Ego Free Leadership

by Brandon Black

  A common trap in creating emotional safety is to wait for our colleagues to be trustworthy before we trust them enough to be authentic. Counter-intuitively, trust and emotional safety work the other way: In taking the risk of authentically disclosing our difficulties, we make it safe for others to follow suit. The result is the creation of trust.

  The breakdown between Brandon and Fritz illustrates the danger of playing the “you first” waiting game. Once they got off track, the lack of safety both men felt with each other made it too risky to talk about the performance shortfall in Healthcare, causing their frustrations and judgments to build up. This continued until Brandon disclosed something quite vulnerable: He had lied to Fritz and had done so because he was afraid to tell him that his division was closing. “It would have been much easier to just tell Fritz he was gone,” Brandon said.

  Instead …

  “In my two years at Encore,” Fritz recalled, “I felt closest to Brandon when he admitted he lied to me.”

  As unlikely as it seems, this type of response to vulnerability is consistently the case. Instead of protecting his image of being a smart and competent CEO, Brandon was determined to connect with Fritz as a person, and he owned up to his imperfection and frailty. This act of human vulnerability—which felt scary—allowed Fritz to see behind Brandon’s desired image and, consequently, to feel safer. Fritz’s attention shifted from how Brandon was unfairly judging him to how Brandon was struggling and in need of help. This is emblematic of the unexpected power of being vulnerable and real—which doesn’t happen when we are promoting or defending our desired and dreaded images.

  “There were a lot of ways Brandon could have approached that,” Fritz said. “Dishonest; too cute by half. He was straight up honest. If we had talked that way before, it wouldn’t have changed the business facts, but it would have helped. As it was, it enhanced my desire to support the transition. I could see he was in a tough place.”

  Their newfound alignment made a difference, and it set a tone of enterprise leadership throughout the layoffs. Fritz’s behavior helped give Brandon confidence that he could trust a broad team of leaders with this important secret. Instead of looking for reasons not to share, he openly talked about his fears. That group included Kasey, who had just joined Encore as a senior manager in the Human Resources department. One of her first priorities was to manage all the details of the layoff. “I had second thoughts about joining Encore after hearing about the layoff,” Kasey recalled. “But after a few meetings with the leadership team, I could see that everybody cared so much about the people impacted. It made me fully committed to the company.”

  The Power of Vulnerability and Empathy

  BRANDON

  The next week was a long one. Understandably, when you hear about a company doing a layoff, there is little talk of the emotional toll it takes on the people carrying it out. As human beings, however, the last thing we want to do is hurt others. The impacted employees have bills to pay and families to support; most of them are committed to the success of the company and feel shocked by a transition they are not choosing. I felt that each member of the team assigned to work on the project was deeply aware of this.

  We met with our board on Friday morning to review the final plan. Their approval made the proposed changes official. We had forty-eight hours to sleep on it and finalize any remaining details.

  I wanted the notifications to affected employees and the subsequent broader announcements to be sincere and contrite. The departing employees needed to walk out with their heads high, knowing they weren’t being abandoned by the organization. I asked the leadership team to be accessible for every question that came up—and to be patient when people got angry or cried. An executive went to each site, and I stayed in San Diego to address employees and answer any shareholder questions. The largest headcount reduction would occur in Phoenix, so our SVP of Operations, Jim Syran, went to personally deliver the message.

  I woke up early Monday morning after a poor night’s sleep. I had practiced my speech over and over again in my head and felt prepared. When I arrived at work, lights were on in the offices of the HR team, who had been there since 6:00 am preparing for the day. As I approached my office, I saw an employee whose name was on “the list.” For the past week, I had been interacting seamlessly with people I knew would be terminated. Somehow I had been able to compartmentalize this moment. Today was different. I was hit by a wave of emotion and walked directly into my office without acknowledging him. I felt sick to my stomach.

  The plan was to have each impacted individual privately meet with his or her manager before we held a company-wide meeting. After the first few meetings, however, the employees knew something was up. I could hear chatter, but when I walked out of my office, everybody fell silent. When I turned around, the talking resumed. Most of them had nothing to worry about, but I couldn’t tell them that. I felt helpless.

  Several employees being let go had been with the company for a long time, and I wanted to talk with them personally. I walked into one of these meetings and found the person in tears. I didn’t know what to say, so I sat down beside her.

  “How are you doing?” I finally asked. It felt like a stupid question.

  She turned and looked at me. “Thank you,” she said.

  Am I in the wrong meeting?

  “I really appreciate that you cared enough to come see me,” she told me.

  It was an act of grace.

  I left the conference room determined not to have to make a decision like this again. I saw how my fears and avoidance had caused problems to pile up. The employees needed me to figure out a way to grow the organization successfully while maintaining cost discipline—no matter how uncomfortable it was for my ego. I committed in that moment to do whatever it took to live up to that responsibility.

  I had a call at noon with leaders at each site to get a progress report. Things went as well as could be expected, especially in Phoenix, where about 33 percent of the employees were being let go. Jim had done an amazing job of delivering a message that didn’t come across as scripted or distant. Instead of blaming the change on industry challenges or a corporate mandate, he took ownership for the decision. He addressed the entire site and answered all their questions. Initially, people were angry and didn’t want to see their friends go. They saw this as the first step toward closing the site. Instead of being defensive, he empathized with their perspective and emotions. More unnerving, he walked around the call center floor, talking to people as they packed up. Nobody liked the message, but they appreciated his willingness to be there with them. By the time he’d left, the emotion had subsided greatly.

  We debriefed with our outplacement firm Lee Hecht Harrison afterward to get their assessment. They told Sharon it was “one of the best layoffs they had ever seen.” It wasn’t something I would put on my resume, but I was proud of everyone involved, both those who stayed and those who departed.

  SHAYNE

  “I was very uncomfortable walking the floor after the announcement,” Jim Syran said. “A lot of employees were quite upset. People’s moms and sons were being laid off. I had no clue what to say or do.”

  Jim was facing a highly emotional situation. He worried he was harming people and feared their anger, blame, or tears. He felt overwhelmed and ill equipped. He, like many of the employees packing their belongings, felt vulnerable.

  “Feeling vulnerable” is the primal sensation of facing a potential physical or emotional danger. In modern times, that usually means the risk of judgment, failure, embarrassment, or rejection. I want to acknowledge the strong intensity of this discomfort—it can feel life threatening, which is why we spend so much energy avoiding it—while reminding us that the potential consequences are mainly discomfort to our ego.

  Layoffs, performance reviews, and interpersonal conflicts are common workplace events that can make both implementers and recipients feel quite vulnerable. When leaders in positions of authority don’t work thro
ugh their egosystems’ threats in these moments, they fall into fairly predictable fight–flight behaviors. Avoiding others, becoming harsh, and relying on rationalizations all help numb the pain of the event and remove any blame we feel.

  “I had a call with my LaL coach, Marc-André Olivier, the morning of the layoff,” Jim recalled. “I walked him through my presentation. I had the math, the rationale. I had scripted out the business case. As Marc-André probed me to see how I was feeling, it became apparent that I was focused on protecting how I appeared.

  “All these people reported to me, and I was overseeing their terminations. I didn’t want them to think I was wrong or thoughtless or that I didn’t care. I didn’t want to be a bad person in their eyes. So I had unconsciously slanted my slides to prove it wasn’t my fault. That it was the right decision and I had to do it. I wasn’t thinking about what they needed in that moment.”

  Jim’s presentation would have been professional and logical, but its overriding, unconscious intent would have been to prove he was irreproachable. Even if he delivered a flawless message, his workforce would have sensed he was shifting the burden. That he wasn’t really emotionally present for their pain.

  Although understandable, these self-protective reactions tend to aggravate already difficult situations. Losing our livelihood against our will is scary. If our previous colleagues are withdrawn or harsh, it adds an element of abandonment, humiliation, and a lost sense of belonging. These intangibles can be as painful as the financial hardship.

  Jim, Brandon, and the rest of Encore’s leadership team were able to empathize more profoundly with the people losing their jobs because they were aware of their own vulnerability as leaders. Brandon could have rationalized the layoff as life in corporate America. Instead, he let himself feel the human costs. He sat beside the long-term employee losing her job. In being more in touch with our own feelings, we are better able to empathize with others, and more inspired to take them into account.

  Empathy is not sympathy, which is the act of sharing the feelings of another person, especially sorrow or difficulty. Sympathy can often lead us to rationalize someone’s shortcomings or try to fix a situation. In an organizational perspective, this can contribute to inaction—for example, on performance issues. Empathy is the ability to understand another person’s feelings and perspective; to put ourselves in their shoes and sense that we could feel the way they do. Used properly, empathy not only influences how we have a difficult conversation or make a hard decision, it also enables us to even do it at all.

  Coming out of his coaching call, Jim turned his attention to what his people, rather than his ego, needed. Reconnected with his goal to create an atmosphere of dignity and humanity, Jim focused on ensuring that people understood clearly what was going on and letting them know he was there to emotionally support them.

  “I was able to be present in a completely different way,” he described. “I decided that no matter how uncomfortable I felt, I would show up for them. I felt really vulnerable.”

  The lesson here isn’t to do this or that strategy, like walk the floor. In fact, Jim had no idea what to do. Just as Brandon felt stupid for asking his long-time employee how she was, Jim felt incompetent that morning. And yet it was a day in his career where he made a great difference for his employees. “People came up to me afterward,” Jim said, “and thanked me for staying there. For not being the executive who delivers the message and then disappears.” In setting aside his self-worth preoccupation, he stepped into what the situation needed.

  In today’s tumultuous global economy, it is impossible for companies to guarantee employment, much less assure employees that they will always get a raise or only receive positive performance feedback. These moments of vulnerability will happen. What matters most is how leadership behaves during these difficulties. Encore’s employees saw that even when the worst occurred, leadership would be “in it together” with them.

  “Odd as it sounds,” Fritz said years later as a successful CEO in Southern California, “I treasure my couple of years at Encore, including how it ended. Firing someone can be traumatic for their personal life, their finances, their ego. That experience has made me more caring and thoughtful when I need to make those decisions.”

  How to Create a Safe Space

  BRANDON

  We didn’t see many prolonged effects from the layoffs. To the contrary, we had no incremental attrition, and employee engagement surveys indicated morale was higher than it had been in years. That was the good news. The bad news was that portfolio pricing continued at unsustainable levels and our stock price was down significantly. As a team we had pulled together beautifully around the personnel reductions, but I worried that the external pressures on the business would undo our positive momentum.

  In addition, a doubt still persisted in the organization as to whether the layoff was really about moving jobs from the United States to India, where no job reductions occurred. The word “outsourcing” was everywhere in the news, and companies were often viewed as anti-American if they moved jobs offshore. But India was one of our two strategic imperatives, and we needed to do everything we could to make it successful.

  One of my key forums for communication was an all-employee meeting after each earnings release to provide context about our results and answer any questions. The November 2007 meeting was the first since the layoff. I knew there had to be some lingering questions and I wanted to make sure they had the chance to hear the answers from me.

  We gathered the San Diego employees in a conference room late on a Tuesday afternoon. From collectors to statisticians to software engineers, we employed a diverse array of individuals at our headquarters, and I was addressing people from every department. I spent thirty minutes explaining the results using a PowerPoint presentation and then opened up the floor to questions. A minute went by in complete silence. Trying to break the ice, I assured them I wasn’t going to let them go until I got at least one question.

  “Why aren’t you telling us when you’re closing the site and moving our jobs to India?” asked Jonathan, one of the most tenured account managers in the company. He had a forceful presence and his voice was deep and commanding. It was a statement, not a question.

  I was pissed. I had worked with Jonathan for almost a decade. You should trust my motives by now! I almost growled back. I felt he was challenging my moral compass.

  I took a deep breath, realizing I’d had a pinch.

  “Great question,” I said, trying to buy some time. I’d known this was coming—I just didn’t expect it to be this direct a challenge. “I’m sure this is on many people’s minds, so thank you for bringing it up.”

  “So are you going to tell us when our jobs are moving to India?”

  “They’re not.”

  “Not today, or not ever?”

  My ears were hot, and I felt adrenalin pumping through my body. Take a moment, I instructed myself. What’s my ego threat? Several jumped out immediately: that he was accusing me of being dishonest and selfish, and that I looked like a bad leader. So if that’s just my ego, what’s truly important right now?

  I’d told my team that answering questions about our plans for India would be pivotal if we were to gain the trust of the employees. This was that moment. If I debated him or shut him down, we’d take a big step backward.

  As a leader, you are cautioned to “never say ‘never.’” Any future decision that contradicted what I said now would likely be held over my head as proof I was untrustworthy. Saying “never” here seemed foolhardy; if India’s performance consistently rivaled that of our domestic workforce, moving jobs overseas would become very financially compelling. My responsibility was to maximize returns for our shareholders; how could I justify not taking advantage of this lower-cost environment?

  “Let’s focus on why jobs are not moving, but without the ultimatums.” I tried to de-escalate the tone. There was chatter in the room. What do they need right now? “Let’s talk about
what this would mean to all of you if I made that decision.”

  “It would certainly mean a lot more to me than to you,” Jonathan said. He was still angry. “You would keep your job.”

  I felt another pinch, but not as strong. They’re afraid. Jonathan and the other employees needed to know I understood the potential impact on him and the people in the room from an emotional perspective, not an analytical one.

  “You’re right,” I said. “If I did what you fear, it would impact you more than me. I take that very seriously. Now, let me tell you what I fear. I see how we are struggling to really commit to our India strategy: the communication breakdowns and the hallway griping about the time difference. If you believe that I’m going to ship your job overseas as soon as they perform well enough, why would you want to go the extra mile to make them better?”

  There was nodding in the room, and I sensed that we’d gotten their big concern out in the open. My earlier aggravation dissipated as I both empathized with their fears and saw clearly our path forward. I felt light inside.

  “I worry that we won’t do everything in our power to make India successful,” I told them. “Because unlike what you read in the papers or see on the news, in our business, having a greater presence in India will protect jobs in the U.S., not threaten them.”

  “I don’t understand,” somebody called out.

  “Very simply, if we can’t bring down our costs, we won’t be able to acquire new portfolios. You’ve all seen how difficult the last few years have been. Without new portfolios, we’ll end up having more episodes like September. I don’t want that, and neither do you. The only initiative that will allow us enough cost savings to be competitive is India.”