, including internal specialists in executive development and external consultants. The people interviewed came from a wide variety of organizations, large and small, public and private. The 40 interviews took from an hour to three hours each; this resulted in over 400 pages of interview transcripts, which we subjected to careful analysis. We were looking for patterns in what executives found problematic about their jobs, how likely it was that executives acknowledged these difficulties, and what conditions affected whether executives became aware of their problems or attempted to do something about them. For this study we defined an executive as an upper-level manager in a line position with general management responsibilities, or a highlevel head of a function such as chief financial officer or vice-president of administration.9 Self-development is important because no executive can escape having deficits and because deficits matter to executives and their organizations. These deficits run the gamut: difficulty in thinking strategically; trouble adjusting to a job with large scope; a proclivity for viewing all problems through the lens of one's specialty;4 discomfort with one's role as public figure and organizational spokesman; an introverted personality that people lower in the hierarchy experience as aloofness; a susceptibility to let power, posi-