Edward E. Lawler III, John Stumpf has stepped down as CEO and chairman of Wells Fargo amid public pressure. Rarely is someone at the top of an organization held accountable for the sins perpetrated by those below – even if they directly or implicitly encouraged them. Will a change at the top be enough to salvage the bank’s reputation and customer relations? More importantly, will the change in leadership to another insider – Timothy J. Sloan, its previous president and chief operating officer steps into the role vacated by Stumpf ‑‑ put an end to the corporate culture that ran amok at Wells Fargo? Congress, for one, doesn’t have much faith that it will. Within hours of the bank’s anointment of Sloan, who held a senior post at Wells Fargo throughout the scandal, Rep. Maxine Waters, a California Democrat, issued an official statement declaring her concern that Sloan was also culpable in the recent scandal. To think about this question, let’s take a look at how and why the unethical culture Mr. Sloan will inherit actually happened.
It has been said that the Wells Fargo culture Mr. Sloan is inheriting is the wrong kind of culture. However, if you look at all the verbiage produced by the company on who they are and what they stand for, it comes off sounding like a wonderful culture, dominated by courtesy and customer care. “Everything we do is built on trust. It doesn’t happen with one transaction, in one day on the job or in one quarter. It’s earned relationship by relationship,” John Stumpf – who spent 34 years of his career at the bank – wrote in Wells Fargo’s Vison and Values Statement.
But carefully-crafted mission statements don’t tell what the real culture is. What we know about culture is that it is determined by top management and supervisory behavior, not words. And clearly one of the key corporate behaviors that determines culture is what people see being rewarded and what they see being punished. What management says is much less important than what management rewards – and when what is said conflicts with what is rewarded, what is rewarded tells everyone what management genuinely believes, values, and wants.
We have spent our careers studying financial rewards in organizations and how they and other management practices affect employees and their organizations. Here is some of what we have learned about using financial rewards as an incentive: When excessively high or difficult goals are set, individuals either do not try to reach them or try to achieve them by beating the system.
I am coming to the harsh realization that I might have to look for a new job.
I liked my job for the first two years but the past year has been difficult. Our manager Marcia quit and the General Manager of our location took over our department rather than hire someone new to manage us.
I never hit it off with the GM, Jack, and now that he’s my direct supervisor, it’s very difficult.
For the past year I haven’t made any suggestions although for the previous two years I made several recommendations for ways to improve our processes, and Marcia approved them all.
I’m not going to say I was her right-hand man but I knew I was a valued member of the department, and I don’t feel that way anymore. Jack has never asked my opinion about anything. In a year, we’ve only met twice one-on-one and the entire meeting each time was just a recap of my progress on my projects.
Jack basically ignores me. I don’t know what I might have to done to offend him (apart from having a great relationship with Marcia, who also never got along with Jack, which is why she left her job).
I haven’t done anything in the past year that I can add to my resume, but even worse than that is how discouraged I feel. It’s hard to come to work when your boss doesn’t seem to care whether you’re on his team or not.
Jack is friendly with most of our teammates, but not me. Several people have asked me “How did you get on Jack’s bad side?” and I have to say “I don’t know.”
Successful people come from all walks of life, yet they all have one thing in common: where others see impenetrable barriers, they see challenges to embrace and obstacles to overcome.
Their confidence in the face of hardship is driven by their ability to let go of the negativity that holds so many otherwise sensible people back.
Obstacles do not block the path; they are the path.
This perspective helps successful people to think differently to everyone else, which is important, because if you think like everyone else, no matter how smart or experienced you are, you’ll hit the same ceiling. By thinking outside the box and going against the grain, successful people rise above their limitations.
And it all starts with their morning routines. Here’s how ultra-successful people utilize the first hours of the day:
1. They drink lemon water.
Drinking lemon water as soon as you wake up spikes your energy levels physically and mentally. By improving nutrient absorption in your stomach, it gives you a steady, natural energy buzz that lasts the length of the day. You need to drink it first thing in the morning (on an empty stomach) to ensure full absorption. You should also wait 15-30 minutes after drinking it before eating (perfect time to squeeze in some exercise). Lemons are chock full of nutrients, such as potassium, vitamin C, and antioxidants. If you weigh less than 150 pounds, drink the juice of half a lemon (a full lemon if you’re over 150 pounds). Don’t drink the juice without water because it’s hard on your teeth.
2. They exercise.
Richard Branson, Tim Cook, and Disney’s Bob Iger all wake up well before 6:00 a.m. to get their bodies moving. While their ungodly wake-up hours and exercise routines may seem crazy, research supports the extra effort. A study conducted at the Eastern Ontario Research Institute found that people who exercised twice a week for 10 weeks felt more competent socially, academically, and athletically. A second study conducted by researchers at the University of Bristol found that people who exercised daily had more energy and a more positive outlook, which are both critical for getting things done. Getting your body moving for as little as 10 minutes releases GABA, a neurotransmitter that makes your brain feel soothed and keeps you in control of your impulses. Exercising first thing in the morning ensures that you’ll have the time for it, and it improves your self-control and energy levels over the course of the entire day.
3. They disconnect.
Howard Schultz starts his day with a motivational e-mail to his employees, after this, he disconnects and dedicates his time to exercise and family. When you wake up and dive straight into e-mails, texts, and Facebook, you are far more likely to lose focus, and your morning succumbs to the wants and needs of other people. It’s much healthier to take those precious first moments of the day to do something relaxing, which sets a calm, positive tone for your day.
4. They eat a healthy breakfast.
Eating anything at all for breakfast puts you ahead of a lot of people. People who eat breakfast are less likely to be obese, they have more stable blood-sugar levels, and they tend to be less hungry over the course of the day. And these are just the statistics for people who eat any breakfast. When you eat a healthy breakfast, the doors to a productive day swing wide open. A healthy breakfast gives you energy, improves your short-term memory, and helps you to concentrate more intensely and for longer periods.
5. They practice mindfulness.
Mindfulness meditation has become increasingly popular among highly successful CEOs. Its growth in the business world is largely due to the huge dividends it pays in productivity and overall well-being. Research shows that mindfulness fights off stress by reversing the fight-or-flight response, improves your ability to focus, boosts creativity, and increases your emotional intelligence.
6. They set goals for the day.
Benjamin Franklin was obsessive about planning his days. Each morning, he would wake up at 4:00 a.m. and meticulously piece together a schedule. There’s a clear message to take from Franklin’s habit: prudent goal setting pays dividends. When you plan out your day as carefully as possible, your chances of successfully accomplishing your goals skyrocket. I like to set my daily goals after my mindfulness practice, because the added calm and clarity help me to set effective, specific goals.
7. They say no.
No is a powerful word, which will protect your precious mornings. When it’s time to say no, avoid phrases such as “I don’t think I can” or “I’m not certain.” Saying no to a new commitment honors your existing commitments, and your morning time is an important commitment. Research conducted at the University of California in San Francisco showed that the more difficulty that you have saying no, the more likely you are to experience stress, burnout, and even depression.
Bringing It All Together
While the above strategies are tried and true, you should build upon them with other activities that work for you.
How do you like to spend your mornings? Please share your thoughts in the comments section, as I learn just as much from you as you do from me.
Should bosses try to hold on to their star performers?
For most of corporate America, the question might seem like nonsense. Star performers are seen as so valuable that managers should pull out all the stops to keep them—or else see their companies take a big hit in productivity.
Yet some of the best managers not only allow their top performers to leave, but actively encourage it.
I’ve spent the past 10 years studying the world’s greatest bosses across 18 industries, luminaries such as Ralph Lauren in fashion, Julian Robertson in hedge funds, Norman Brinker in casual restaurants, Larry Ellison in technology, Michael Miles in packaged food, Jay Chiat in advertising and Tommy Frist Jr. in hospitals, to name a few. As I was surprised to discover, these extraordinary leaders achieved outstanding results in large part because they abandoned conventional thinking about keeping the best employees.
They weren’t afraid to lose their best people. On the contrary, most willingly unleashed their top performers onto the world, going out of their way to help them land outside opportunities. The leaders I studied built iconic businesses, transformed entire industries and in a number of instances became billionaires not by hoarding great people for themselves, but by mastering the flow of talent through their organizations.
Doing so will make an organization far more resilient, sustainable and successful over the long term. The talent-flow strategy is also better tailored to many of today’s abiding business realities, including volatile markets that demand more dynamic workforces; a generation of millennials less inclined to stick around for loyalty’s sake; and an entrepreneurial, gig economy that encourages frequent shifts in employment over the course of an individual’s career.
Not joined forever
The stories of these bosses reveal a crucial shared belief: You’re better off having the best people for a short time than average people forever.
The bosses were uncompromising when it came to recruiting. They didn’t want average; they wanted mind-blowing. They searched high and low for unusually talented individuals, often experimenting with nontraditional hires (and tolerating higher levels of churn when some of these hires didn’t work out).
But once unusually talented people were inside the organizations, the bosses accepted that some would leave. Top employees, the bosses realized, were almost always on a rapid growth trajectory. They were ultra-ambitious, perpetually angling for the next big opportunity, and it stood to reason that at least some of them would eventually need to leave the company to keep their careers moving ahead.
One leader told me that it was “normal” for people to want to pursue their own interests after a while: “We let these people go on an individual basis, and they left with their heads high and with great feelings toward us. It was probably the most successful thing we ever did.”
Another said: “You can’t keep good people down, and if they get a really good opportunity that you can’t match, it’s inevitable you’re going to lose them. But that’s the price you pay for having really outstanding people.”
Unlike most corporate chiefs, the bosses I studied were quite willing to pay that price. Exceptional talent, they thought, is well worth dealing with greater turnover. After all, these bosses were certainly not oblivious to the price of losing top talent.
As these bosses also understood, such turnover isn’t nearly as destructive as most managers think. When a stream of top performers go on to better things, the departures usually hasten the flow of more top talent into the company. Outstanding bosses who let their top talent leave developed reputations as launchpads; their companies were places to go to supercharge a career.
Working with the best
High-potential prospects began flocking to these bosses and not their competitors, eager for a chance to train with the best, build their résumé and partake of the bosses’ magic. Talented young people were so excited to work for these bosses that they even accepted below-market pay. Bosses such as Messrs. Chiat, Ellison and Lucas became widely known as “the guy” to work for in their industries because of all the prominent people who had come through their organizations and gone on to spectacular careers.
If the notion of being a talent magnet seems abstract compared with the tangible loss when a great person leaves, try a thought experiment. Imagine you have outstanding young people, each smarter and more creative and ambitious then the last, knocking on your door every day.
In that context, saying goodbye to some of your best people doesn’t seem especially risky, does it? On the contrary, it becomes desirable, since it makes room for more up-and-comers eager for their chance. In this scenario, your goal in managing talent is not to keep any one person, but to do what it takes to establish a strong talent flow, and to remove any impediments to that flow.
The bosses I studied also took advantage of a wonderful paradox: When you stop hoarding your people and focus on creating a talent flow, you find that more of your top people actually do wind up staying. Most people who worked for bosses like Messrs. Chiat, Brinker or Frist didn’t want to work for anybody else. Why would they? From the employee’s perspective, the environments these bosses created offered unique opportunities for excitement, innovation and advancement. It also offered the prestige of working at a top brand-name employer in the industry.
Alumni network
Another paradox was equally important: Top performers keep delivering benefits when they stop working for you. Great bosses get the most out of their talent flows by building networks of former employees. Although these networks help alumni build their careers, bosses also rely on them for business opportunities, information, vendor relationships and new recruits.
The very existence of these networks has value because it further cements the boss’s reputation as someone who can help foster a career, thus heightening the “talent magnet” effect. So, it’s no surprise that many of the bosses I studied helped their best people move on. As they intuitively understood, every star who left made the alumni network that much more powerful.
Consider one health-care star who left to found his own company. He told me that senior leaders at his company weren’t particularly upset or anxious about his decision. “They were all excited for me. They had a party the day we closed the deal.” That went for the top boss, too. He “was right there every step of the way, and he invested in the company. Without his support and guidance, I never could have made this happen.”
The star-turned-entrepreneur became an important part of his former boss’s network, and as his business grew, the former boss’s equity share grew as well.
Throughout his long career, in fact, that boss helped many protégés start their own businesses, sometimes investing in them or providing advice, other times arranging to buy products and services from them. Partly as a result, his company’s hometown is now the headquarters of hundreds of health-care firms, with the boss having some influence over, or a direct role in, the majority of them.
As an alumnus of that company told me, the company’s network remains vibrant, built on strong personal connections: “The social community around here, the arts, the various things that we do to support human-services organizations here…we all show up at the same places, and we all associate with each other.”
***
The next time your top performer talks about leaving, what will you do? I suggest you follow the lead of the world’s greatest bosses and welcome it. Our people are our greatest assets, but not in the way we usually think. To win big, we can no longer afford to keep our best talent to ourselves. We have to be willing to lose it. Our talent will be better off, and so will we.
Dr. Finkelstein is the Steven Roth professor of management and director of the Tuck Center for Leadership at Dartmouth College, and the author of “Superbosses: How Exceptional Leaders Master the Flow of Talent.” He can be reached at reports@wsj.com.
John Seraichyk - Executive Jobs Guy - Executive Career Search consultant drills deep to match a client with a new job. John Seraichyk's Beginnings In the Executive Career Search Business 1990 - 2016
In 1990 I was laid off. I showed up at work one day and my boss called me into his office and said, “Today’s your last day.”
We had just bought a new house, I had one child and another on the way. I was unable to find a job in computer programming. One morning I had an epiphany — I was going to help college graduates find jobs. I placed a $19 ad in The Providence Journal. It was, about, three lines. The next day my phone rang off the hook.
I didn’t exactly know how I was going to help them find their first job. Maybe it was just going to be a resumé. The first young man showed up at my house. We sat at my dining room table. He said, “What are you going to do for me?” and I said, “I don’t know, but you and me are going to do this. We’re going to work this thing.” I charged him $25 and he ended up at Amica. He’s still there today.
It really took off.
If I could do this with college kids — people with no experience — imagine what I could do for someone with a resumé, with credentials. So the demographic I work with today is the mid- to high-level executive — 250k plus. But I still love to offer advice to the college grad when he calls.
I never get the easy job searches. Most of my clients are accomplished people who know how to get things done and they’re not always ready to reach out for help. They look at their credentials and say, “I don’t need to hire anyone.” By the time they come to me, they’re in a bit of a quandary.
Some people start their job search six months into an eight-month severance package. That person should come to me on day one. The minute the employment history on your resumé no longer reads “present,” your market value begins to decline. So who has the upper hand when you’re sitting there with a potential employer?
I tell people to expect the process to take three to five months, but we often make it happen in less time. Or it might be an even longer road to success, with lots of ups and downs. The problem with many folks at the high end of compensation — like multimillion — is that they often don’t really need to work. They need to work emotionally but not monetarily. They’re not living paycheck to paycheck. It’s hard to focus them, to make them stay on track. “It’s not right for me — I need to hold out for something better.” The seven-figure client can be pretty selective.
Is it easier to work with someone who is desperate? Absolutely. The more they need new employment, the more focused they are in getting from A to B, and they know they need to get there sooner rather than later. They need to replace that 200k now. Their lifestyle reflects that salary.
I try to look at my client through the eyes of an employer: What does the employer see? We need to identify the liabilities. Maybe you’ve been out of work for five months. That’s a liability. How are we going to handle that? I’ll bring you through a series of mock interviews to identify those liabilities, ask questions about strengths and weaknesses, open-ended questions about areas of expertise. I really drill deep. If it ain’t broke, we don’t fix it, but if there are things that need work, we confront them. I call it verbal judo.
I won’t take on more than three clients at any given time. A client has my cell-phone number, and I’m available seven days a week. When we pull the trigger on this job search, we go, and we don’t stop until we’re done.
Our definition of success is our ability to clearly define what your career goals are, what your job search criteria are, then bring you together with a potential employer for an interview. That’s all we can guarantee. We can’t guarantee a job. We can’t guarantee the outcome of those interviews. But we can guarantee that you will be meeting with companies in the right geography, talking about the right compensation. My job is to get you there.
The only good time to look for a job is when you still have one. And the day you take a new job, that’s when you start updating your resumé all over again. You always need to be looking. Keep the resumé at the ready and always be thinking about change. The unemployment rate is 9 percent. That means the employment rate is 91 percent — 91 percent of the people who want jobs in this country have jobs. And you just need one.
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John's entire professional career has been dedicated to assisting professionals and executives with career transition, employment search and career consulting. Offering over 20 years of career search and consulting experience, John has earned a reputation for engaging with 200k + professionals and executives in a successful effort to advance their professional career status. Mr. Seraichyk has built multiple management teams for his organizations and teamed with them to provide unprecedented growth. John’s professional mission has been clearly established, with the mandate of providing the highest quality career management services to his clients while always striving to optimize their success.
