Women Of The C-Suite: Christine ‘Chris’ King of Henry Schein One+Skyworks On The Five Things You Need To Succeed As A Senior Executive
An Interview With Vanessa Morcom
Discover what motivates your team — As a leader, one of your primary responsibilities is getting to know each team member individually through collaboration and observation. Pay attention to what motivates each individual to perform their best. For instance, you may boost one person’s motivation with frequent recognition and praise for their outstanding work, while another might thrive on a shared purpose and mission. By tuning into what inspires them, you can offer the optimal level of encouragement and assistance, leading to a more motivated and productive team ready to conquer their goals.
As a part of our interview series called “Women Of The C-Suite”, we had the pleasure of interviewing Christine King.
Chris King’s more than 40-year career in technology has included roles as CEO for three public companies providing technology to the enterprise computing, consumer, automotive, and medical markets. Chris currently serves on the Boards of Directors for Skyworks, a semiconductor manufacturer for smartphone and IOT applications, and Henry Schein One, an industry leader in dental technology, where she serves as Executive Chair and CEO. The book detailing her rise to becoming the first female CEO of a semiconductor company and the lessons she learned along the way, Breaking Through the Silicon Ceiling, is available from Amazon and wherever books are sold.
Thank you so much for joining us in this interview series! Before we dig in, our readers would like to get to know you a bit more. Can you tell us a bit about your “backstory”? What led you to this particular career path?
Sure, I suppose the start of my story was when I was a 20-year-old, single mother with a high school diploma and few prospects in 1970. My husband had just abandoned me with a toddler son, dilapidated trailer, rusty Ford Mustang, and sixty-six cents to my name. I was in a crisis but couldn’t find a job because potential employers feared that they couldn’t rely on a single mom to be at work every day. Others claimed that I was “too pretty” and would distract the men on the manufacturing floor. I knew I needed to get some skills or a college education quickly to become more employable. First, I got on welfare, then I convinced my social worker to allow me to spend part of my welfare check on tuition at the local community college. I planned to study history and become a teacher, but fortunately discovered electrical engineering when I was trying to impress a good-looking guy!
I earned associate and bachelor’s degrees in electrical engineering technology and landed a position at IBM where I rose through the ranks and built multiple billion-dollar businesses before being named President and CEO at AMI Semiconductor in 2001. Over the course of 30 years, I rose from poverty to being the world’s first female CEO of a semiconductor company.
Can you share the most interesting story that happened to you since you began leading your company?
Gosh, there have been so many interesting stories. I suppose one of the most interesting is the day I started my first stint as a CEO. It was Sept. 11, 2001! I had arrived the day before and got up early to start my first day as CEO. As I got ready in my hotel room, I switched on the news and was shocked to see smoke billowing from the North Tower of the World Trade Center. I picked up my cell phone to call my parents and ask what was going on since they lived right across the river. They weren’t sure, but as I was speaking with them, a plane hit the South Tower and we all knew something dreadful was happening. The events of that day and the weeks that followed added to the surrealism of starting as a CEO.
The company I was now running, AMI Semiconductor, had been losing money and the revenue dropped even more significantly after Sept. 11. We worked on our turnaround strategy, however, and in 2002 I had the opportunity to acquire Alcatel Microelectronics, which was also losing money. I committed to taking the best of both companies to create a new, solid company, and we were able to return to profitability within the year. This set us up for our successful initial public offering (IPO) in September of 2003. It was a $600 million IPO and made the VCs who had hired me as CEO very happy!
It has been said that our mistakes can be our greatest teachers. Can you share a story about the funniest mistake you made when you were first starting? Can you tell us what lesson you learned from that?
Not when I started at AMI, but there is a story from my time when I was still at IBM that still makes me laugh. I was working to get a brand-new IBM business off the ground focused on building and selling our ASIC chips to customers outside of IBM. Everything was new at the time, and we were kind of figuring it out as we went along. Before we had anything real to sell yet, I was out meeting with potential customers to get a sense of the market and absorbing their feedback like a sponge.
My presentations went quite well and the customer engineers “oohed and ahhed” over the speed and density of our technology. As I went through my deck, I closely watched the facial expressions of the people in my audiences to get a sense of times when they didn’t quite understand, or worse, didn’t believe what I was saying. The mistake that still makes me laugh was when I got a question about how short the delay was across IBM’s circuits, and when I took a guess, answering, “two picoseconds,” some of the engineers rolled their eyes. Ooof, I thought to myself. I flubbed that answer. When I debriefed with my team later, I learned the actual answer was 200 picoseconds, which was still great, but I understood why the engineers had rolled their eyes when I gave an answer that was two orders of magnitude faster than what we could actually deliver. My team had a good laugh at my mistake, and fortunately, it wasn’t a deal breaker for those customers!
None of us are able to achieve success without some help along the way. Is there a particular person who you are grateful towards who helped get you to where you are? Can you share a story about that?
Oh my goodness, there are so many people. I guess one person was John Kelly, who shortly after being named the head of IBM’s Microelectronics division, reorganized the division by market segments and selected me to run Wired Communications. I give John a lot of credit for taking a chance on me. I wasn’t the typical executive choice, and I was definitely not part of IBM’s good ol’ boy network, but John wasn’t a typical IBM leader, and he was willing to place his bet on my experience in creating and rapidly growing businesses. He told me that my “what you see is what you get” authenticity made everyone trust me — customers, employees, management — and that authenticity coupled with my intelligence and resilience made me a good bet. John was one of the very few managers who took an interest in my career, and my subsequent success in that role accelerated my career and became the catalyst for a Harvard Business School case study. His bet on me ended up being a very good bet.
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?
I think one of the challenges for leaders is discerning the best path when one offers short-term gain and the other offers potentially greater long-term gain. I have been at that crossroads many times in my career, but one of the earliest I remember was when I was still in community college. As I mentioned, I was studying history and had started taking classes in electrical engineering to impress a boy.
Halfway through that first semester of engineering courses, AT&T was facing a discrimination lawsuit, and the local office was combing nearby schools to recruit women with technical backgrounds to work for the company. They were in dire straits, and even though I only had half of one semester of the engineering curriculum under my belt, AT&T offered me $12,500 a year to drop out and come to work for them. I nearly fell out of my seat when they made the offer. It was a huge amount of money, the equivalent of $80–90,000 today! But accepting their offer meant that I wouldn’t get my college degree, the pursuit of which had become my North Star. I turned AT&T down and I’m sure people thought I was crazy, but if I could make that much as a technician, I thought to myself, imagine how much I could make as an engineer with a degree.
Having a “North Star” or set of guiding principles is invaluable when you must choose between two presumably good paths.
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 CEO or executive does. But in just a few words can you explain what an executive does that is different from the responsibilities of the other leaders?
Well, as they say, the buck stops here. You are responsible for the ultimate success or failure of your company. But if you make the mistake of thinking it’s about you, I promise you will underperform. As CEO, you must keep your ego in check and resolutely pursue the company’s mission. If you don’t, you will likely make poor decisions and hurt your ultimate success. CEOs must possess the maturity and wisdom to recruit a high-performing team (because you can’t achieve greatness on your own) and guide them to exceed what they think is possible. It’s challenging work, but also some of the most personally rewarding work you can do.
What are the “myths” that you would like to dispel about being a CEO or executive? Can you explain what you mean?
Our culture’s infatuation with celebrity has spilled into the corporate world and you hear about “celebrity CEOs.” Celebrity CEOs aren’t sustainable. CEOs need to see themselves as a servant leader of their company and its many stakeholders — employees, customers, investors, etc. The CEO role is less about the CEO him or herself, and more about the role they play in achieving the company’s vision and mission. That is a serious mandate and one not to be taken on lightly.
In your opinion, what are the biggest challenges faced by women executives that aren’t typically faced by their male counterparts?
Well, I suppose there are many challenges for women executives in business, and the technology sector in particular, but one challenge that still amazes me when I see it today is the assumption that women automatically have less business or technical acumen than men. I can’t count the number of times I had to prove my capabilities and worth to male colleagues and managers who frankly weren’t as skilled as me but assumed they were far better than me simply because I was a woman.
I remember one manager told me, “Chris, you make a great lieutenant, but you’ll never be a general.” Despite his prediction, in less than a decade I was his boss’s boss’s boss.
What is the most striking difference between your actual job and how you thought the job would be?
As I assumed my first CEO job, I thought it would be wildly different than running a division at a large company, IBM in my case, or running a small startup. In fact, I quickly learned that the principles are the same. Defining a mission or goal, assembling and motivating a great team, and delivering on the stated objectives. So, the principles are the same! Of course, serving the public markets and understanding public accounting principles might be different. But at its core, Leadership is Leadership!
Is everyone cut out to be an executive? In your opinion, which specific traits increase the likelihood that a person will be a successful executive and what type of person should avoid aspiring to be an executive? Can you explain what you mean?
I suppose not everyone is cut out to be an executive, but I imagine most people can become one if they are willing to work hard enough at it. Of course, you need to be intelligent, wise, mission-driven, team-oriented, knowledgeable of your industry and markets, customer-focused, etc., but I would say the two most-important traits are a North Star and the determination or grit to pursue it, come what may.
You will go through exceedingly tough times. Times that can last months and even years. You will have to make exceedingly difficult decisions that have an impact on the people who work for you, your customers, and other stakeholders. If you don’t have a North Star to guide your decisions and provide clarity and focus when there is turbulence and uncertainty all around you, you will most likely fail. Beyond clarity of vision, however, if you don’t have the determination and grit to keep getting up to pursue that vision when you are knocked down, you will assuredly fail.
What are your “5 Things You Need To Succeed As A Senior Executive” and why? (Please share a story or example for each.)
1 . Discover what motivates your team
As a leader, one of your primary responsibilities is getting to know each team member individually through collaboration and observation. Pay attention to what motivates each individual to perform their best. For instance, you may boost one person’s motivation with frequent recognition and praise for their outstanding work, while another might thrive on a shared purpose and mission. By tuning into what inspires them, you can offer the optimal level of encouragement and assistance, leading to a more motivated and productive team ready to conquer their goals.
2 . Lead by example
Your behavior, work ethic, and attitude should mirror the values and expectations you have for your team. The most effective leaders don’t “command and control.” Instead, they inspire others to follow willingly. You can achieve that by being a mission-focused leader rather than an ego-focused one. Acknowledge that you don’t have all the answers. Encourage open dialogue and value diverse perspectives. Focus on collaboration and fostering a shared vision. Trust your team to perform to your standards, but always be prepared to step in when they veer off track or require guidance.
3 . Provide your team with opportunities
Throughout my leadership journey, I’ve been fortunate to attract a steady stream of talented individuals to my teams. I believe this is because I’m committed to providing all team members with opportunities that empower their professional growth and pave the way for their success. I encourage my team members to push their boundaries and do their best to reach their full potential. I delegate responsibilities in areas where they can grow their expertise, allowing them to take charge independently, with the assurance that my support is readily available when needed. I acknowledge and compensate them for their hard work and dedication.
4 . Encourage others to be enthusiastic about the mission
Ensure you fully believe in your company or team’s mission, or no one else will. To spark your team’s enthusiasm for the mission, frequently connect their work to the mission and larger impact on humanity and the world, if possible. Involve your team in setting the goals to achieve that mission.
If you’re leading a small company or team, and the sense of direction is unclear, bring all members together for a couple of days of team bonding. During this time, set goals and collaborate. When your team feels like they’re part of the planning of the mission, they’re more likely to feel enthusiastic about completing it.
5 . Multiply your effect
As an individual, you can only achieve so much, as we all have limited bandwidth and time. When you leverage a team, however, you can achieve much more. I mean it makes sense, right? On a simplified, linear basis, if you can perform X amount of work in a day or week, you and a team of four others can theoretically perform +/-5X the amount of work.
But the reality is that teams can have an exponential, multiplier effect on your impact. As a leader, think on the system level and consider how the individuals on your teams can operate as a single, higher-order entity to achieve your goals. Consider every team member’s unique abilities, strengths, and weaknesses and how they all fit together to achieve the vision for your team. Determine whether there are any talent gaps and then find the right people to fill them. Only once you’re thinking on the team level will you achieve your maximum leadership potential.
You are a person of great influence. If you could inspire a movement that would bring the most amount of good for the greatest number of people, what would that be? You never know what your idea can trigger.
I suppose it would be to encourage all people to avoid letting their own and other people’s insecurities and beliefs about the path to success get in the way of their actually achieving success. The conventional wisdom is that success in business is reserved for those who have the resources and connections to start a few rungs up the ladder from the beginning. The conventional wisdom is that an uneducated, single mom is destined for a life of mediocrity. My story obviously turns conventional wisdom on its head on both accounts.
I have learned time and time again in my life, and in the lives of the many people I have known, that success in business or whatever you put your heart and mind to is not dictated by your demographic or the types of challenges that life may throw at you. The seeds of success are within you.
I have written quite a bit about this in my new book, Breaking Through the Silicon Ceiling.
We are very blessed that some very prominent names in Business, VC funding, Sports, and Entertainment read this column. Is there a person in the world, or in the US with whom you would love to have a private breakfast or lunch with, and why? He or she might just see this if we tag them
Hands down, Elon Musk! Although I am not sure I could hold his attention. Being an engineer I am a real admirer of Elon’s technical prowess. He is so knowledgeable in so many areas — technology, materials science, physics, electrical and mechanical engineering, manufacturing, and industrial expertise. Many people have their opinions about Elon, but there is no doubt about the impact of his accomplishments across so many areas — Space, Automotive, Banking, Drilling, Networking, I could go on and on. I would just love to speak with him in person.
Thank you for these fantastic insights. We greatly appreciate the time you spent on this.
About The Interviewer: Vanessa Morcom is a millennial mom of three and founder of Morcom Media, a performance PR shop for thought leaders. She earned her degree in journalism and worked for Canada’s largest social enterprise. She can be reached at vanessa@morcom.media
