How Senior Executives Can Get the Hard Truth When Everyone Has an Agenda

Lessons from 35 years as CEO and nearly a decade coaching business leaders

Have you heard that phrase ‘It’s lonely at the top’? It tends to resonate with CEOs, other C suite executives, and business owners. What causes that sense of isolation among those who have come so far in their careers? Most importantly, what can you do about it?

As someone who has been CEO for multiple enterprises, let me share the benefit of my experience. Hopefully, a few words can help ensure you don’t take as long as I did to find the input and support you need.?

A Business Proposition

Here’s my story in brief. I was in my early thirties and serving as marketing director for a small company. An audit revealed that we were losing serious money and I was given a proposition. I’d have 90 days to turn things around. If I succeeded, I would take over as president. If I failed, the business would be liquidated.

As you might guess from the fact that I’m telling this story, I took on the challenge and won. Then, over the next eight years, I expanded the $18 million company to $370 million, a level that today would make it a billion-dollar enterprise.

This was the first of what would become eight tenures in the chief executive’s chair. Among them, I returned a VC-backed concern losing $250,000 per month to significant positive cash flow. I launched a concept targeting the business traveler and sold it to a public company. I brought life back to a 20 million startup that was ‘only mostly dead’, to quote The Princess Bride, and exited day-to-day operations with private equity funding.

Looking back, I realize that the biggest barrier I faced through it all was truth. No matter which company I was leading, almost everybody around me had an agenda. They either told me what they thought I wanted to hear, not what I needed to hear, or they spun information for their own purposes. No one told me the hard truths and the lack of honest input frequently caused problems.

Today, I’m an executive coach and my top advice to individuals in the C suite is to find a group of people who will give it to you straight.

Likeminded People Who Think Differently

There are various ways to follow my counsel. An executive might work with a single mentor or assemble an ad hoc mastermind group. But a tried and true method, which has proven valuable to leaders for nearly three-quarters of a century, is Vistage.

If you aren’t familiar, Vistage is an organization combining a peer advisory group, one-to-one coaching with a Vistage Chair, and an array of resources and research. My executive coaching happens under the auspices of Vistage because I believe it is the best model for helping CEOs, C suite executives, and rising stars grow as leaders and as people, with specialized groups tailored to individuals at each of these critical career stages.

I often describe a Vistage peer advisory group as a bunch of likeminded people who think differently. Vistage is a non-competitive, confidential environment. Members share a commitment to supporting each other and we come together to help solve problems by marshaling our diverse experience, knowledge, and perspectives.

The best part, we’re empowered to be ‘carefrontational’. We are compelled to challenge each other’s assumptions and tell our peers those difficult truths from a place of concern, support, and respect.

It’s refreshing to see the impact of this process. Receiving the input is vital. But more often than not, we learn even more when working through someone else’s problem. In those situations, we’re free of attachment to the outcome and the personalities involved and can apply dispassionate analysis. Then when a similar issue arises in our own company or life, we find that we have additional tools and insights to draw on.

So You Want Results?

You may be saying to yourself that this process sounds great but does it really work? Short answer: yes.

There is a study indicating that Vistage members’ companies grow 2.2 times faster than the competition. Based on what I’ve seen in the five peer advisory groups I work with, that may be an understatement. Here are just a few examples:

• A first-time CEO joined my original Vistage group and collaborated with peers on a growth strategy. The company’s revenue expanded 5x to $25 million within seven years. Today, they are a recognized trailblazer in the industry.
• The head of a $60 million enterprise was troubled by its reliance on Amazon for 70 percent of sales. Working with our peer advisory group, he devised and implemented plans that grew higher margin, direct-to-customer sales to over 70 percent of the business, while maintaining Amazon-derived revenues at the same level.
• A family-owned business was taken on by the second generation. Once they got to $12 million the co-CEOs were working incredibly long days just to keep up. They didn’t know how to build the organizational depth they needed to scale up and delegate more. After becoming part of Vistage, they grew 2x and started enjoying life again, too.

The opportunity to contribute to such transformations is the reason why I became a Vistage Chair and why I’m even more passionate about facilitating peer advisory groups nearly a decade later.

If the Vistage experience has taught me anything, it’s that there is greatness in everyone. That means similar results are available for you; you just must may need a little help. If you think a peer advisory group could be that resource, contact me here for more information.