Leading Greats #178

A client of mine, an SVP running a sizable division, picked up a reputation this spring that his peers meant as a compliment. Tough.

In a leadership meeting, he told a VP on his team that her team's missed numbers weren't his problem to explain to the board. Two people in that meeting mentioned it to others before the week was out.

Six weeks later, his strongest VP, the one he had been positioning as his own successor, took a call from a competitor and did not say no.

I hear a version of this story more often now than I did two years ago.

A hard line and real accountability are not the same thing, and in a lot of leadership meetings right now, nobody seems to be checking which one they're actually rewarding.

The data backs up what I am seeing in my own client roster.

As Forbes reported this year, only 68 percent of HR professionals now rate their CEO as empathetic, down from 84 percent in 2022, the lowest mark in a decade.

None of this means discipline is the problem. Standards matter, and most of the executives I coach did not get where they are by lowering them. What changes is what a leader does the moment someone falls short of one.

My client did not think of himself as unkind. He thought of himself as clear.

What he had not noticed was that his directness read as coldness to the person he was counting on to carry his own succession plan, not the clarity he intended.

That gap is rarely visible from the inside. Most executives with his reputation do not find out it cost them anything until the person they were counting on has already started looking elsewhere.

If you are the one whose reputation for being tough might be costing you more than it is earning you, I have been there. I can help.

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-Ronnie

Founder | CEO | Executive & Leadership Coach, MBA, PCC

Leader | Advisor | Speaker | Writer

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