Adam Bryant of Merryck
How To Pass ‘The CEO Test’
"FEARLESS CREATIVE LEADERSHIP" PODCAST - TRANSCRIPT
Episode 303: Adam Bryant
Hi. I’m Charles Day. I work with creative and innovative companies. I coach and advise their leaders to help them maximize their impact and grow their business.
Welcome to Season 3, which we’re calling, “Leading The Future”.
We’re living in an unprecedented time. An epoch in which the collision of science, technology and humanity is changing everything we thought we knew.
How do leaders lead when none of us have ever been here before?
This episode’s guest is Adam Bryant, the Managing Director of the Americas at Merryck - a leadership advisory group. Adam is also a noted author, and before joining Merryck, was a writer and journalist for the New York Times. He is perhaps best known for his column, the Corner Office, in which he interviewed over 500 CEOs. He is an extraordinarily astute observer of leadership.
The last year has, in many ways, brought us to the future faster. We have seen and solved problems that 12 months ago we could barely imagine. We have reacted and responded and adapted, perhaps further and faster than at any time in the history of humankind.
And as we begin to emerge, blinking, back into the light, those attributes will be necessary for some time to come.
But sitting above them is something else. An ability that all leaders need and which too few demonstrate.
The ability to define where we are going and how we will know when we get there.
On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy said this.
“I believe that this nation should commit itself to achieving the goal, before this decade is out, of landing a man on the moon and returning him safely to the earth.”
Vision. Mission, KPIs. In 31 words.
JFK had been dead for 6 years when success was achieved.
Where are you taking your business? How will you know when you get there? And are those answers so meaningful that people will pursue them long after you have left the building?
Here’s Adam Bryant.
Charles: (02:12)
Adam, welcome back to Fearless. Thanks so much for coming back on the show.
Adam Bryant: (02:16)
I always enjoy talking with you, Charles.
Charles: (02:18)
Tell us where you are at the moment.
Adam Bryant: (02:20)
In New Orleans.
Charles: (02:22)
So you have left New York?
Adam Bryant: (02:25)
Not permanently. We still have our apartment there, but we moved down here last fall to be with our two grown daughters who are both ER nurses at the same hospital here in New Orleans.
Charles: (02:33)
Oh my gosh. I can't imagine what their lives must've been like for the last 10, 12 months.
Adam Bryant: (02:38)
It's pretty intense, pretty intense, but they're healthy and they've been vaccinated, so all is good.
Charles: (02:43)
Oh, good. Good, good, good. Tell me, how do you look back on 2020? What's kind of the headline for 2020 as you think about it now?
Adam Bryant: (02:53)
Well, I think from a leadership point of view, just in terms of the lens, I think it's been a real inflection point on a few things. For one, I think it's the official death of command and control leadership. In a time like this, anybody who sits at the head of the table, virtual or real, and pretends to have all the answers is going to lose credibility instantly. So I think there's very much this sense of like, what does everybody else think? I think that's point one. Point two, just the idea of humanity and compassion. I mean these have all been kind of aspirational notions, but they are now kind of must haves for leaders at this time where the wall between the personal and professional is sort of officially down.
I think the final point I'll make is that I think in this era of virtual work, which is going to continue, I mean, not everybody's going to go back to the office full time. Prior to that, I think a full office was seen as like a proxy for productivity. If the parking lot is full, it must mean everybody's busy, and that notion has gone away. And I think in many ways, this is putting more and more responsibility on leaders to do some of the core skills of leading, which is to clearly articulate what the strategy is so people know that, what should I be working on and why is it important?
And also to be sort of relentlessly communicating, not only about the strategy, but reinforcing sort of the values and the culture and creating all these touch points, because when people are working remotely, you really have to work that much harder to create that sense of fabric and team. So, I think when we look back like 50 years from now, people are writing the history of the American corporation, I think a few chapters are going to be devoted to 2020 because I just think it's been such an incredible inflection point on so many levels for leadership.
Charles: (04:50)
Yeah, I'm sure you're right about that. I think one of the areas that I'm fascinated by is this idea of intimacy that you've talked about and we've all seen that, how people are exposed and show up in different ways. The level of access we have to each other's lives and seeing each other through lenses we never had exposure to before, has clearly changed people's relationships. What do you think happens when there is some kind of return to the office? And suddenly we are back in kind of neutral territory, if you will. How much of that residue do you think will carry forward? The comfort of seeing each other in our sweats versus showing up in a jacket and shirt or whatever. How do you think that translation is going to happen? Will we be comfortable about the fact that you know that much about us?
Adam Bryant: (05:39)
I think some of these sort of status markers of like, okay, I'm going to the office. I have to put on a jacket and a tie and stuff. Now that we've spent so much time with our colleagues in their hoodies and getting photo bombed by pets and all that, I think some of that will go away. I think there's going to be more thoughtfulness about the sort of lie, in terms of why we're going to the office. I mean, not to generalize too much, but there's two kinds of work. There's sort of heads-down stuff you need to do by yourself, which is probably better to do at home, where you're free of distractions and you can kind of plow through that work that's sometimes hard to do with all the distractions at the office. But there are some things that you need to be around other people for. That's where the magic happens. I think a whiteboard session in person is a lot more productive than it is virtually.
And so I'm hopeful that companies will be a little more thoughtful around creating clarity around that. I think companies who just say, look, we pay you to show up to work so show up to work, they may pay a price for that. I also wonder at the other extreme, companies that are just saying, okay, everybody's remote forever. I know you're going to save a lot of money on commercial real estate, but I also am concerned something might be lost ultimately in that kind of environment as well.
Charles: (06:59)
And do you think that continuum from one end of everybody back, the other end to that we don't have an office anymore. Do you think that continuum changes depending on the industry that you're in, the kind of business that you're operating?
Adam Bryant: (07:12)
I do. And I also think, my sense is kind of the older, the industry, the more legacy, the company, there might be more of a sense that you have to be in the office. I also think, I mean, you sort of go back to first principles of human nature. I think there may be a sense, like if you're ambitious and you're, okay, I'm going to work at home today. And then you find out your colleagues who are similarly ambitious are in the office where the boss is, you might start saying, you know what? I need to go to the office.
That's why I think that the best way to approach it as a company is almost to declare it's like, okay, Wednesday is going to be a work-from-home day because otherwise you're going to get into that kind of like status wheel of like, no, no. It's like, I need more face time with my boss. And that is how a lot of people operate. So companies have to be thoughtful about that dynamic because otherwise you're going to just get back to where we were before, where FaceTime is kind of a stand in for productivity and other things.
Charles: (08:17)
Yeah. It's going to be very different, isn't it, clearly, going forward. And what do you think the impact on leadership is going to be? How do you lead a company that has got that kind of fluidity to it?
Adam Bryant: (08:28)
Yeah, it goes back to this idea of what do leaders do? And, in some ways it sort of speaks to some of the core tests that we talk about in our book, because we started working on the book before the pandemic and when the pandemic hit, we sort of kept checking ourselves as like, are these things still holding up? Are they still right? And maybe there's home team bias, but I do think they're right, because the core leadership test, the seven that we lay out in the book are, can you develop a clear strategy and build teams and culture? And can you listen as a leader? And so this is a key test for leaders. It's like in a distributed workforce, the act of listening, and by listening, we don't just mean sort of one-on-one, be present, active listening, but do you create a listening kind of ecosystem and infrastructure so you really know what people are thinking? Can you lead through a crisis?
All these tests, I think, have been magnified, intensified in the pandemic and are only going to be more important long-term. I mean, you work with a lot of clients in the business world. We do too. One of the insights for me is just this cornerstone foundation of any organization is having a clear strategy. And what is amazing is how many companies have trouble articulating one. They think it's clear, but it's often not clear to their own employees. And it's also not necessarily a strategy in the sense of this is what we are trying to achieve. This is a big goal we are going after.
One of the traps we see a lot of companies fall into is when you ask them what their strategy is, they just do this kind of general description of what they do. We're going to pursue industry leading returns while also pursuing high value opportunities. That's not a strategy. That is what companies do. And so that's why I think the strategy discussion has to be much more focused on, be specific about what you need to accomplish and why, and then ladder up to, how do we do that? What are the challenges you have to overcome and how you're going to measure progress? And that sounds simple and obvious, but it is amazing how many companies don't do that.
Charles: (10:45)
Yeah. I think that we share that perspective. I am always struck by the fact that very, very rarely do I find a company that can clearly, simply, and memorably articulate its strategy.. The book you're referring to is, just to be clear for the audience, a book you've just recently written and published. You co-wrote with Kevin Sharer, it's called “The CEO Test: Master The Challenges That Make Or Break All Leaders”. I actually found it before you and I reconnected. I'm curious because obviously you've written this over the last few months in an unprecedented time. I'm curious if, as you look at the book now, given what we've all just experienced, which of the tests as you described them stand out even more to you now than they did when you first wrote it?
Adam Bryant: (11:32)
It's interesting. The very last chapter we wrote in one of the key seven tests is Managing In a Crisis, as we were unfolding. And we had thought, we probably need a chapter because in terms of if you ask yourself, like why do leaders succeed or fail in their roles? It's very often whether they can handle a crisis or not. And in many ways that chapter took us longer to write than any other, probably because it felt so real time. Like how do we make sense of this moment we're in? And so one of the framing devices for that chapter is just to point out that there's two kinds of crises. One is the sort of global pandemic that affects everybody. You know, this metaphorical tsunami that goes around the world and knocks everybody over, and then the second kind of crisis is the one that happens in your business unit or team or organization and different responses to those.
But some of the other chapters, there's a chapter on driving transformation and we provide kind of a playbook that we draw out of several case studies on how to do that. And as we say in that chapter, like this idea of driving change, being a leadership skill, that is redundant, right? I think it's fair to say that. To lead now is to drive change and that is going to be a constant. I think that's one of the things that have changed permanently. And we all recognize that we're going to get beyond the pandemic, but let's be honest there's going to be some other crisis that comes around. It might be climate related or cyber attack, whatever it is, but we are going to be living with crises for the long term.
I think that the culture chapter is endlessly fascinating in terms of just it's an amorphous word, people have different ideas about it. And I just think that the question of culture becomes so much more important when we're not in the office together. Especially ones that are… the idea of all hands meeting. It's like, are we going to do those again when everybody's in the office at the same time? And it's just going to be... I think about a challenge for leadership this past year, because some companies have done great. You know, if you're in the Cloud communications business you've probably doubled your workforce over the past year. And what's it like to onboard an employee when they never meet their colleagues in person?
And so just the demand to be that much more thoughtful about what culture is and what it means here. And to tell the stories behind, I don't need to tell you, Charles, it's like the stories that make things stick. So we've talked about this. This is such a fascinating time. And I really believe this is an incredible inflection point for leadership and is just raising the bar on so many fronts. I mean, nobody feels any sympathy for CEOs generally they're handsomely paid for their work, but boy oh boy, the list of responsibilities. You have to be the Chief Diversity Officer. You have to be the Chief of VSG. You just keep going down the list. And these are things you can't delegate. They have to be baked in to all the leadership discussions at the very top.
Charles: (14:46)
Yeah. I mean, I think your point about culture is one that I firmly believe in. You walk into companies and you hear people talking about their culture almost from minute one. And I've always believed that culture was a reflection of the values that you not just espoused, but that you actually hold people to account too. So it's, I think you're absolutely right that they have to be defined. They have to be consistent. They need to be three-dimensional. And then they also have to be things that people are held to account to. That there has to be a consequence to not behaving against them. And I think not many companies get to the place where they are fully defined and articulated and expressed, and even fewer in my experience, are really willing to say, and we really mean this. I mean, we're actually going to hold you to account on them.
Adam Bryant: (15:29)
Right. Because the test is the proverbial high-performing jerk, right? Like there's one in every company and everybody's watching. It's like, that person is directly contradicting all of our stated values and yet not only, and it's usually he, not only is he being rewarded, but often promoted. And when you have something like that, I think it's almost dangerous, it's probably better not to even articulate those values, because if you have that sharp contrast between the walk and the talk, that then makes people cynical. And as you know, one CEO said to me once, cynicism will spread like a cancer really quickly through your organization and people would just be rolling their eyes and saying, oh, I guess this is one of those kinds of places.
Charles: (16:12)
Yeah, I think it's the same analogy. It's doing great advertising for terrible products. You just highlight attention on the fact that we didn't really mean any of that stuff. And so you think less of us than if we had said none of it, right? I think it's really true. You know, I think the question or the point about leadership in the last year, one of the things that has really struck me is that there were, I think we would both agree, a lot of people who held leadership titles, who it became clear pretty quickly last year had little leadership capability. And that the real leaders have shown up, because as you said earlier, that there was no playbook. We had never lived through this kind of stuff before. People were literally making it up as they went along and you saw some people really step forward and up and out and lead and other people just disappear out of sight. You saw the same thing.
Adam Bryant: (17:03)
Yeah. And heard very often versions of that stories from leaders I've interviewed. I talked to Bob Eckert who ran Mattel for many years and he told me the story when he was running that company, when they had the lead paint problem in China with their toys, he says he remembers very vividly before that crisis, he said if you had asked him to rank his leadership team, he would have done one to 10 in a certain order. And he said after the crisis, it was completely flipped because of the phenomenon you just described, Charles. You find out what people are like. Some people who you expect to step up, kind of lose their voice and fade. And other people just really thrive in a crisis.
And some of the other things I've heard from people I've interviewed over the past year, they've made the point that you used to have to sort of run simulations to find out what people are like in a crisis. Like we've been living the simulation, and also phrases that have been popular in leadership for the last few years. It's like, can they embrace ambiguity? It's like, okay, now we're going to find out. And it's just been fascinating to see how some people step up and some people don't. I mean to me it's one of the many reasons why leadership is endlessly fascinating, because as much as you'd love to have the diagnostic to tell you whether somebody is going to do well, you don't. And I'm often fascinated and you start talking to people about it, and sometimes you have to go back earlier in their lives. And it's usually like, did they have to deal with adversity when they were younger? Because if they have, then they're much better prepared for when something comes along in the world, it starts disrupting life as we know it.
Charles: (18:49)
As you look back over the last year, are there specific examples of leaders that you think have really stepped forward and shown up?
Adam Bryant: (18:57)
Yeah. Just on the humanity side, I did an interview with Tim Ryan at PWC… on both fronts of the crisis. I mean, he's really raised the level of the organization's engagement around the question of race and being very transparent about diversity numbers. But he told me this great story early on during the pandemic, he was doing these sort of all hands virtual meetings and 30,000 employees on the call or something. And sometimes I find like little moments and small stories can be very telling, but he, at one point, he said early on in the pandemic, he had like six kids at home and he sort of said, yeah, like our family had our blow up moment last Friday night.
And he said, he got hundreds of emails from employees just saying, thank you so much. It's good to know it wasn't just me. And to me, this is one of the... I often think of leadership just as a series of paradoxes. Like you've got to be confident, but also vulnerable. And you have to be compassionate, but also demanding. You can just sort of work through the various paradoxes. But I think the crisis has highlighted this notion of how do you be vulnerable? How do you show your human side while also being the leader? And I think so many more people have had to show up that way in this environment and to sort of connect with people. Because it is, it's such an incredible leadership challenge. If the wall has gone down between the personal, professional and yet we're interacting with each other, only through these Brady Bunch squares, how do you connect with people?
And I think a big part of it is being vulnerable and saying, hey, look, I'm dealing with this stuff as well. But then also going on to say, okay, and this is what those basic things are like, this is why the work we do is important. And this is what the strategy is. And this is why we need everybody to step up in this moment. And it's about communication and clarity and all those things that have always been important. I feel like have been kind of 10X important in this pandemic.
Charles: (21:09)
Yeah. I think that's really well said. One of our neighbors actually, is Susan Credle, who I interviewed on last week's episode. And Susan's husband, she's open about this, we talked about it, is going through cancer treatment. And she was saying one of the struggles that she's had actually, is people trying to kind of over-manage her and saying, we'll only call you if there's really a crisis. And she said, which means that the only calls you get when you're dealing with your own personal stuff are the calls that are actually about crises. And she said, I would rather they just call me and tell me, here are the things. You tell us which ones you have time for. But I think her willingness to talk openly about her own struggle with that conflict or with a huge tension going on in her life and how she's navigating that, is, to your point, evidence of her vulnerability, but also her ability to keep driving the company forward at the same time. She doesn't lower her own expectations in herself.
And I think that that sort of level of humanity is one the characteristics that's really going to come out of this last 12 months. The ability to maintain your standards, but be accessible, be open, be vulnerable, be human without feeling like that's a sign of weakness. I think we've lived for such a long time with a sense that leaders had to be, I think you talk about this in your book don't you? That leaders have to be strong and powerful and almost inaccessible. And now I think we're talking about a different kind of strength, very human kind of strength.
Adam Bryant: (22:33)
Exactly.
Charles: (22:33)
What do you think the stories will be coming out of this? What will be the stories we'd tell five years from now that we've learned from this from a leadership standpoint?
Adam Bryant: (22:42)
I think the pandemic, just because of the sort of structure and nature of certain industries means that certain companies are going to struggle more than others. Like you don't want to be in the movie theater business, right? The commercial real estate business. But I do think we will be studying which companies came out of this pandemic stronger and why? And not necessarily because of particular tailwinds or headwinds, but just ones who took this moment and ultimately saw it as an opportunity. I mean, to me, from all the leaders I talked to over the past year, especially the ones early on in the pandemic and ultimately it's about mindset, right? Like we've all been knocked over by this crisis, but how quickly do you get back up and see it as an opportunity? And the best ones sort of take it as an opportunity to revisit those sort of first principle questions of like, if we were building our company from scratch today, how would we build it? You know, what have been the momentum killers these last few years that we can now deal with. Those threshold questions.
I think the ones that kind of embraced that mindset, I've interviewed hundreds of entrepreneurs over the years, as well as CEOs of big companies have come from more of a traditional manager background. And the thing that strikes me about the entrepreneur's mindset is they don't necessarily see bad news. It's just like another sort of data point that's come in. And it's like, okay, what's plan B, C and D? And they sort of never really dwell on the bad news.
And I think all of us to some degree have had to adopt that mindset. I mean, just from a personal level, probably about a month or two into the pandemic, I was feeling kind of pretty down, beaten up and uncertain and all those other things. And I interviewed this woman, Sharon Daniels, a CEO, and during the interviews, she sort of framed it as a physics question. And she said, just in terms of like energy disruption creates motion. And so then the question becomes, how do you take advantage of the energy that is created by that motion? And Charles, literally as soon as she said that, it's like, wow, got it. It was like this inflection point from me and it's like, okay, I'm going to start running more. And I'm just going to make the most of this.
And I think at the end of the day, it is that sort of mindset where everything's an opportunity. How do we make the most of this opportunity? And to me, five years out when we're looking back, I think that will be one of the lenses that we look through, is which companies succeeded and why?
Charles: (25:26)
And last question for you, what have you learned about yourself over the last 12 months?
Adam Bryant: (25:31)
You know, I knew I was an introvert before this, Charles, so the fact that I'm not in a ton of social settings and my wife and I we're pretty compatible, so we've been fine this past year. Yeah, it sort of goes back to the story that I told. It's like once I kind of flipped that switch and said, I'm going to make the most of this time and the fact that I'm not traveling anymore and just started exercising more every day and gave me the time to finish writing the book. And I just said, I want, if this is going to be a year which is kind of a turn year and then some of that's turning out to be... I just kind of set myself a goal that I want to be able to look back on the other side of this and say, I made the most of it. I accomplished some key things. I lost a bit of weight. I got healthier. And so to me, that's kind of the way I framed it up.
Charles: (26:32)
Very healthy indeed. Adam, thank you so much for joining me today as always. The Corner Office was always such a true cornerstone I think, of understanding leadership with real insight. And I think the book has just taken your insights forward. So thank you for joining me. And please also thank your daughters too, for their courage and for their talent and their humanity. I mean without them and people like them, I don't know where we would be.
Adam Bryant: (26:57)
I appreciate that. I'll pass that along. Thank you.
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