Emotionally Intelligent Leadership: When Marc Walked Away from Twitter

In his bestseller, Trailblazer, Salesforce CEO, Marc Benioff recalls the time, in 2016, when he was convinced Salesforce should acquire Twitter.

He envisaged Twitter as a platform for communicating directly with Salesforce’s customers and creating communities of interest and direct feedback – for Salesforce, for their customers and for their customers’ customers.

Benioff had a very strong gut feeling about the advantages of purchasing the social media platform.

Even in the face of an equally strong opposition to buying Twitter voiced by his senior leadership team, Benioff remained steadfast in his commitment.

Even when the stock market got wind of the prospective acquisition and Salesforce’s share price began to take a turn south, Benioff stayed true to his instincts.

Even when key investors shared their objections, Benioff continued to espouse the many upsides to the Salesforce-Twitter deal.

As he explained:

‘At some point, every leader will find themselves taking a position that requires them to discount the judgment of all the smart people around them.’

What Prompted Marc to Rethink?

It seems that a literal stumble, his falling out of a car and splitting his meniscus, on the day he went on to successfully pitch to the credit ratings agencies and agree investment-grade underwriting – triggered the start of a rethink.

At Dreamforce, Salesforce’s annual community get-together, Benioff looked out at the people in the audience – a mix of Salesforce Directors, colleagues and investors – and he registered the looks on their faces. These were not faces full of optimism and delight, they were faces of dread and fear.

He recognized that if he moved ahead with the deal – moving against stakeholders' almost uniform opposition – he would betray their trust in him, as well as undermine the culture of Salesforce.

In that moment, he recognized that he needed his people to trust him more than he needed to trust his gut.

Rather than move ahead and announce the deal, he apologized. To the collective relief of those present, he explained that the deal was off.

Trust

Trust is the foundation of thriving, healthy relationships. Psychological safety is the group equivalent – where anyone in a team environment feels safe in sharing something important to them.

Trust is Salesforce’s number one value.

There are different types of trust, such as trusting teammates and trusting your gut instinct. It’s important to recognize which takes precedence in a situation.

There are simple ways to build trust (simple to understand, not always simple to do, as Benioff’s example shows): be transparent, honest, respectful, vulnerable, consistent – among others. There are equally simple ways?to destroy trust.

What isn’t equal, is the time involved. It can take a lot longer to build trust than it can to destroy it.

Emotionally Intelligent Leadership

Emotionally Intelligent leadership requires a blending of thinking and feeling skills. Benioff was initially focused on his emotional cues – his gut instinct and his optimism that Twitter would reap benefits for Salesforce. He possibly wasn’t displaying as much empathy to others’ views, or to rational analysis.

Ultimately, tuning into the expressions on the faces of his audience – people loyal to Salesforce, who didn’t agree with the acquisition, and who had conducted analysis of their own – helped him decide. It was also a rational decision to take into account the perspectives and fears of others. If his team were not behind the deal, it didn’t auger well for its success.

We Will Never Know

Still, we will never know if Salesforce would be even more successful than it is today post a Twitter acquisition, or if it would have sunk into oblivion – or whether something different again would have ensued.

In that moment, Benioff recognized it was time to abandon his trust of his gut, and trust instead those around him, those fearfully looking back at him from their seats in the Dreamforce auditorium.

Emotionally intelligent leadership requires blending thinking and feeling skills to make smarter decisions - often in situations of great uncertainty, complexity and tight timeframes. It requires recognizing if the optimism and excitement you're feeling is based on sound logic and relevant experience or on heady opportunism absent of reliable knowledge.

Andrea Stone is a leadership coach, working with CXOs and leadership teams to define success and the paths towards it. She helps leaders hone their EQ - the #1 determinant of success at senior leadership levels.

?Andrea Stone, Stone Leadership Coaching and Consulting Pvt. Ltd.