The Corner Office

For some companies and organizations, this quality is so important that they build their hiring pro cess around it.

Every year, Teach for America sends its new recruits into often difficult school and classroom situations. The organization, founded in 1990 by Wendy Kopp, has learned how to screen for people who are likely to succeed in settings where the odds are stacked against them.

“We’ve done a lot of research to look at the personal characteristics that differentiate the people among our teachers who are the most successful,” said Kopp. “And the most predictive trait is still demonstrated achievement. But then there are a set of personal characteristics, and the number one most predictive trait is perseverance, or what we would call internal locus of control. People who, in the context of a challenge – and you can’t see it unless you’re in the context of a challenge – have the instinct to figure out what they can control, and to own it, rather than to blame everyone else in the system. And you can see why in this case. Kids, kids’ families, the system – there are so many people to blame. And yet you’ll go into the schools and you’ll see people teaching in the same hallway, some of whom have that mentality of ‘it’s not possible to succeed here,’ and others who are just prevailing against it all. And it’s so much about that mindset – the internal locus of control, and the instinct to stay optimistic in the face of a challenge.”

Accenture, the giant consulting firm, has made a science of trying to assess whether candidates have this quality. William D. Green, the CEO of Accenture, said the company considers screening job candidates a core competency, and has developed a system called “critical behavior interviewing” to find the right people. Accenture gets roughly two million résumés a year, and hires between 40,000 and 60,000 people. If it hires well, that gives it a huge competitive advantage. Here’s Green explaining Accenture’s critical behavior interviewing pro cess:

“It’s based on the premise that past behavior is the best indicator of future behavior. Essentially what we’re looking for is, have you faced any adversity and what did you do about it? We also know the profile of successful Accenture people, and how do we learn from the people we have who have stayed, learned, grown, and become great leaders, and how do we push that back into the recruiting pro cess to find the best matches for Accenture?

“If you get down to it, it’s what have you learned, what have you demonstrated, what behaviors do you have? Have you shown intuition? Have you shown the ability to synthesize and act? Have you shown the ability to step up and make a choice? How have you dealt with the hand in front of you, played it out?”

Green told a story of how one job candidate stood out from the crowd for him.

“I was recruiting at Babson College,” he said. “This was in 1991. The last recruit of the day – I get this résumé. I get the blue sheet attached to it, which is the form I’m supposed to fill out with all this stuff. His résumé is very light – no clubs, no sports, no nothing. Babson, 3.2. Studied finance. Work experience: Sam’s Diner, references on request. It’s the last one of the day, and I’ve seen all these people come through strutting their stuff and they’ve got their portfolios and semester studying abroad. Here comes this guy. He sits. His name is Sam, and I say: ‘Sam, let me just ask you. What else were you doing while you were here?’ He says: ‘Well, Sam’s Diner. That’s our family business, and I leave on Friday after classes, and I go and work till closing. I work all day Saturday till closing, and then I work Sunday until I close, and then I drive back to Babson.’ I wrote, ‘Hire him,’ on the blue sheet. He’s still with us, because he had character. He faced a set of challenges. He figured out how to do both. It’s work ethic. You could see the guy had charted a path for himself to make it work with the situation he had. He didn’t ask for any help. He wasn’t victimized by the thing. He just said, ‘That’s my dad’s business, and I work there.’ Confident. Proud.

“What critical behavior interviewing does,” said Green, “is get at people’s character, and you get to see where work fits in their value system, where pride fits in their value system, where making hard decisions or sacrificing fits in their value system. I mean, you sacrifice and you’re a victim, or you sacrifice because it’s the right thing to do and you have pride in it. Huge difference. Simple thing. Huge difference.”

People don’t have to climb Mount Everest or run the 135-mile Badwater Ultramarathon through Death Valley to develop battle-hardened confidence. Nor do they need to wish that they had faced more challenges growing up. Battle-hardened confidence starts with the right attitude. And attitude is the one thing that anyone can control, even if it seems like everything else is outside of their control. If you tackle challenges, building a track record of success, then battle-hardened confidence will follow.

A first step, though, requires developing a healthy relationship with failure. Many CEOs recognize that failure is part of success – particularly for people pursuing an ambitious goal – and they embrace failure and value it and learn from it. It can be a hard lesson to learn, particularly for teenagers shifting from high school, where they perhaps grew accustomed to acing exams, to college, and then into their careers.

John Donahoe, the CEO of eBay, said he learned from a mentor how to be more accepting of failure.

“A really valuable piece of advice early in my career was from a guy named Kent Thiry, who was another of my early bosses and is now CEO at DaVita,” Donahoe said. “I didn’t know it at the time, but I was suffering from a real fear of failure. Kent said, ‘You know, John, your challenge is you’re trying to bat.900.’ And he said, ‘When you were in college, you got a lot of A’s. You could get 90, 95 percent right. When you took your first job as an analyst, you were really successful and felt like you were batting.900.’

“But he said, and this is probably five years into my career, ‘Now you’ve moved from the minor leagues. You’re playing in the major leagues, and if you expect to bat.900, either you come up at bat and freeze because you’re so afraid of swinging and missing, or you’re a little afraid to step into the batter’s box. The best hitters in Major League Baseball, world class, they can strike out six times out of ten and still be the greatest hitters of all time.’ That’s my philosophy – the key is to get up in that batter’s box and take a swing. And all you have to do is hit one single, a couple of doubles, and an occasional home run out of every ten at-bats, and you’re going to be the best hitter or the best business leader around. You can’t play in the major leagues without having a lot of failures.”

Video games have been criticized in some quarters for creating slothful kids. But Jen-Hsun Huang of Nvidia said they taught him a valuable lesson about failure.

“I’ve never beaten myself up about mistakes,” he said. “When I try something and it doesn’t turn out, I go back and try it again, and maybe it’s because I grew up in the video-game era. Most of the time when you’re playing a game you’re losing. You lose and lose and lose until you beat it. That’s kind of how the game works, right? It’s feedback. And then eventually you beat it. As it turns out, the most fun parts of that game are when you’re losing. When you finally beat it there’s a moment of euphoria, but then it’s over. Maybe it’s because I grew up in that generation and I have the ability to take chances, which leads to the ability to innovate and try new things. Those are important life lessons that came along.”

Learning from failure, and recognizing failure quickly, is part of the culture at Nvidia, Huang said.

“This ability to celebrate failure needs to be an important part of any company that’s in a rapidly changing world,” he said. “And the second part of our core value is what we characterize as intellectual honesty – the ability to call a spade a spade, to recognize as quickly as possible that we’ve made a mistake, that we’ve gone the wrong way, and that we learn from it and quickly adjust. Now it came about because when Nvidia was first founded, we were the first company of our kind, but we rapidly almost went out of business. We built the technology and then it just didn’t work. And so we did everything differently.

“It was during that time that I learned that it was okay for a CEO to say that the strategy didn’t work, that the technology didn’t work, that the product didn’t work, but we’re still going to be great and let me tell you why. I think that’s what’s thrilling about leadership. When you’re holding on to literally the worst possible hand on the planet and you know you’re still going to win. How are you still going to win? Because that’s when the character of the company really comes out. And it was during that time that we really cultivated and developed what I consider to be our core values today. I don’t think you can create culture and develop core values during great times. I think it’s when the company faces adversity of extraordinary proportions, when there’s no reason for the company to survive, when you’re looking at incredible odds – that’s when culture is developed; character is developed.

“And I think ‘culture’ is a big word for corporate character. It’s the personality of the company, and now the personality of our company simply says this: If we think something is really worthwhile to be done and we have a great idea, and it’s never been done before but we believe in it, it’s okay to take a chance. If it doesn’t work, learn from it, adjust, and keep failing forward. But every single time you’re making it better and better and better. Before you know it, you’re a great company.”

John T. Chambers, the CEO of Cisco, said that the adversity he faced both as a child and as a CEO were among the most important leadership lessons he had learned.

“People think of us as a product of our successes,” Chambers said. “I’d actually argue that we’re a product of the challenges we faced in life. And how we handled those challenges probably has more to do with what we accomplish in life. I had an issue with dyslexia before they understood what dyslexia was. One of my teachers, Mrs. Anderson, taught me to look at it like a curveball. The ball breaks the same way every time. Once you get used to it, you can handle it pretty well. So I went from almost being embarrassed reading in front of a class – you lose your place, and I read right to left – to the point where I knew I could overcome challenges. I think it also taught me sensitivity toward others.

“I learned another lesson from Jack Welch,” he continued. “It was in 1998, and at that time we were one of the most valuable companies in the world. I said, ‘Jack, what does it take to have a great company?’ And he said, ‘It takes major setbacks and overcoming those.’ I hesitated for a minute, and I said, ‘Well, we did that in ’93 and then we did it again in ’97 with the Asian financial crisis.’ And he said, ‘No, John. I mean a near-death experience.’ I didn’t understand exactly what he meant. Then, in 2001, we had a near-death experience. We went from the most valuable company in the world to a company where they questioned the leadership. And in 2003 he called me up and said, ‘John, you now have a great company.’ I said, ‘Jack, it doesn’t feel like it.’ But he was right. While it was something I would have given anything to have avoided, it did make us a much better company, a much stronger company, a company that at times doesn’t take itself too seriously but also a company that doesn’t have fear. We have a lot of healthy paranoia about what can go wrong. So that’s a nice way of saying that it’s how you lead through tough scenarios that often determines where you go.”

Quintin E. Primo III, the co-founder and CEO of Capri Capital, said his experience of surviving a near-death experience also taught him a lot about leadership.

“Leadership, in my opinion, is best learned, or honed, through adversity,” he said. “And it’s in times of adversity that one must step up to the plate, and do something. You have to do this, or do that, but you just can’t stand still. You have to take action in adversity. And for me, probably the most poignant moment in my career as a leader was when my first business failed miserably. We were crushed by the real estate markets of the early ’90s. Back then we were a very young, emerging organization with no real business. We entered into a death spiral, roughly two years after I started the firm in ’88. And managing down, as the Titanic is sinking, you’re not even worried about the deck chairs.

“It taught me a lot about who I was. It taught me a great deal about the folks I had selected to work with me on this sinking ship. It was a very frightening period for me, but what I’ve learned is that one must have faith, faith in something larger than yourself, or you truly will be sunk. Whether that faith is faith in the common good of man, whether it’s in universal rhythm or karma, or whether it is simply in God, there has to be something larger than you.

“In that period of adversity for me, I discovered that my employees, as such, were really part of my family. And you will sacrifice, you will do extraordinary things to protect your family, and feed them, and clothe them. You will sacrifice greatly. And so, in this period of adversity, I had to move outside of me. It no longer was all about me, but about making sure that the hardship on those who worked with me was as modest, as low, as possible. It just shifted priorities. After graduating from Harvard Business School, and having success for eight golden years in real estate, I thought I was the next great thing since sliced bread. In abundance, it’s very easy to lose focus. But in adversity, one must have extreme focus.”

Anyone with a blemish on his résumé or academic record may be tempted to paper over it, or wish it away. That may not be necessary. Many CEOs, and others who have achieved a measure of success in their lives and are in hiring roles, have probably had some rough patches themselves. If candidates can explain what they’ve learned from those experiences, and how they dealt with them, they may find their résumé goes to the top of the pile.

Meridee A. Moore, the founder of Watershed Asset Management, a hedge fund, said that when she’s hiring she considers it a plus when she sees that candidates have suffered a dip in their academic performance at some point, then persevered to improve.

“If you’ve ever had a setback and come back from it, I think it helps you make better decisions,” she said. “There’s nothing better for sharpening your ability to predict outcomes than living through some period when things went wrong. You learn that events aren’t in your control and no matter how smart you are, and how hard you work, you have to anticipate things that can go against you.”

Understand what you can control. Don’t be a victim. Figure out a way to get things done. It’s a way of perceiving the world that will help you avoid the disappointment of failure, and stay in the right frame of mind for plowing through adversity. Challenges become learning experiences rather than disappointments. It’s often just a matter of attitude that makes people stand out. They earn the confidence of their managers that they will take on, and own, any assignment thrown their way.

For bosses, a dream employee will eagerly accept a challenge, and say those words that are music to a manager’s ears: “Got it. I’m on it.” People who want more responsibility, with a confidence born of a track record of facing down challenges, will move up.

Chapter 3

TEAM SMARTS

At some point, the notion of being a team player became devalued in corporate life. Perhaps it was all the rah-rah team-building exercises, the jerseys, the T-shirts, the buttons. They may be good for bonding, but improving teamwork on the job? That takes more work than trust-building exercises like falling backwards into a colleague’s arms. The notion of being a team player has been reduced to a truism – I work on a team, therefore I am a team player. It’s a point captured in a cartoon, by Mike Baldwin, in which an interviewer says to a job candidate, “We need a dedicated team player. How are you at toiling in obscurity?”

The most effective executives are more than team players. They understand how teams work, the different roles of individual players, and how to get the most out of the group. They know how to create a sense of mission and how to make people feel like every-one’s getting credit. They know how to build a sense of commitment in the group. Just as some people have street smarts – they are savvy and know their way around a neighborhood, and they understand the unwritten rules for getting things done – others have team smarts.

In a world in which work is increasingly done through collaboration, team smarts is an essential skill.

“With most of the important things I learned about leadership, it was usually because we weren’t hitting our numbers,” said Teresa A. Taylor, the chief operating officer of Qwest Communications. “When things are going well, you think, ‘Oh good, everything we’re doing is right.’ When things aren’t going so great, that’s when you reflect and you say, ‘What am I doing that isn’t working, or what do I need to change?’ It’s very much on instinct and experience. Even the instinct is driven by watching people’s body language, watching how they’re presenting. I mean you can just ask an open-ended question, and if three people wiggle and one person doesn’t, you can figure, okay, they’re not working together. So I do spend a lot of time reading the room.”

It starts with an understanding that teamwork is built on a foundation of one-to-one interactions between people, an unwritten contract that has nothing to do with business cards, organization charts, or titles. A big part of being team smart is appreciating that teamwork is developed by conveying a sense that you are looking out for a colleague, that you’ve got her back. It’s these small exchanges – a favor here, an extra mile of effort there – that become the connective tissue between two people. And that’s where team-work starts: with two people.

Greg Brenneman, the chairman of the private equity firm CCMP Capital, said that one of the most memorable lessons he learned about leadership was from the future Massachusetts governor and presidential candidate Mitt Romney, with whom Brenneman worked at Bain, the consulting firm, long before Romney went into politics.

“He said, ‘Greg, in any interaction, you either gain share or lose share. So treat every interaction as kind of a precious moment in time,’ ” Brenneman recalled. “And I’ve always remembered that, because I think it’s really true. So what I’ve tried to do is have more conversations where I’m gaining share than losing share, to try to add value to everything.”

Gary E. McCullough, the CEO of Career Education Corporation, shared a story that helps bring Brenneman’s rule to life. It involved a woman named Rosemary, whom he came to know when he was working at Procter & Gamble. She operated the coffee cart that came around each morning, but McCullough came to appreciate her keen sense of people, and her insights about whether they understood the basics of teamwork.

“Rosemary had an uncanny ability to discern who was going to make it and who wasn’t going to make it,” McCullough said. “And I remember, when I was probably almost a year into the organization, she told me I was going to be okay. But she also told me some of my classmates who were with the company weren’t going to make it. And she was more accurate than the HR organization was. When I talked to her, I said, ‘How’d you know?’ She could tell just by the way they treated people. In her mind, everybody was going to drop the ball at some point. And then she said, ‘You know you’re going to drop the ball, and I see that you’re good with people and people like you and you treat them right. They’re going to pick up the ball for you, and they’re going to run and they’re going to score a touchdown for you. But if they don’t like you, they’re going to let that ball lie there and you’re going to get in trouble.’ Again, I think it’s those intangible things.”

Being team smart begins with the foundation of learning to work with another person. The next step is to understand team dynamics, and the role that individuals play on each team. Many CEOs have learned these lessons through sports.

Mark Pincus, the CEO of Zynga, the online gaming company, said his experience playing soccer on his school team was a formative leadership lesson.

“We were on the same team together, most of us, for eight or nine years, and we were at a really little school in Chicago that had no chance of really fielding any great athletes,” he said. “But we ended up doing really well as a team, and we made it to the state quarterfinals, and it was all because of teamwork. And the one thing I learned from that was that I actually could tell what someone would be like in business, based on how they played on the soccer field. So even today when I play in Sunday-morning soccer games, I can literally spot the people who’d probably be good managers and good people to hire.”

He explained the qualities he looked for on the soccer field:

“One is reliability, the sense that they’re not going to let the team down, that they’re going to hold up their end of the bargain. And in soccer, especially if you play seven on seven, it’s more about whether you have seven guys or women who can pull their own weight rather than whether you have any stars. So I’d rather be on a team that has no bad people than a team with stars. There are certain people you just know are not going to make a mistake, even if the other guy’s faster than they are, or what ever. They’re just reliable.

“And are you a playmaker? There are people who don’t want to screw up, and so they just pass the ball right away. Then there are the ones who have this kind of intelligence, and they can make these great plays. These people seem to have high emotional intelligence. It’s not that they’re star players, but they have decent skills, and they will get you the ball and then be where you’d expect to put it back to them. It’s like their heads are really in the game.”

Andrew Cosslett of InterContinental Hotels Group also learned about team dynamics from sports – in his case, rugby.

“Everyone’s different, so you have to know people,” Cosslett said. “I think having a sense of self-awareness is very important, like how you impact each of the people you’re with differently. The whole thing about staying alive on a rugby field is about reliance on the guys around you. Each one of those people on a rugby team responds differently because it’s physically dangerous as a game. It has a tension in the changing room before you go out to play that’s not like any other sport, and I’ve played lots, because it is almost like going into battle. There’s a chance you’re going to break your neck or have a very bad injury.

“You need to jell with them as a team, but each one responds individually. So it’s about seeing the world on their terms and then dealing with them on their terms, not yours. I think you’re born with some of this as well. I’m very sensitive to how people are thinking and feeling at any given moment. That’s really helpful in business, because you pick things up very fast.”

Part of team building is understanding the roles that different personalities play in a group. For example, Will Wright, the video-game developer behind best-sellers like Spore and The Sims, sees people either as potential “glue” or “solvent” in a team setting when he is considering hiring someone.

“There is the matter of how good is this person, times their teamwork factor,” Wright said. “You can have a great person who doesn’t really work well on the team, and they’re a net loss. You can have somebody who is not that great, but they are really very good glue, so that could be a net gain. A lot of team members I consider glue within the team in that they disseminate things effectively, they motivate and improve the morale of people around them. They basically bring the team tighter and tighter. Others are solvents, and it’s their kind of personal nature that they might be disagreeable. They rub people the wrong way. They’re always caught in conflicts. For the most part, that is at least as important as their competence in their roles.”