Hamara CEO kaisa ho?

“You know why everyone wants to be a leader?” he took the last drag from his cigarette, looking at me. I did not know how to answer. “Because it pays more. And you get a big office”. Plain and simple. It sounded like a very blunt and raw motivation for an otherwise noble and exalted profession. It didn’t help that I was a CEO myself. It was a dent on my own pride.

But there has to be some truth in the statement he made. He is an Executive Recruiter and gets paid to hire “leaders”. But are leaders so driven by money and power? During my McKinsey days I learned that the reasons were varied. Some wanted money and power but others wanted nicer things such as respect, opportunity to make an impact, fame or an opportunity to create something. When did it become so lopsided?

It may be true but there is another side of the story. The median tenure for the CEO is declining. It used to be six years but now it is five. You add an activist shareholder or Private Equity in the board and the tenure falls further. If the CEO is having to change his “passion” every three years, it is difficult to not be mercenary. The job becomes more about managing expectations, managing the board, highlighting achievements and minimising failures. It is upward management like any other job. Most of the CEOs, having successfully climbed the corporate ladder, are also well trained in this art so it comes naturally.

Whatever be the justification, the problem is that mercenary CEOs do not work. The “regular” employees see right through. They follow what the leader does and not what he says. The behaviour is easy to spot. The telltale signs are the top down dissemination of apathy and cynicism followed by a significant employee attrition. The CEO explains it as the cost of leadership transition to the board. Corporates today see this story play out repeatedly with companies small and large.

However, when the CEO does work out, it is magical. Microsoft doubled its stock price under Satya Nadella. The company is starting to become respected in “cool tech” circles again. Eric Schmidt provided the backbone that allowed Google to scale efficiently. The “regular” employees see that too. There is energy, alignment and a sense of purpose. They can tell.

What is the difference between them? I think it all comes down to motivation. Leadership is both a physically exhausting and emotionally painful responsibility, especially when truly executed. You are responsible for the outcome and judged by the masses for every slip while the rest of the organisation is responsible for the work they do. Look at the public scrutiny of Elon Musk for having smoked Marijuana on a Radio Talk show. Notwithstanding this, there is a “cause” that propels the leader and it is very personal. Cesar, AZ-120 infused, super intelligent ape leader in “Rise of planet of apes” was moved by the plight of his fellow apes and wondered loudly about the moral right of one animal (human) to enslave and imprison another (ape). He felt obligated to fix this and led the charge. It was very personal to him as he had seen his friend getting beaten and humiliated. Gandhi wasn't motivated to lead Indian Freedom movement in the beginning. He was living a comfortable life as a barrister until he was kicked out of a train for his skin colour. The wounded pride grew to become a revolution. I am not sure what the motivation for Satya Nadella is but he has seen Microsoft when it was the most dominant tech company on the planet. I will not be surprised if he is driven by restoring the glory of the company which made him what he is today in what would otherwise be a modest life.

Such motivation infuses people with missionary zeal. Everything is personal. There is a reason he is doing what is doing. And it rubs on the people around him and trickles down. There will be a sense of purpose, camaraderie and an extreme sense of urgency. People live and die together. People make sacrifices for each other and for the "cause". The whole organisation is united around the leader and things move fast. From the outside it may look like absolutely disorganised behaviour, but inside there is already an organic informal organisation formed, with teams, processes and managers.

While it is difficult to find CEOs with such passion it is still a crucial part of the job. Boards would do a lousy job if they ignore this. Simon Sinek talks about this in his seminal book

"Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action" and his TEDx talk. It makes life so much simpler for them. The passion reverberates through the employees, customers and other stakeholders in the organisation.

I can literally see my CEO friends rolling their eyes now. It is not so easy to be passionate about steel mills and mattress companies. Every company is making an impact on the lives of people but the impact is not as visceral as that of a medical device company, an education technology company or a space research company. But I have seen passionate CEOs in the "boring" industries. Just the object of their passion is less around the customer and more around the tribe they have joined. Companies are live beings with history, legends and soul. They are passionate about the life in them: how a couple of friends come together to form Infosys, pooling money from their friends and family and taking a shot at the moon. The sacrifices that people make to come this far. These CEO's make themselves part of that pride, journey and the dream and become ingrained with the company itself. That creates a shared passion. They become "one".

True passion is an elusive qualification to capture in a resume and even more difficult of a qualification to assess for an Executive Recruiter. Corporate honchos know how to present themselves. The job of a Board is a difficult one and for Executive Recruiter even more so.

But then who said that the job of a CEO, a board or an Executive Recruiter was easy? Certainly not the payslips they receive.