“At one time, he was the leading, perhaps the only, candidate for CEO.”
The man speaking was a senior executive at one of the corporations in a study of how careers go off the rails. The man he was describing had then been handed something he had never faced before, an unprofitable operation. After that, the executive said, he “seemed to go on a downward spiral,” becoming more remote each day and unable to work with key subordinates.
Why did he derail? Partly luck, the executive said: the business was already going down when he inherited it. Partly the specialists he surrounded himself with. “And some of it was that he never learned to delegate. He had no idea of how to lead by listening.”
Two stories from each insider
The interview was part of a study by Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo of the Center for Creative Leadership, published in January 1983. With their colleague Ann Morrison, they worked with several Fortune 500 corporations to find “savvy insiders”: a few of the top ten executives and senior human resources staff who helped make succession decisions. Each was asked to describe, in detail, one executive who had made it to the top and one who had derailed. Derailed meant very successful for 20 or 30 years, then demoted, fired, retired early or simply stopped, against their will. The interviews yielded about 20 success stories and a comparable number of derailments. The derailed executives, the report notes, were all men.
The quick explanations, the authors noted, were the Peter Principle or a fatal flaw. What they found was that those who derailed “differed only slightly from those who reached the top.” Both were, in the report’s words, “incredibly bright,” identified early, with outstanding track records. The derailed had often been described as technical geniuses or brilliant problem solvers.
What changed was the job. “After a certain point,” the authors wrote, “managers cease to do the work themselves, and become executives who see that it is done. Some never made this transition.” One external affairs executive who knew little about government regulation tried to direct a subordinate with 30 years of experience in it. The expert balked, and the boss lost a battle, the report said, “that should never have begun.”
Among those who derailed, the brilliant but unlikable tended to fall through insensitivity to others or overmanaging. Loyal, hard-working types “remained that way and over-managed themselves off the track.” In the report’s summary, “the same attributes that got these men to the top also did them in.”
What the arrivers had done
The ones who made it, by these accounts, had more varied records. Derailed executives had usually succeeded at the same kind of job again and again: turned a business around more than once, or run bigger and bigger operations in one function. Arrivers had moved from line jobs to staff jobs and back, or started a business from scratch.
The authors warned against reading their list as a formula. “There is not one best way to succeed (or even to fail),” they wrote. Their evidence was what about 19 executives remembered of about 40 careers.
One of the derailed, in a colleague’s words, was “a talented guy and not a bad manager either.” His overmanaging, abrasive style “never allowed his colleagues to develop and never allowed him to learn from them.” He was passed over.