Full-court pressure

Imposing your will is a challenge for even the best leaders

Friday, February 18, 2005

BY MATTHEW FUTTERMAN

Star-Ledger Staff

When Joe Scott was hired as Princeton's basketball coach last spring, it seemed like a perfect match.

The New Jersey native played for the Tigers and served as an assistant. As the head coach at Air Force, he used discipline and hands-on coaching to lead the team to its first NCAA tournament. So, it was an easy call to come home when Princeton offered the reins of the defending Ivy League champions.

Hard-charging Carly Fiorina had a pretty good run at Lucent Technologies, too, before she took the top job at Hewlett-Packard in 1999 -- a move that made her the most powerful woman in business.

Neither worked out as expected.

Scott's Tigers are on the verge of the school's first losing league record in 51 years. Fiorina got the ax last week after nearly six years. As she left, HP employees popped open bottles of champagne.

The lesson? Change is almost always a lot more complicated than it looks. Whether it's a college basketball team or an $80 billion company, the challenge, management experts said, is to balance one's personal style with that of the organization's.

"There's an old saying that goes like this -- you're not a leader until people decide to follow you," said Howard Guttman, whose firm, Guttman Development Strategies in Ledgewood serves as a management consultant to several Fortune 500 companies, "With Carly, it seemed like she kept climbing further out on the limb, but then you turn around and you realize you're all alone out there."

In an era when employees are accustomed to an atmosphere of cooperation and team-building, the my-way-or-the-highway manager may soon become an endangered species. As former President Clinton has noted, the easiest way to lead is first to figure out where the people are going.

"People who come in and try to change everything without a fundamental understanding of what already is working end up breaking things that are successful," said Mike Abrashoff, a retired Navy captain and author of the best-selling book, "It's Your Ship: Management Techniques From The Best Damn Ship in the Navy" (Warner, 2002).

What no one mentioned when Scott got the job at Princeton was how different he was from his predecessor, John Thompson III, who went on to Georgetown. Thompson spent most games quietly pacing the sidelines and encouraged players to deviate from Princeton's set offense when they saw the opportunity.

Scott is a far more hands-on, constantly barking instructions during games. He wants his players to play within the strict structure he has laid out, and he may yet be successful.

"I am hard on the guys," Scott said earlier this week. "I'm very demanding, but I'm very clear in those demands so they know exactly what is expected from them each day."

While communicating goals is important, management experts say unsuccessful leaders often skip the first step when they join an organization: asking questions and listening to the answers.

"You're walking into an open human equation and you want to ask all the stupid questions to reduce risk," said Abe Weiss, director of the Center for Management Development at Rutgers University. "You need to have an open door, you need to give people hope, be extremely positive and listen, listen, listen. Ask questions until it hurts."

Fiorina took a company with 83 separate units and reduced the number to four, all of which reported directly to her. She also ignored the advice of thousands of shareholders and a rival member of her board, who warned against an ill-fated 2001 merger with Compaq Computers.

Michael Zinn, principal of the executive search firm Michael Zinn Associates, said HP and other companies would be well-served to follow the example of Herbert Henkel of Ingersoll-Rand.

Henkel was hired as the chief operating officer at the Woodcliff Lake-based manufacturer in 1999 with the understanding he would get the top job the following year. He then spent his time studying every facet of Ingersoll-Rand's business. Only then did he begin to implement a transformation strategy by selling off divisions that had long been stalwarts because they were too expensive to run.

At the same time, Henkel invested in higher margin businesses such as refrigeration, compact equipment and security.

"Herb has his own style of collaborative participatory management, rather than a hierarchical system that was in place," Zinn said. "I'd say the success is reflected in the stock price."

And how. Shares of I-R have more than doubled since Henkel took over, rising from $40 to $80, far ahead of the growth rate of the Standard & Poor's 500 Index.

Guttman recommends managers come into a company as if they were serving as consultants: Get a lay of the land, ask people about their accountabilities, their frustrations, how they think they can be more effective.

"You don't come in telling people what to do because you don't know what to tell them," he says.

Abrashoff took over a different unit every 18-24 months during the last half of his career in the Navy. He said the key is to recognize what worked in one place doesn't work everywhere, and to be open to nontraditional solutions. At one base, where rush-hour traffic was awful, he switched the workday from 6:00 a.m. to 1:30 p.m. so his forces had an easier commute. In that case, circumstances called for a unique approach.

Likewise, Guttman pointed out how Yankees manager Joe Torre spent a lot more time teaching when he managed a young Mets team in the 1970s than he does now.

"With the Yankees, he comes in with the premise that he has a fairly sophisticated group of players and does not to have try to impose his will," Guttman said. "You find a way to match your leadership style to the situation."

Copyright 2005 NJ.com. All Rights Reserved.