Waiting for Time to Heal The Prodigal Executive

"Someday this bitter ache will pass, my sweet. Time wounds all heels."

This Groucho Marx line, from the 1940 film "Go West", is more than the ingenious reversal of the popular cliche "Time heals all wounds.” This is a myth that trips up many companies who have an executive who is too good to fire and too bad to keep.

(By the way, Ann Landers, the most widely syndicated columnist in the world, is also credited with coining this phrase. In 1955, Eppie Lederer was a 37-year-old well-to-do housewife and mother who had never published a word when she entered a contest to write an advice column under the pseudonym Ann Landers in the Chicago Times. She beat out 27 other entrants, many of them professional journalists, with a column that began “Time wounds all heels” and went on writing for nearly 50 years.)

In my book The Prodigal Executive, I discuss the misguided belief that time will work it out. The organizational hope is that the executive will eventually quit causing the pain, suffering and havoc.

So the leaders do nothing. Typically the board of directors or the CEO doesn’t want to confront the pain-in-the-assets executive. This inaction does more harm than good, because silence is reinforcing the executive’s negative behavior (“If they aren’t saying anything, then what I am doing must be okay” they reason).

Typically I am called in when the company can’t wait any longer for time to wound the heel. They feel they have run out of options and the situation has reached a crisis because of problems like high turnover, customer defections and even lawsuits for misconduct like sexual harassment and hostile work environment.

Nope, time isn’t going to be the answer.

That was the case with Larry, a big guy with a gruff, gruff exterior. Larry was good at alienating people and creating the impression they knew nothing he knew everything about his area of specialization. Despite repeated warnings from senior executives, Larry was not changing.

In organizations, there are many ways to communicate symbolically. There are ceremonies, awards, logos, icons, contests and oft-told stories. And there are real-life leadership behaviors that “speak” volumes.

My showing up created two pieces of symbolic communications for Larry. One, he didn’t believe his job was threatened until an outsider showed up. I was not afraid to confront him and tell him that he was inches away from being shown the door. The other message he got from my presence was the company was willing to make investment in him to be a more effective leader, so he had better pay attention. Happily, in Larry’s case, he did pay attention and lost the negativity.

Tell The Prodigal Executive The Bad News

Of course, it is human nature that people don’t want to give other people bad news. That is why there are expressions like, “Don’t shoot the messenger.” Deep down people want to be seen as likable, the nice guy or gal. Because they want to be nice, giving people negative, but necessary, feedback is the hardest thing for them to do.

The classic example is the senior executive who gave performance appraisals in the restroom. This manager would see the employee in the restroom and hand the person a folder with things they're doing well and not well.

Regardless of the reason, if you are a manager and you don't give somebody in your organization negative feedback, it borders on being unethical. You're carrying information the employee needs to know for their career survival. If that person doesn't succeed but could have if they had the information, then you as their manager have set them up for failure.

The other problem that happens in executive organizations is that the higher up you go, the less feedback you get.

In the words of Dr. Marshall Goldsmith, the author of 19 books on leadership, “All other things being equal, your people skills (or lack thereof) become more pronounced the higher up you go. In fact, even when things are not equal, your people skills often make the difference in determining how high you go” (“behave Yourself,” Talent Management Magazine, July 2007).

The feedback a high level executive receives is so sanitized because of the politics it is of scant value. So many times executives, when they do finally get this level of feedback that they're potentially derailing, they're very surprised. And some of the comments are, "Well why wasn't I told this before?" And part of that is the fear of telling the boss there's a problem.