Your Business
At many companies, CEOs are insulated from “trivial” concerns that, in the opinion of their subordinates, they do not need to know. That’s particularly sad because much of this executive sheltering is misguided.
CEOs should be told about unusual or unexpected events, even if they are unpleasant. How can they properly manage their companies unless they are kept well informed? A leader managing in a vacuum is a sure-fire path to corporate erosion and eventual oblivion.
The following is a recent complaint that the CEO of a global hotel chain probably would have personally addressed had he known about it:
The email from his headquarters staff read, “Thank you for reaching out to us concerning your recent stay. My name is Sandra, and I’m with Executive Customer Relations. Your letter to our CEO has been forwarded for me to handle….”
Unfortunately, it was the usual “bug letter” response. What Sandra was saying was that her CEO would never see John’s complaint letter or learn what actually happened.
John’s thoughts returned uneasily to the night he and his wife were subjected to a terrifying experience by a strange-acting employee at one of the chain’s hotels—an event that occurred again a week later with another customer at the same hotel.
John wanted an apology from that hotel’s general manager and assurance that the chain’s CEO had been made aware of his complaint, but that was not to be. Instead, he would receive emails with platitudes, and no real action would be taken. Apparently, customer retention was not their concern.
But you can bet that John will tell his friends, and they, in turn, will tell others, and those people will tell others. That will reduce the positive effect of the global chain’s advertising, but the CEO will never know what happened.
Why do employees withhold information from their leaders? Hal Gregersen’s Harvard Business Review article, “Bursting the CEO Bubble,” points out that no one in the company wants to tell the CEO of problems: “If you’re a leader, you can put yourself in a good-news cocoon; your power and privilege leave you insulated from information. Ironically, to do what your exalted position demands, you must in some way escape your exalted position. You have to project an approachable attitude that inspires other people to speak up.”
Walt Bettinger, the CEO of Charles Schwab, calls this dilemma his job’s “number one challenge.” As he explains, it takes two forms: “people telling you what they think you want to hear, and people being fearful to tell you things they believe you don’t want to hear.”
Sometimes this problem gets solved in unplanned ways. Some years ago, when I was president of a 500-employee lubricant company, I used to stay late in the office after everyone else had gone home to catch up on things that couldn’t be done during the day.
Workers at our nearby blending and packaging plant noticed this and started dropping by after their shift to talk to me about whatever happened to be on their minds. Nothing huge was discussed, but I learned a lot about what was really going on that way.
Happily, they understood that “the door is always open” without me actually having to use that hackneyed phrase.
Jack Goodhue, management coach, can be reached at goodhue@aol.com