Leading From The C-Suite: Keith Giarman of DHR Global On Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive
An Interview With Doug Noll
Being CEO is a lonely job, partly because you really can’t let your anxiety or uncertainties affect the team. This doesn’t mean you can’t be genuine and transparent, but it is a balance. If a CEO doesn’t have a coach stepping into such a role, they should get one. You will need someone who you can confide in who has your back at all times and can offer a rational sounding Board to reflect on what you are seeing and think needs to be executed.
As part of our series called “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive” we had the pleasure of interviewing Keith Giarman.
Keith Giarman serves as Managing Partner of the Private Equity Practice, based out of the San Francisco and New York offices. He is also a member of the firm’s North American Executive Committee driving overall strategy for the organization.
Keith led the launch and successful expansion of the Private Equity Practice over the past 10 years. Under his leadership, the practice manages approximately 100 board, C-level and senior search assignments per year working with management teams and top-tier investors. He is also a core member of the Board & CEO and CFO practice groups.
Prior to joining DHR, Keith built the CEO practice for one of the premiere boutique executive recruiting firms in Silicon Valley serving the venture capital community. Previously he worked extensively with VC and PE investors, most recently as President and CEO of Clarus Systems. He was also Vice President of Sales, Service and Marketing at Citizens Communications. He was one of five executives on the senior leadership team responsible for 800 employees, $1 billion in revenue and $200 million in operating income.
Keith earned his Bachelor of Arts at UC San Diego and his Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School. He serves as the Chairman of the Board at Mission Dolores Academy. He is the former Vice Chairman of the HBS Association of Northern California, former Trustee for Schools of the Sacred Heart in San Francisco, former Trustee and President of the Alumni Association at the Hopkins School in New Haven, Connecticut and former Chairman of the Western Region Board of Jumpstart based in Boston, Massachusetts.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series. Before we dive into our discussion, our readers would love to “get to know you” a bit better. Can you share with us the backstory about what brought you to your specific career path?
Both before and after business school, I excelled in sales, marketing and ultimately GM and CEO roles in technology. I had a sizable role as Vice President of Sales, Marketing & Services at Citizens Communication, a $3B public company which oversaw 1200 employees. Even though I was being positioned to potentially run the company, I was allured by the Silicon Valley tech boom and made my move to San Francisco.
From there I bridge-funded my first start-up, IAsia Works, securing $10MM and eventually going public. Then at my first real start-up, NightFire Software, a pre-series A with $300k in the bank, I teamed up with technical founder, Swami, to secure Series A funding from some of the industry’s top VC firms, such as US Venture Partners, Sequoia Capital and NEA. We ended up scaling the company to $40 million and selling it to Neustar, which eventually did an IPO.
After leaving my last start-up CEO role at Clarus Systems, I knew I was ready for something new — my fourth career as I call it — and was approached by Spencer Stuart about joining their team in the Bay Area. It was at this time, I started seriously considering and getting interested in how I could translate my leadership skills as an operating executive who believed deeply in people and talent into a search consultant and practice leader. Now, here I am at DHR, a global talent advisory firm, 15 years later having founded and built its Private Equity Practice.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you started your career?
Wow, there are so many twists and turns. Perhaps one of the more interesting stories was being approached by one of my professors, Robert Eccles at Harvard Business School, to join the PhD program. I wasn’t sure I wanted to follow in my father’s footsteps into academia, so I asked if I could get some experience in teaching and research before taking the plunge. Somewhat reluctantly, the school administration agreed and I was introduced to Professor Carl Sloane. We immediately hit it off and he ended up becoming a very close mentor. We teamed with Professor Shoshanna Zuboff and built a course called “Age of Options” to address mid-career executive transition which was grounded on adult developmental psychology research and principles.
Although I enjoyed what I call the “third year of my MBA” and believe I would have excelled at teaching and academic research, with blessings from Professor Sloane I decided that I needed to get back on a General Manager track in tech. It was clear from my one-year experience in academia that I thrive on the competitive aspects of business and would be most stimulated building companies and managing people. “Age of Options” was taught in the Exec Ed Program at HBS for 10 years after I left; I am very proud of that. I was very close with Professor Sloane — a wonderful man and mentor — who unfortunately passed away in 2015. It is interesting how my career turned to executive search given my experience during that time and my childhood around academia but then again, I have always been a student of leadership and I guess it reflects in my current role.
Can you please give us your favorite “Life Lesson Quote”? Do you have a story about how that was relevant in your life?
As a passenger in another car, my father tragically passed in a drunk-driving accident while on sabbatical at Stanford. I was eight years old at the time. Of course, our good friends rallied. One of them being Mike Malkin, who was a PhD student in Astrophysics at Yale and a former Marine. His favorite phrases were Carpe Diem and Semper Fi. My family and I live these mottos in life to this day, and I continue to live these mottos in business. You have to be urgent and ‘seize the day’ in business. That’s what makes it fun and inspiring. But, you are ‘running a marathon’ so you have to effectively build relationships and establish a sense of loyalty in yourself and others. What makes a great leader are things like integrity, authenticity, empathy, and yes — loyalty to your people and to a cause.
Is there a particular book that made a significant impact on your leadership style? Can you share a story or an example of that?
There are actually three. None of them warrant a specific story. Simply put, all three frame the way I interview, assess and consider successful senior executives every day in my role as a headhunter.
I love Jim Collins book “Good to Great” even if it seems a bit dated. For me, it stands the test of time in many regards, but most of all the concept of Level 5 Leadership which, oversimplified, is a powerful combination of humility plus will that he and his research team determined was the key to success for great CEOs.
To add to that a book called “The Outsiders: Eight Unconventional CEOs and Their Radically Rational Blueprint for Success” by Will Thorndike. I see it as a natural extension of Collins research, because it gets at the technical financial skills required for CEOs to generate great returns for employees and shareholders.
A more current book or, rather summary of a series of articles in Forbes, is something called “Sketches for a New Paradigm” by John Kao, who runs the Institute for Large Scale Innovation. I have known John since I was a child. He is a Yale trained MD, completed his residency in psychiatry, graduated from Harvard Business School and taught there for a number of years. He’s a concert quality pianist, likens management to a jazz ensemble, and is a successful entrepreneur. I like his redefinition of leadership skills coming out of the pandemic. He calls these ‘meta proficiencies’ categorized as follows: Contextual Intelligence; Moral Intelligence; Generative Intelligence; Technological Intelligence; and Transformational Intelligence.
What do you think makes your company stand out? Can you share a story?
DHR Global is a leading, privately-held provider of executive search, leadership consulting and emerging leader search solutions in over 50 markets spanning 22 countries. We have an entrepreneurial spirit where structure, support and a dynamic culture are provided to partners who are enabled to create their own business on our platform. Hands-on high-touch personalized service is the mantra at DHR Global, where senior level staff go deep in the execution of assignments working with their clients. Our “pods” of Partners and their Associate staff establish and maintain deep professional connections in service to the client. We are all here for the same reason — to practice our craft focused on service delivery excellence for our clients.
You are a successful business leader. Which three character traits do you think were most instrumental to your success? Can you please share a story or example for each?
Grit / Resilience — Not everything goes according to plan. Great leaders know how to ‘pivot’ when required and keep things on the path to success even when there are setbacks.
Authentic Human Touch — Your success is dependent on others. It is critical that others trust and believe in your integrity, empathy and transparency.
Agility / Foresight — You have to see around corners. Only thinking about executing today or even 1 year ahead is not sufficient. You need to build for the long-term with a strategic mindset.
I was a young VP / corporate officer in a $3 billion company overseeing 1200 people, about 500 in call center roles. When I first took over operations in Dallas, I set up monthly meetings so I could start meeting the team — the entire team. This was done in a series of dinners with staff where they could engage with me, discuss any issues they were experiencing and ask questions. In one of these meetings, I got to know a call center rep. Her first comment to me was: “You know Mr. Giarman, when I was at XYZ company, I would never meet someone at your level. I’m not sure we were allowed to be honest with management about the things we needed to fix.” I told her she could trust me and shared some of my own personal stories so she could be more comfortable. Of course, many issues surfaced which I agreed to assist with.
During our exchange, I learned that her young son was a very promising and aspiring pianist. I learned later from her boss that they wanted to buy a piano so he could practice at home. As part of her bonus at the end of the year, I made sure a new piano was delivered to her home around Christmas. I think you can imagine the impact that had in developing a relationship with this employee — a caring mother. That’s what business is all about. Building relationships with your people one at a time, not just from the top and not just as their boss.
Leadership often entails making difficult decisions or hard choices between two apparently good paths. Can you share a story with us about a hard decision or choice you had to make as a leader?
In my current role, I was executing a search for a President in a private equity sponsored $200 million company who would ultimately succeed to CEO. The business was run by a larger than life founder for 40 years who was still coming into the office right before he passed away at age 90. His son was on the Board and took over. He was definitely not a CEO and had very strong feelings about trusting the incoming executive before elevating him to CEO. In any event, we decided to move forward with one candidate who had a rather well defined ‘edge’ to his personality — not uncommon in his industry where he had grown up in a rougher plant environment. I flagged this for everyone, notably the investors, but they were convinced he could handle the onboarding and were feeling pressure based on some missteps building a new plant.
Here, either path could have made sense: move forward and support the candidate through the process given PE’s urgency, or recognize the depth of the issue upfront and find another candidate. In retrospect, I should have listened to my instincts more and pushed for more thought on the matter, but we all decided to move forward with the candidate. Three months later, I got a call from the head of human resources who said that things weren’t going great and they were going to get him a coach. Again, that might have been a good solution OR simply recognize the depth of the problem and fire him. I told the HR head the Board should fire this gentleman — that this felt like a cultural disconnect based on this individual’s core personality and coaching was likely not going to matter. They did fire him and we re-did the search with a successful President who transitioned into CEO.
Lesson: You have to trust your gut in these situations. Even though you are working with investors on the Board, your first loyalty needs to be the process and its validated truth about the cultural and functional fit of the executives you place. If you feel uncertain about something, it is your duty to influence the process, however delicate, in service to the company (your client).
Ok, thank you for that. Let’s now jump to the primary focus of our interview. Most of our readers — in fact, most people — think they have a pretty good idea of what a C-Suite executive does. But in just a few words can you explain what a C-Level executive does that is different from the responsibilities of other leaders?
C-suite leaders, most importantly, are part of an overall team running the business with the CEO guiding that team based on the strategic imperatives of the business. As alluded to earlier, they not only need to execute against today’s imperatives but be thinking strategically to ensure the business is positioned for long-term success — not just “hit the plan” in a given year. To do this, each executive not only needs to be a master of their own functional area — be it marketing, finance, etc. — they need to understand the business holistically from a strategic standpoint.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a C-Suite executive? Can you explain what you mean?
First and foremost, they don’t have all the answers. They are in place to ensure the organization exercises a process to explore and gain the truth and be sure there is focus on continuous improvement. In that process, they must continually activate the ‘consciousness’ of the organization to see and react to internal and external forces in order to keep the company on a path to profitability and strategic success.
Related to the above, many see CEOs as the panacea. They are not. They are highly dependent on the team they build and motivate. This is actually the most important element of their job — building and motivating the C suite team. It surprises me when I see so much attention attributed to the “rock star” CEO as THE individual responsible for success. It is a team event and the CEO not only guides but is very much part of the team.
Some see and want to believe that CEOs only and ruthlessly pursue shareholder or investor value at the expense of individual employees. I have personally never met a CEO (if they were any good at their job) who did not believe deeply about their people and the impact their decisions have on personal lives.
What are the most common leadership mistakes you have seen C-Suite leaders make when they start leading a new team? What can be done to avoid those errors?
You can’t have the answers too quickly even if you are pretty sure you know where to go. It’s critical that you exercise a deliberate process — the listening tour — to gain perspective and crystallize your thoughts working with the Board and the team.
On the other hand, you can’t tolerate a ‘hole’ in the management team. You need to assess the team quickly. If someone does not fit in terms of chemistry or capability, you need to move on that. If it’s the right team, they will understand and applaud rapid action in this regard.
Being CEO is a lonely job, partly because you really can’t let your anxiety or uncertainties affect the team. This doesn’t mean you can’t be genuine and transparent, but it is a balance. If a CEO doesn’t have a coach stepping into such a role, they should get one. You will need someone who you can confide in who has your back at all times and can offer a rational sounding Board to reflect on what you are seeing and think needs to be executed.
In your experience, which aspect of running a company tends to be most underestimated? Can you explain or give an example?
The difficulty translating the strategic path into a more granular operational and execution plan with the right people to deliver. Anyone can use a strategy framework to think through the business, build the spreadsheets on what good looks like, highlight competitive concerns, etc. The ‘rubber hits the road’ with execution down into the organization, creating the ‘followership’ needed for success. Culture is key here — a culture that is crisp, celebrates success and is accountable as core values.
Ok super. Here is the main question of our interview. What are your “Five Things You Need To Be A Highly Effective C-Suite Executive”? If you can, please share a story or an example for each.
Let’s talk CEOs.
1 . Tech & Data Savvy — It’s a different time, where the ability to collect and harness data and use it intelligently has to be part of the CEO’s thinking every day. We’re not looking for CEOs who are deep technologists in most cases, but they must be fluent in these areas to work with the team. This is especially true with newer, more radical technologies like robots and AI now taking shape and impacting all aspects of business.
2 . Agile & Aware — It starts at the top. Organizations today will not survive unless they can react quickly to the forces that can impact the business both positively and negatively. They must know how and when to pivot. The CEO needs to embrace that way of thinking and make it part of his or her daily communication pattern. This attribute goes hand-in-hand with being tech and data savvy.
3 . Honest & Transparent — No matter how much technology continues to inundate our lives, business is about people. People follow others who have integrity, are authentic in who they are and build trust within their sphere of influence. When things get rough and resilience is required, they will turn to their leaders who walk the talk.
4 . Articulate & Believable — Again, it’s all about getting others to follow and you can’t do that without high-impact content-rich communication tied to a vision for the business. The most effective leaders “paint the picture” on the path forward and do so in a manner consistent with the values and beliefs of the business. This does not mean the CEO needs to be ‘charismatic’. They need to be effective in getting people to listen and follow.
5 . Strategic & Willful — Back to Jim Collins and Level 5. Without critical thinking skills focused on the long-term health of the business and a willful approach to get there, organizations mire themselves only in short-thinking and take their eye off the real prize at the end of the rainbow. Great leaders believe in the business and its people more than themselves and push long-term for excellence across all aspects of the organization.
In your opinion, what are a few ways that executives can help to create a fantastic work culture? Can you share a story or an example?
So, what is a fantastic work culture? One person’s preferences may not align with someone else’s view of the world. Once your strategy is determined, the most important thing a CEO can do is own, define and drive the culture.
SRS Distribution in McKinney, TX, has done this exceptionally well under the watchful eye of Dan Tinker the CEO. I have never met a person who met Dan and didn’t leave their office feeling like they had met their best friend. SRS is a distributor of roofing, landscaping and pool supplies. They are decidedly not like companies one sees in Silicon Valley. They celebrate the flag, service to the military and the little guy who works with their hands every day. Their motto is ‘One Family, One Fight. It doesn’t matter if it’s YOUR type of culture, it’s THEIR type of culture. It infuses everything they do and starts at the top all the way down into the warehouse where a worker is moving pallets of roof supplies to ship to the contractors.
Importantly, Dan has put some real teeth behind their culture, in a way not seen very often in private equity sponsored companies. He has made it his business to help others become and think like owners by investing in the business. More than 100 millionaires now work at SRS, some quite low level in terms of their responsibilities. He has also created a recruiting machine so potential employees in the regions they serve have a career path that will allow them to join a company where they can move up the ladder and feed their families in a place that celebrates their contribution.
Again, SRS is an example of a company that knows who they are, hires the people who embrace their values and rewards them while reinforcing their culture every day. Their culture would likely not work as well in Silicon Valley, but that’s the point. It’s not a judgment. Define your own culture, intertwine it with business purpose and celebrate it every day — whoever you are and whatever your company believes in.
PS: A quick story. In my last role as CEO, one of the sales reps came to me and asked when we were going to have our first beer bash and what were my thoughts on ‘exit strategy’ for the company. I said firmly and kindly, ‘When you guys bring me that first $1 million contract, that’s when we’ll have the first of what will be many beer bashes. As for the exit, our goal is to build a highly profitable fast-growing business. When we do that, the rest will take care of itself.’ Trust me when I say, I am ALL for having a good time and doing fun things along the way but people thrive in cultures where they celebrate success for themselves, success for their peers and success for business overall.
You are a person of great influence. If you could start a movement that would bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger. :-)
We’re starting a movement with Mission Dolores Academy where I serve as Chair. Mission Dolores Academy serves a fully diverse community in the Mission District in San Francisco. My philanthropic pursuits have always focused on education. What could possibly be more important than making sure our children who will determine our future have the critical thinking skills, agility, personal values, confidence and grit to make an impact on themselves, on their family — on the world?
Right now, we are positively impacting 200 kids at a time and hopefully will grow to 500 over the next few years. Does it make me or us more successful if we are serving 5,000? I guess in some ways it does, but I choose to focus on places where my efforts are tangible in the success of the organization. I can see it and feel it every day talking to those kids, the teachers and the parents in service to them. If I could convince 100,000 people to join us, that’s 50,000,000 kids — so I guess that’s the movement I would start. 😊
How can our readers further follow you online?
(23) Keith Giarman | LinkedIn + DHR Bio Page
Thank you for the time you spent sharing these fantastic insights. We wish you only continued success in your great work!
About the Interviewer: Douglas E. Noll, JD, MA was born nearly blind, crippled with club feet, partially deaf, and left-handed. He overcame all of these obstacles to become a successful civil trial lawyer. In 2000, he abandoned his law practice to become a peacemaker. His calling is to serve humanity, and he executes his calling at many levels. He is an award-winning author, teacher, and trainer. He is a highly experienced mediator. Doug’s work carries him from international work to helping people resolve deep interpersonal and ideological conflicts. Doug teaches his innovative de-escalation skill that calms any angry person in 90 seconds or less. With Laurel Kaufer, Doug founded Prison of Peace in 2009. The Prison of Peace project trains life and long terms incarcerated people to be powerful peacemakers and mediators. He has been deeply moved by inmates who have learned and applied deep, empathic listening skills, leadership skills, and problem-solving skills to reduce violence in their prison communities. Their dedication to learning, improving, and serving their communities motivates him to expand the principles of Prison of Peace so that every human wanting to learn the skills of peace may do so. Doug’s awards include California Lawyer Magazine Lawyer of the Year, Best Lawyers in America Lawyer of the Year, Purpose Prize Fellow, International Academy of Mediators Syd Leezak Award of Excellence, National Academy of Distinguished Neutrals Neutral of the Year. His four books have won a number of awards and commendations. Doug’s podcast, Listen With Leaders, is now accepting guests. Click on this link to learn more and apply.
