A new CEO builds on a company\u2019s past strengths by keeping key people in place as he takes authority.<\/em> He doesn\u2019t replace them or give them empty titles, as Caesar did. A true leader can make the inherited management team feel valuable and find ways to make them productive and maintain their self-worth.<\/p>\nThe counterexample to Caesar\u2019s authoritarian style is Alan Mulally. When Mr. Mulally became CEO of the Ford Motor Co. in 2006, his assignment was to turn around an auto maker in decline. He had a record of success but in aeronautics, not automobiles, and he knew that he had a lot to learn. Although he had authority to fire the old management team, he kept most of them on, arguing that Ford\u2019s problem wasn\u2019t its people but its management system.<\/p>\n
Mr. Mulally put a new system in place, but it rubbed the old team the wrong way. The manager who protested most boldly was the internal candidate for CEO who Mr. Mulally had beaten out, Mark Fields. But where some might have seen\u00a0daggers, Mr. Mulally embraced Mr. Fields\u2019 resistance and used it as an occasion to bring the leadership team together and make it more collaborative. The move worked, and brilliantly. Ford returned to profitability and was the only major U.S. auto maker to avoid a government bailout in 2008. As for Mr. Fields, not only did he succeed under Mr. Mulally, he followed him as Ford\u2019s CEO when Mr. Mulally retired in 2014.<\/p>\n
A successful leader builds a culture of cooperation, not a cult of personality.<\/em> Take Amy Gutmann, president of the University of Pennsylvania since 2004, and a scholar of democracy. A visionary with a strong sense of how to get things done, she came to Penn with a plan to grow the endowment in order to be able to offer needy students more financial aid without burdening them with huge loans. She succeeded brilliantly, in large part by being a great listener with an ability to get people on board. \u201cNobody succeeds alone,\u201d she has said, \u201cI have always had great teams working with me.\u201d<\/p>\nCaesar\u2019s motto was \u201cI came, I saw, I conquered.\u201d It might be one of the pithiest marketing devices in history but it sent precisely the wrong message. \u201cI\u2019ll listen, I\u2019ll learn, I\u2019ll share\u201d is what a real leader says. Combined with a genuine effort to respect and engage the inherited management team, that approach will leave a CEO popping celebratory corks instead of dodging daggers.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"excerpt","protected":false},"author":8,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sync_status":"","episode_type":"","audio_file":"","castos_file_data":"","podmotor_file_id":"","cover_image":"","cover_image_id":"","duration":"","filesize":"","filesize_raw":"","date_recorded":"","explicit":"","block":"","itunes_episode_number":"","itunes_title":"","itunes_season_number":"","itunes_episode_type":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[392],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/8"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2278"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2278\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2278"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2278"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/barrystrauss.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2278"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}