Coachless new leaders often shoot themselves in the foot.
The brutal reality is that executives have less time than ever to prove their worth. Tough global competition, more diligent regulators, increasingly engaged boards of directors, and demanding investors have combined to create an environment in which a new hire has to show results almost from Day One. The pressure is especially acute for outside recruits.
40% to 60% of high-level corporate executives brought in from outside a company will fail within two years. Those who do fail most often derail quickly, sometime between seven and nine months in the job. Last year, there were 28,058 executive turnovers, including board members and executives from CEO down to vice-president, a 68% increase 2005, according to Liberum Research's analysis of North American public companies. Of those, 44% of the positions were filled from outside the company.
Leaders often fail for a few common reasons: due to unclear or outsized expectations, a failure to build partnerships with key stakeholders, a failure to learn the company, industry or the job itself fast enough, a failure to determine the process for gaining commitments from direct reports and a failure to recognize and manage the impact of change on people. Onboarding coaching of the newly recruited or promoted executive can turnaround this high rate of failure.
When a company ejects a high-profile hire in under a year, the problem is usually not one of ability but of leadership style. The person clashes with the CEO, inspires resentment in co-workers, or pushes for too much change too quickly.
Julie Roehm, 36, as director of marketing communications at Chrysler Group, is no ordinary executive. When Wal-Mart came knocking, Roehm had been working at Chrysler for nearly five years. It was a company that all sides agree fit her temperament perfectly. "We're probably the edgiest automaker in terms of the things we try. And the times Julie went over the edge have been well documented," says Jason Vines, the automaker's chief spokesman.
Roehm was flattered when headhunter Spencer Stuart contacted her in September of 2005 about the possibility of joining Wal-Mart. She saw an opportunity to head a marketing communications department and be part of a potentially exciting effort to transform the company and its image. However, Roehm and her husband, Michael, who looks after their two boys, age 5 and 8, wondered about moving from suburban Detroit to Bentonville. And from the moment she arrived at Wal-Mart on Feb. 6, 2006, Roehm recognized that fitting in would be harder than she had imagined.
A leadership onboarding coach would have worked with her to keep a low profile and spend her first 100 days listening to build productive relationships within the company. That's not her default behavioral style. "I get overly excited," she acknowledges. "I wanted to hit the ground running. Go, go, go." Unfortunately, no one told her to back off.
Roehm acknowledges mistakes, among them moving too quickly and not adapting to her new workplace. But she also paints a picture of warring fiefdoms and a passive-aggressive culture that was hostile to outsiders. Wal-Mart, she says, "would rather have had a painkiller [than] taken the vitamin of change." What has she learned? "The importance of culture. It can't be underestimated."
Source: BusinessWeek, February 12, 2007