Page 143 - Executive Warfare

The Team You Assemble

And it’s always your judgment that’s in question.
Of course, things can be even worse when the board or the CEO grows
to really like one of your people, and you decide that the person is doing
a poor job. In that case, you probably
have to prove that he is failing to your
superiors—your aghast and disbeliev- GIVEN THEIR
ing superiors—before you’ll get the go- INCREASING SENSE
ahead to get rid of him. OF PERSONAL
I once had a finance person who was LIABILITY SINCE
a great presenter but really technically THE ENRON
incompetent. He made mistakes all the SCANDAL, OUTSIDE
time—clearly, a serious liability to me. BOARD MEMBERS
But he was loyal as a Labrador. He never ARE BOLDER AND
said a bad word about me, never com- BOLDER IN
plained, took whatever raise I gave him. QUESTIONING
A supremely nice guy, and he was highly PERSONNEL
regarded by many people in the organ- DECISIONS.
ization.
I wasn’t eager to fire him since I had
just recently made a few other core personnel moves, including a firing.
So I came up with a solution that made everybody happy: I traded him to
an enemy and let him make his errors elsewhere. Then he got fired by
someone else.

INSIST ON YOUR OWN PICKS
You are going to be judged on the quality of your team, no matter what,
so don’t assume that you will be given a pass just because somebody is
forced on you. Once I ended up managing a senior employee who was
very friendly with the president of the organization. Let’s call him Jerry. I
realized that Jerry was an obstruction who had to go—but I didn’t know
how to take him out without getting the president to agree.

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