Big mistakes on the way to the executive suite — do you have what it takes?

The most coveted jobs in the business world are those of C-Suite executives. Along with it comes responsibility, and there are many unspoken rules. It’s hardball, and you can strike out without even seeing the pitch.
Such is the case at Glossika, where we’re developing an educational language training platform, and based in Taipei, Taiwan. There’s nothing draconian in the way we do business, and we do expect professionalism.
As a candidate for a C-Suite position, we let the serial entrepreneur “Steve” work according to his own style and gave him the room and time to prove himself. Despite being tech-savvy, he started off making the bold move of refusing to use Slack where important updates to product development/schedules/meetings get announced. He didn’t attend meetings or communicate regularly with stakeholders. He maintained an invisible presence by working remotely. “Steve” envisioned he could mold our current culture into his own dream vision — by communicating to no one.
“Steve” didn’t get the memos for meetings nor did he ask anybody, so he missed meetings and the decision making process, and he missed schedules, and he missed deadlines. He never acted as a leader — only responding to the occasional questions from his team, and only telling the CEO what he expected from his team. In other words, he used the CEO as his own proxy in his eternal absence. He used his special relationship with the CEO to assert his power and influence egregiously. And he reacted negatively when developers and marketers finished work that he didn’t approve of. But he wasn’t in the meetings where the decisions were made in the first place, so nobody ever heard his voice or cared for that matter.
Over the course of his short employment, Steve’s name was frequently mentioned in meetings by the CEO, “Steve told me this/that”, followed up by the others’ “why?” and “if Steve wants to be heard then why isn’t he here speaking for himself?” So his name quickly became a pariah, and only proved the lack of respect he demanded. One of our stakeholders said, “His name or his ideas should not be mentioned again when there is no objective evidence behind his claims. I’m not going to listen to another ‘Steve said.’” As a result he reluctantly agreed to attend an important meeting in early July through video call.
The respect he deserved was really nobody else’s responsibility but his own. So, assuming that he was on track to gain a C-Suite position because he was “acquainted” with the CEO over a period of three years, he blindly walked into his own undoing through a massive ethics breach described below.
I come from a corporate background. In the late ’90s I worked as a Chinese interpreter and translator. Between 2002 and 2010, I transitioned as a consultant to executives at a number of companies in Taipei, Taiwan, at branches of multinational corporations like Microsoft/Yahoo/HP, and local companies like Asus/BenQ/Quanda who were finding their presence on a global stage. Quite a variety of operating styles exist between these companies and the kinds of expectations they had. For seven years I held a position with Motorola where I was on the team that was negotiating logistics contracts with Broadcom, Foxconn and a slew of other companies to help Motorola save some US$200m annually by setting up Just-In-Time supply chain logistics. The negotiations were successful, but the savings were only temporary as the plight of the company was sealed by that point. During these years I helped tech, animation, trading, and pharma companies negotiate important contracts. As a result, in 2006 I published a negotiation training manual for executives that I used to train clients over the next few years. I’ve always enjoyed working with and training talented individuals to excel in their jobs and communicate across cultures.
One day a client of mine asked if I would run a corporation of my own someday, so I did some research and decided to become an entrepreneur. Now a decade later I’ve built an edutech and publishing company. Individuals are now approaching me who think are qualified to get a C-Suite position because they personally know me. The remedy I see in this case should be: a heavy dose of reality.
If you’re a company owner, you shouldn’t settle for mediocre performance: bring on people who are willing to learn and acclimate to your culture and have the potential to perform by instilling in them the right work ethic. There are those with exceptional talent who are full of themselves for good reason: because they have optimum performance and are the best at what they do — and they would be great for any company. The danger lies when you bring on someone with that attitude who disappoints and underperforms.
There is always going to be a lot of competition for the C-Suite job, so retaining that spot depends on your performance, your everything. If you fail to understand the culture of the company, how to communicate within that culture, or fail to maintain your relationships, you’re just not going to survive.
Sure, I gave Steve the benefit of the doubt and a good five months to prove himself. I didn’t listen to my partners and was blinded by the early warning signs based merely on believing in competencies that never materialized.
Steve didn’t communicate with any of the stakeholders in the company, didn’t gain rapport or buy-in for any of his initiatives, and believed that he could wrestle control and power within the company from an offshore location without ever stepping foot into the company. Not only did he not know the rules of the game, he didn’t even know how many players were in the game.
The first 100 days of an executive’s job are the most important. Before your first day, you should already be in contact with your team, putting together your agenda and figuring out the roles that everybody is going to play. You should have also figured out who all the stakeholders and department heads in the company are. And you should have a head-start on hiring if need be, so you should have plenty of communication and buy-in with HR.
I highly recommend every aspiring executive to get their hands on “The New Leader’s 100-Day Action Plan” by George B. Bradt, Jayme A. Check, and Jorge E. Pedraza. Use it wisely as your manual to corporate success.
In pursuing your agenda, there are going to be a lot of people in your way. Your first goal is to establish frequent and small wins throughout your first 100 days. The more buy-in you get, the more support you’ll achieve across the organization. The lack of communication is the source of your loss of control.
A C-Suite executive must work hard to gain trust, assert authority, be a leader, and establish rapport with everybody s/he comes into contact with. This applies to both outside and within the corporation.
Meetings are where relationships and deals get made, and what make the world go round. If you weren’t there, then it’s impossible for you to establish any influence or voice your opinions on company directives. You don’t exist.
The person who works remotely has to work twice as hard as anybody else to make sure they get in the right meetings and make themselves be seen and heard, especially when nobody else has an interest in covering their ass.
Most meetings really do need to happen in person because of body language. If you’re calling in, even if by video call, your field of vision can be limited. You should only call in when your future stake in the company is not at risk or the deal is small enough that you do not need to impose any “presence” to make things happen. Making demands to your team when calling in remotely can have an adverse effect on your authority and leadership — but you can likewise appear more powerful when the positions are reversed and they’re calling in to you at the head office.
A leader, especially a C-Suite executive, has to be a person of presence, has to be both seen and heard. It is not unlike that of a politician’s job. The C-Suite executive should go over the details of projects and timelines with his own team, but may or may not be directly involved in doing the detailed work of his team. In other words, you need to work on your department, not necessarily in your department.
Not everybody can handle the executive job. Most corporations will not tolerate nepotism, favoritism, undermining of corporate objectives, or underhanded manipulation behind the scenes. Tread carefully.
The job can go to any person competent enough to lead the company forward whether sourced internally or externally, but the lifespan of the job can be surprisingly short.
Let’s go over each of the arguments that Steve had, and see how these did not align with corporate goals:
“We’re a small company and should always remain a small company.”
— Nobody knows for sure what will happen. Of course a corporation wants to achieve the highest amount of revenue with the least number of employees. But in some cases, more employees are necessary to achieve specific milestones. A company grows according to market forces and demand, and by the founder’s vision. Staying small, just because of a mantra, is illogical.
“Likewise, a company can be successful by working remotely because talent can exist anywhere in the world.”
— We cannot argue about talent coming from anywhere in the world. But working remotely, if it is someone’s choice (and the right we gave Steve to prove), must work properly. If it proves ineffective, then nobody’s going to listen to your case.
— As a company of innovation, much of that innovation is sparked from conversations and increased interactions with others by working together in the same space.
— If you’re expecting to win a C-Suite position, but you can’t even make one of your initiatives work, then you’re not going to gain respect or the support that you need from corporate stakeholders.
“Meeting with only one executive is enough to get my job done.”
— You may have a special relationship with the CEO (or other executive within the company) but this is a recipe for disaster. As an executive you need to be in constant contact with all areas of the company and make sure you’re kept in the loop. The reality is that any decisions made behind closed doors that you’re not part of, means that you’re on the fast track out of the company. By not communicating across the company, you choose not to achieve the initiatives of your department, and you’re only going to leave your team in disarray.
“Deliverables get done when they get done, because I should have the freedom to work on my own time and schedule.”
— As an executive, nobody’s going to argue with your experience and expertise. You will have only your results to show. In the case of Steve, his free schedule progressed much slower than the pace of the rest of the company which played out in his offshore fantasy. I’m pretty that sure he wasn’t even aware of the fact. Everybody has their own agenda and doesn’t want to wait for someone holding them up. All we see are a lot of non-deliverables and unaccomplished tasks.
— Unfortunately, since Glossika has been working on one big project together, Steve was effectively sabotaging everybody, holding the whole company hostage, and putting the continuity, budgeting, and cashflow of the company at risk. Remember, if you alone hold so much control, that you can block everybody else’s agendas, and thereby refuse to hold meetings with everybody else, then you’re the problem, not everybody else. Not even a founder would survive the chaos and mass exodus that would ensue. (Steve happens to be a serial entrepreneur and chooses not talk about his past — could he have experienced a mass exodus of employees in his own past?)
Steve has allowed important deadlines to pass, and created new deadlines based on his free schedule — without holding any discussion or meetings with company stakeholders to inform them of changes or express concerns.
“That’s how it’s done in silicon valley.”
— This is one of Steve’s favorite catchphrases. First, this isn’t silicon valley, and second, we’re not idiots. Third, if anybody ever tells you “this is how it’s done [somewhere]”, walk away, or fire that person, depending on your level of authority of course. Every company has its own culture and way of doing things, even in silicon valley. Glossika rules are not defined by me, but rather as a group whole of all the employees involved — and we get along well as a team. We make decisions together. That is our culture and we protect it. There are no secret meetings between individuals hashing out secret deals. That kind of behavior won’t survive here. One of our stakeholders is extremely intolerant of it, and has been vehemently opposed to Steve’s behavior.
— I know how Mullenweg runs his company, and what kind of culture he’s got, and that has no bearing on us. And in spite of his employee setup and work ethic, I know for a fact he doesn’t put up with any of this b.s.
“I can negotiate massive power plays because of my friendship with the CEO.”
— And Steve would be sorely mistaken. To add oil to the fire, asking for 15% of sales revenue as his personal compensation package is a major breach of ethics and just wouldn’t fly in any company in the world. In fact, I purposefully feigned a weak negotiation position the whole time, allowing Steve to “come to our rescue” so that I could baseline Steve’s intentions. Those intentions reared themselves soon enough. He would have played a completely different hand were he a man of integrity and principle. Still playing to his ego, I lauded him on his powerful negotiation skills and let him know what a great deal he had made, knowing fully well it would never get approval or signature from the already irate stakeholders in the company.
— Steve didn’t baseline me, or even figure out that sales revenue — not even 1% — will ever be on the table to be negotiated. That’s not how we do business. I continued to let him argue his points, and as part of the negotiation he asked under what circumstances he would be let go. I let him know, and hereby hinting, that an ethics breach would suffice.
— Steve sent a follow-up email stating that our company would owe him his percentage “in perpetuity”. This is the equivalent of paying him a tax on our sales revenue to his estate (or family/heirs) for centuries to come — for as long as the company still exists. That is an extremely unethical thing to ask or to even consider. I’m glad to say that “Steve” will never represent or negotiate on our company’s behalf.
His ability to negotiate was greatly undermined by his ego. He failed to baseline me or to understand the company.
I’d always presented him as a “guru”: a knowledgeable and experienced individual to everybody I’ve introduced him to. But when he decided to take a position at our company, he failed to understand the role reversal and that he was now playing by our rules. Once having tried to blackmail us into gaining power and a ridiculous compensation package by holding the project hostage, there was no alternative.
During the short time at our company, Steve listened to me explain the details of the algorithms, patents, and database structures because I felt I could speak freely about them under our work agreement. All of that is and will continue to be our proprietary intellectual property that has been in development for many years, long before Steve came. Even though he no longer renders services or works for us, it would be yet another breach of corporate conduct if he were to claim ownership or make applications in his own name to patent offices based on what he learned here. I’m announcing publicly here that his termination announced to our board on Friday, August 18, 2017 (the missed launch date) and that was informed to him on Monday, August 21 legally removes him from the processes and technologies we’ve designed and built.
It’s true. We’ve suffered losses. We have to build from scratch or rebuild almost everything. Steve’s team at the office spent most of their time waiting around for his directives and answers to questions, costing the company losses in payroll expenditures when the team could have been otherwise very productive. Such is the cost of remote work when a team doesn’t have a leader. We have to eat the losses and move on.
Most of the planning for our launch has been done in-house in our own meetings. Steve really had no say, no effect, and no input on most of those decisions and our stakeholders have been driving initiatives forward steadily. The hardest work is done, and we’re just around the corner from a launch date.
The final lesson is to learn how to protect yourself. Don’t let so-called friends fool you, no matter how long they’ve known you. In this case, Steve and I didn’t know each other well at all, except having a formal meeting every other month over the last 3 years (involvement on a separate project). Make sure that who you’re hiring is properly qualified for the job. A couple years ago, two friends of mine went into business with a third partner who literally “stole” their company with a buried contractual clause that threw them out and they’re still in court fighting for the company. This guy had been their “friend” for 10 years before going into business together!
This is the reality: your enemies will keep you closer than your friends.
