Teaming up with the team.

• Author: HORTON, THOMAS R.
• Position: Chief executive officers and team building - Brief Article

What the board should do to determine, before it's too late, if the CEO has no talent for team-building.

IN RECENT YEARS the corporate CEO has become the personification of the business enterprise, a central character on the American stage, a cultural icon, a celebrity. In short, a star. Names like Ballmer, Bezos, Nasser, and Welch have entered our vernacular. Writers on governance emphasize the supreme importance of the relationship between the board and this very special individual.

Yet almost 50 years ago Peter Drucker observed that the chief executive's job "cannot properly be organized as the job of one man. It must be the job of several...acting together." At one time he counted 41 different activities that ostensibly could be done only by the chief. His conclusion, of course, was that the CEO must build, and lead, atop-management team, and it is this team that can provide the leadership so essential to success.

Drucker's insight proved to be true. In the most successful companies, leadership is a shared function. The late Marisa Bellisario once told me, while she was CEO of Italtel, "I am a great team player so long as I am captain of the team." She was a great captain, but not everyone is cut out for this role. Still, many who are not are nevertheless chosen to play it.

Over the past two years we have witnessed a veritable Niagara of "resignations" of short-term CEOs. A recent study concludes that 40% of new CEOs lose their jobs within their first 18 months.

Many of these failures, doomed from the start, were board failures: the results of flawed selections. Typically, these chief executives rose from the number-two post, where they had performed brilliantly. In such cases they generally failed at the top not for lack of technical skill, market knowledge, or financial acumen but rather for the more subtle deficiency of sensitivity, a topic recently addressed in this space ["Two Special Qualities that Define a Leader," Spring 2000]. In postmortem accounts, directors described them, sotto voce, as having been variously tone-deaf, tin-eared, wearing blinders, or ham-handed; they had "just not gotten it," at least to the degree they needed to get it, to serve as corporate heads of state.

A more common contributor to the failed CEO syndrome is an absence of teambuilding capability. Over 15 years ago Harvard professor John J. Gabarro discovered a prevalent characteristic of failed successions, at the CEO and lesser levels, to be that the...