Chapter 3
You Gotta Earn It
Earning your way to the top
In 1974, Christie Hefner was the quintessential feminist, a Brandeis graduate with an interest in law, politics, and journalism. And a decided disinterest in business.
“Liberals in my generation,” she says, “felt that business was, at the very least, suspect, if not the enemy… They didn't care about human rights.”
It seems that Christie's father, Hugh Hefner, founder of Playboy Enterprises, would have been public enemy number one: a man who made his fortune selling sexy women. But he wasn't. Playboy in fact supported many women's rights causes. In 1975, after a year of working for the Boston Phoenix, Christie took a job at Playboy, and a few years later, an opportunity arose. In 1982, Playboy was in trouble. While the board was thinking of searching for an outsider, Christie made a proposal to Hef and the board that she step in (rather than delay with the search for an outsider) and form an office of the President. She felt she had a sense that she knew what needed to be done and that she already had the trust of being a family member. Before too long she was making command decisions at the company. A liberal feminist was calling the shots for the ultimate boy's club. It was an eyebrow-raising succession, as Christie pointed out, that generated “a certain amount of press.” Though as a feminist she entered the business with what she calls a “certain level of disability,” Christie managed to shatter the glass ceiling before the masses knew what a glass ceiling was. Then in 1988, after Hef had a stroke and felt that he no longer wanted to have the role of CEO, she succeeded her father as CEO of Playboy.
But she didn't get to the top because she was Hef's daughter. She got there because she was a respected leader and her own person. Christie always had a sense of who she was and where she was going.
Christie went to Brandeis with the goal of earning a graduate degree in law or journalism. After she graduated, and had gotten some seasoning at the Boston Phoenix, her plan was to apply to Yale's public policy program. But her father intercepted her with an invitation: “On your way to do doing whatever you're going to do, why don't you take a one-year tour through the company?” Christie says, “In hindsight, I think he thought this was a chance for us to spend some time together.” The reality is that they both saw it as a short-term assignment.
Divorced from Christie's mother, “Hef” only visited Christie on birthdays and the occasional holiday. Though he wasn't present, his magazine was. “My mother read it, along with Time, The Atlantic, and The New Yorker,” Christie says. She didn't see her father as the world saw him—the party boy bookended by buxom blondes; she saw her father as a man who published a credible magazine that even her mother read. “My impressions of him were always forged by my sense of him as a person, not an icon. And my attitude toward him was shaped by my mother's very accepting attitude.”
It was easy for Christie to accept an invitation from the person, not the icon. “I didn't come into the company as the heir apparent with all the complications and pressure that comes with that. I was likening it to a junior year abroad, an interesting one-year experience.” But in that first year Christie saw that Playboy's values were more in line with her own than she previously thought. Her father wanted to use its business success to communicate a sociopolitical agenda centered on personal freedom and civil liberties.
In her early days, Christie worked with Playboy's editor in chief to learn the nuts and bolts of putting together a magazine. Later, it was the same editor who gave her some career-shaping advice. “He knew I had been a journalist for a year and he told me, ‘Think like a journalist. Get everybody's perspective so you can see things from all sides. Everybody has a valid point of view, and you need to consider them all.’ When I became CEO, fostering collaboration was the hallmark of my leadership style.”
Christie never imagined her gap year would turn into a deeply passionate commitment to her father's company. “I considered my role to be a steward of a brand, a culture, shareholders and employees, and I had an obligation to serve those masters. I had a long-term and emotional stake in Playboy and its people. They saw that, so they believed in me, supported me, and followed me.”
Christie earned the right to lead because she never compromised her convictions to work with her father. She didn't sell herself out. “You can be anointed in title,” says Christie, “but true power is given by the people you lead.” People follow leaders who are authentic, true to themselves and their life's purpose.
Your Own Way
This is the primary challenge for all leaders: to be authentic and true to one's self. For a successor to do so is complicated. Making one's way when a way has already been established can be more difficult than pioneering something new. To follow in the footsteps of a charismatic leader, successors must earn credibility first with themselves (internal credibility) and then with others (external credibility).
Credibility forms when one develops a realistic sense of what he or she is and is true to that. Self-aware successors accelerate the development of internal credibility because they are able to align their actions with who they want to be. It goes back to the psychological concept of the ideal self (who I aspire to be at my best) and the actual self (who my behaviors show me to be). The first task for the generative successor is to bridge the gap between the actual self and the ideal self. As the gap shrinks, authenticity, self-confidence, and self-esteem increase. The gap widens when people fail to become self-aware, ignore feedback, and protect their ego. A self-aware leader will behave only in ways that match his or her beliefs. Confidence, and hence credibility, follows suit when the leader does what she says she'll do. Credibility can't be borrowed; it must be owned, and originates in the actions that follow from belief. This is what Christie Hefner called “being true to [one's]self”—and this is how a successor begins the ascent to the top.
Earning your way to the top does not start with climbing. It begins with digging down to reality, to the bedrock of one's true identity. The success of Playboy—after 50 years it still is the most widely read male publication in the United States—depended on the authenticity of its founder and his daughter doing what they did well. Hugh Hefner was its public face, comfortably and sometimes flamboyantly showcasing the Playboy ethos; his daughter was the face and voice of the company in the corporate environment, boardrooms, investor meetings, and business press. As Christie said of her father's iconic role, “There will be no successor. There's no Mini-Me in the wings.”
To get to their own sense of leadership authenticity, successors must push through the myth of a legendary parent and become credible to themselves. For Christie Hefner, this did not happen intentionally. There was no grand design for her to run Playboy, to live up to an icon of America's sexual revolution. But Christie had the ability to bring her father's strengths and weaknesses into focus, and to fill in the gaps of his leadership with her strong analytical skills.
This applied to the mystique that surrounded him and often insulated him from the truth. No one wanted to confront “Hef.” Christie's ability to see her father and herself clearly gave her the courage to penetrate “the Hef” mystique. “One of the things that I could bring to the job that might offset my limited experience was a fearlessness about telling my father what I thought was the truth. Even if he might not agree with me, he could at least make informed decisions.”
Be Honest with Yourself
Finding the courage to confront your weaknesses and sort through reality, which is often unforgivingly complex, reflects the core challenge of differentiation. To arrive at adulthood is to arrive at an accurate and realistic sense of self. For successors to make their way in a family business requires that they first find the way to authenticity: find out who they really are. For some children, the process is riddled with setbacks because they haven't met some of the basic life cycle challenges outlined in Chapter 2. To overcome this, successors may have to take some of the practical data from their lives, reflect on which challenges of the life cycle needs to be revisited, and shift their behavior and mindset.
The existential questions in this process are “Who am I?” and “Who can I be?” A child living in the shadows of his or her parent will struggle to honestly answer these questions, especially if the parent's plan is for the child to lead the family business, regardless of the child's skills and passion. Adolescents are robbed of the ability to develop self-awareness: to know oneself apart from whom others say they are—to develop their own definition of self. Indeed, the real job of a parent is to help successors stay out of the shadow to give them a sense that they are valued inherently for who they are, to establish a realistic sense of who they are, and what they are passionate about, rather than encouraging them to merely become mirror images of their parent. When parents fail to do this, successors can easily lose their way to the top, tripping on their parent's expectations, rather than forging ahead with what they know to be true about themselves. This is authenticity.
“Eighty percent of success is showing up,” says American actor, filmmaker, and comedian Woody Allen. And the most important person to show up to is you. Authenticity is not something we have; it's something we choose. It starts with the courage to show up to ourselves and to take a hard look, not a cursory scan, at our inner selves. This does not happen naturally. We are hardwired for self-deception, and our deception is multilayered. Self-deception conceals from the pretender that fact that he is pretending, which makes the pretense seem all the more authentic. In other words, a person is inauthentic about being inauthentic!
Removing the shroud of self-deception starts by first looking not at who we really are but who we are pretending to be, and realizing that we are not that person. Brene Brown defines authenticity as “being willing to let go of who you think that you should be to be who you really are… This opens up the possibility for people to authentically connect with you.”1 In short, being yourself encourages others to be themselves around you. Authenticity leads to authentic community. Generative leaders of strong and iconic brands understand that power compounds the need for authenticity because it is more difficult for people to be authentic around power. “You have to work hard to get people to tell you what they really think because the combination of power and family business can be deadly,” says Christie Hefner, “because people are working just as hard to figure out what you want them to say.”
The pretender is the idealized self that we have nurtured since childhood, often abetted by well-intended parents who tell us we are good at everything. Idealization saves us from the difficult task of facing reality, providing the illusion of security rather than helping us come to grips with the reality in front of us. There is no family idealization conspiracy theory, of course, but it seems families tend to idealize one another. The trap that parents fall into is the stories they tell themselves about their kids. And the trap that children fall into is that they believe these stories, and carry them into their adulthood. They are mired down by the weight of glorious expectations, afraid to admit that there are some things they simply can't do. As the old saying goes, the truth will set you free; however, you first have to have the courage to allow it to do so.
I Go Blind
To fully step out of the shadow of our parents requires that successors develop a realistic sense of who they are. It demands that they stop trying to become something they aren't. It also includes developing clarity of vision about what is true. This, in part, occurs when we face our blind spots. Blind spots are the things that we might not even know that we don't know. The goal is to reduce your blind spots. The myths we create through idealization are full of them. Everyone has blind spots, even the most iconic leaders. They are unavoidable.
Becoming aware of blind spots, a kind of self-awareness, happens in the latter part of the identity-formation stage. The ability to see blind spots is not intuitive. I guess that's why they are called blind spots. To see a blind spot requires intentionality. Of course, a leader will never be aware of every blind spot, but awareness often creates the decision to look for weakness. It's a matter of constant looking. A car's side-view mirror does no good if the driver does not use it. Glancing at it must become intentional until it becomes habit.
When Kathleen Thurmond succeeded her father as the CEO of Best Washington Uniform Supply, Inc., she quickly had to confront her leadership blind spots in order to gain credibility. Her father had a stroke, and she ascended to the top leadership role. Prior to taking over the family business, Thurmond was a nonprofit executive. In the nonprofit sector, her leadership was tempered with compassion. In corporate America, her compassion came across as soft. She says, “[In social work] I learned [to be] very understanding of someone's circumstances. [You can be compassionate for someone who comes to work] late every day and at the same time, you have to hold the line and say, ‘Look, I understand something's going on in your life, but this is unacceptable.’… I had to make tough decisions, and I had to learn to do that.”
Blind spots reveal the limitations in one's make-up: One can't be all-seeing and all-knowing. But the bigger problem is pretending to be something one is not. The way to authenticity is first to acknowledge what one doesn't know. One of the most honest statements in life, and the one that is going to help the most in establishing credibility, is to simply say, “I don't know,” and then to stop pretending that you do.
Idealization, along with the mythology it perpetuates, has its function. It carries a child to the threshold of growing up. But to mature into a credible leader demands pushing through that which hinders us from crossing the threshold into adulthood. The mythology believed as a child helps to simplify the human experience by accounting for only the good. It is the consistency of the information that matters for a good story, not its completeness. The less you know, the easier it is to fit everything you do know into a coherent pattern. Myths make sense of the world, but they are full of blind spots about who a child's parents are and who the child is. Earning one's way to the top demands that successors take regular looks through the side-view mirror, asking questions such as, “Can I lead this $50 million organization?” “Am I tough enough with the leadership team?” “Do I need to develop a new skill set?”
How Parents Can Help
The most fundamental way that parents can help their child build their internal credibility is through holding them accountable. This means making sure that the children do what they say they are going to do by when they say they will complete it, to the level of quality that can be reasonably expected. Too often in families of wealth, children don't come up against the natural limits and accountabilities that a normal child will; thus, they don't have the same level of accountability. Parents sometimes avoid the hard work of accountability for three primary reasons:
- They fear the conflict and negative reaction that accountability may bring.
- They have guilt over the amount of time that they spend on the business and don't want to burden their children anymore.
- They have a need to be liked by their kids, and to be seen as their child's friend.
While there are many more reasons, holding children accountable is a part of the process of showing them who they actually are in the world. It gives children clear feedback on whether they are living up to their responsibilities, and helps them understand their strengths and weaknesses. Without accountability, there is no credibility.
The need for accountability follows successors into their working life. If there is no accountability in their job, it is much more difficult for successors to develop an accurate sense of who they are and gauge their success. It is important in providing accountability, however, that we avoid our natural tendency to shame individuals when they fail. Promoting healthy accountability involves creating an environment of clarity without shame, and providing specific and measurable goals.2
What I most often hear from successors is that it is really hard to get fair, objective feedback. Too often, successors get sugarcoated feedback from people who want to court their favor and support. On the flip side, they get overly harsh feedback from people (often their parents) who don't want to be seen as showing favoritism. Sometimes they don't get feedback at all. It is very hard for a successor to find a strong sense of self if there is no objective feedback and accountability.
One successor tells the story of being pulled over in the small town that is home to his family business. The police officer said, “I can't give you a ticket in this town.” The power of his last name robbed him of the accountability and opportunity to learn.
Building Belief in Others
Being credible to oneself is only one part of the story. To truly be an effective and generative leader, one must be able to instill a belief in others—develop followers. Developing external credibility involves establishing objective evidence of competency and building a track record of success. But that is not all. It also requires successors to develop a sense of connection with those whom they are leading. These people need to feel connected to the successor, sensing empathy for their struggles and an understanding of who they are. The biggest sign of external credibility is developing followers.
Daniel Goleman, creator of the concept of emotional intelligence, talks about this as one of three key areas of focus for leaders. Through a focus on understanding how the other thinks and feels, the leader increases the ability to persuade and influence those he is leading.3
Internal and external credibility don't exist in isolation. In fact, they most often feed each other. When others express their belief in the successor, it feeds the successor's belief in herself (internal credibility). Likewise, when a successor feels credible to himself, it increases others' belief in the successor as a leader (external credibility).
Building Resiliency
To be authentic is not only to recognize shortcomings. Authenticity means owning it and then telling it. To avoid reality is to pretend it does not exist, and if it doesn't exist, then nothing happened and there is nothing to tell. Strong leaders can accurately describe reality without shaming or playing the role of victim. There is a saying that the chief of the tribe is always the best storyteller. The best storyteller is the one who tells his own story because he owns the narrative and his actions in it. This is taking personal responsibility: telling the whole story, the glorious rise as well as the inglorious fall.
To assume this kind of responsibility is a paramount leadership task.
John Tyson, the CEO of Tyson Foods, Inc., is point blank in how he describes and owns his failure. “I'm a recovering alcoholic and drug addict. It's a personal failure. It's a form of responsibility to myself and to those who are counting on me. My addiction sidelined me, but I went and recovered. I had to reestablish my credibility, to myself first. And after that, I just worked. The day I reestablished my credibility to the people in my company was the day I was offered the CEO job.” Embracing his failures was a crucial step toward assuming the larger responsibility of leading and caring for thousands of employees. “There is a tremendous set of obligations that goes along with leading a company, a tremendous set of responsibilities and personal sacrifices,” says Tyson. “It starts with choices. People are afraid of choices.” Tyson knows the fear of taking responsibility for those choices, as well as the strength a person finds when he does.
Parents who indulge their children often forsake teaching their children responsibility. At some point, parents can no longer kiss their children's hurt to make it better. Instead, they must teach their children to identify the problem and solve it. It also includes giving the gift of resiliency—the ability to soldier toward a goal through obstacles and failure. One of the ways that parents do this is to hold their children accountable.
Resiliency is born from credibility. In family-run businesses, it comes less from being a family member, and more from who you are and how you show up. Trek Bicycle's founder, Richard Burke, took an “earn it” approach with his son, John. Richard never presumed John would take over for him some day. He neither subtly pushed the business on him nor blatantly told him he would inherit the business. All he did was leave the door open. “If you're interested,” he told John, “you can get a job at Trek. Your last name will get you in the door and the rest is up to you.” John Tyson, who started working on his father's chicken farm at the age of 13, reflects the same philosophy of family business succession: “It's your life. It's not your parents' life, not the coach's life, not the pastor's life. It's your life. I don't think it's our job to help them find [the right place]. Our job is to simply give them permission.”
A large part of developing resiliency is stripping illusions of dependency that keep one from authenticity. If a parent refuses to swoop in and rescue a child encountering hardship, that child will begin to look inward for the resources to deal with life's challenges. This is the school of hard knocks, one of the most important lessons of self-education. Parents help in that process by giving their children the privilege of working and the freedom to make mistakes, to learn from their failure as well as their success. Work, real work, helps potential successors learn what they are capable of while also revealing what they aren't capable of when they run up against the hard stop of human limitations. Work reveals reality.
It is for this reason that problems often crop up when predecessors (often parents) prematurely vault their child into senior-level leadership. Without credible work experience, a successor is stuck in the myth that he or she is capable by virtue of name alone, not by way of skills, experience, and passion. Sheltering children from their inevitable failure, the predecessor swoops in, solves the problem, and hence, reinforces the predecessor-hero myth. Sometimes predecessors unconsciously place a successor in a role in which they'll fail, so they can be the save-the-day hero. Regardless of intentionality, a family member who is prematurely placed in leadership will more often struggle to establish external credibility because he or she does not have the skill sets or track record to succeed. For example, if a family member is handed a role that requires leading seasoned professionals, and the leader is perceived as paralyzed by hard decisions, he or she will not be respected by the other executives.
Some predecessors simply don't know when a successor is ready to lead. The stories of my research reveal, however, that the most seamless transitions from founder to successor happen when parents soberly answer several questions:
- Are my successor's skill sets increasing?
- Is my successor becoming technically capable?
- Is there a track record of success?
- Has my successor developed followers?
- Is my successor aware of personal blind spots?
- Is my successor being authentic, or is it pretense?
- Is my successor passionate about what he or she is doing?
- Is there objective data to support an increase in responsibility?
The alternate scenario is that some successors recognize they are ready before their parents do. And many are. If a family succession plan is in place, a successor must be patient and work through existing structures. This is complicated for successors, however, who often aren't promoted as quickly as their credibility develops. In these situations, often the only solution is to look outside the organization. In fact, Bill Wrigley was in discussions with a board member about the possibility of leaving the company when his father fell ill. Because he saw himself as credible and felt he needed the opportunity for growth, he said to himself, if I can't grow inside the family company, I will find a place where I can.
Show Up for Work
“The only successors here at Tyson Foods,” says John Tyson, “would be those who worked hard and got a chance to do more.” Successors with credibility earn their way to the top as they immerse themselves in the work of the family business. Successors construct a framework of authenticity and credibility upon a foundational triad of self-awareness, skill, and passion. They do not develop self-awareness through mere introspection, of course. It happens as they test who they are through the discipline of hard work, discovering their skills, and passions. A theme that runs through all my research is that as successors learn to work, they simultaneously learn about themselves.
Earlier in this chapter, I wrote about the gap between who a person thinks she is and who she really is. Work not only serves to expose the gap; work also helps to bridge the gap. To the extent that there are gaps, a successor brings them into the workplace and asks: What values do I stand for?
- Are there gaps between my values and how I actually behave?
- What impact do I want to have in my life and my career?
- What are my skills and talents?
- What does the feedback that I get tell me about my performance?
- Is there a gap between the talent and skills I have today and those that I will need going forward?
And, of course, to succeed in a family business, the leader doesn't work for the sake of work. The leader works for the sake of meaning; for the livelihood of those dependent on the business for their livelihood; and for the joy of building something great, which unites everyone around a common purpose. To lead means to inspire. And to emerge as a generative leader, a successor asks him- or herself a third question: How should I align the values, vision, and action in a way that affects the people I am leading? That's passion. One gains the skill set and stokes the inner fire of passion through meaningful work experience. Work establishes a successor's track record—it is data by which a successor can measure his or her true ability; identify blind spots; and develop a plan to keep learning to establish and maintain credibility.
That experience rarely begins with what many think of as passion. Working one's way to the top does not start with an attitude of naïve entitlement and the expectation of euphoric engagement in a dream job. It might start with work that a potential successor hates (the assembly line floor) and learns to enjoy. It involves trying different things and learning through action.
The summer before his sophomore year in college, John Burke worked the graveyard shift at a plastics factory making “Season's Greetings” plastic candy-cane molds filled with M&Ms. He hated it. John shucked out plastic candy-cane molds all night, wearing gloves with holes that burned his hands. One morning, as he sat eating breakfast alone, his father came into the kitchen.
“How was work?”
“Terrible, it was just the worst,” John said, hoping for a bit of commiseration. “I'm not going back. I'll look for something else.”
“You'll go back and you'll enjoy the job, and it will be a great experience.”
His father then walked out the door. Of that summer job, John says, “It turned out to be one of the great work experiences of my life.”
Richard Burke taught his son a valuable lesson. And it wasn't simply the value of hard work or the truism that if you work at something long enough you will learn something from it. Rather, it was if you bring yourself to work and invest yourself in it, you will begin to develop a sense of yourself. Work matters because of what you bring to it, being fully present in it. To be all there. His father's confident assertion, “You'll go back,” instilled in John an approach to work that now galvanizes the entire Trek organization. “One of the things I like to say, ‘It's another great day to be working at the best bicycle company in the world.’ ”
Skills and passion can follow attitude, as they did for John when at the age of 24, his father put him in charge of sales and marketing for Trek Bicycle Corporation. Too restless to get good grades as a history major at Boston University, John was drawn to a business course where he won top prize for developing a business plan, which he quickly developed into a business. But his father's force field pulled strongly. John went to work at Trek, and one year after college became Trek's top sales rep. While out selling, John was also listening to the customers rag on his father's company. “There is no greater learning experience,” John said, “then getting your head kicked in listening to how bad the family business is.” John absorbed the beating and channeled what he learned into turning customer service around. John had the right stuff for leadership: an innate entrepreneurial sense, quick development of skills in the field, and a relentless positive response to customer complaints.
John earned the inner credibility to take on the mantle of leadership in his father's company. He didn't do so by being Dick Burke's kid. He showed up for work, seizing every opportunity, good and bad.
But he also got to the top because he was credible—not just the icon's son. His father sparked the fire of passion the day he said, “You'll go back to work…” John only did so because he had learned to listen to his dad and to take his advice. Listening itself was another skill John learned from his father. “Nobody does a better job than Trek in listening to its customers. The ability to listen to your customers and not have it bother you, that was my dad,” John says.
The strength of their relationship enabled the two to go at it. They often disagreed over business decisions, sometimes leading to heated discussions when the business was suffering. Fierce confrontations often arise out of fierce bonds of friendship. Resistance strengthens a relationship or a business when the friendship or partnership is strong. The bond was strengthened by the rigorous activities they did together. “I ran three Boston marathons with him,” John says, “and I hate running.”
This theme surfaces throughout interviews I conducted: A successor rises to the top most often when the child feels credible to him- or herself, is respected by parents, and has the support of those being led.
John Burke's story of ascent, like Christie Hefner's, illustrates the axiom that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. In establishing the legacy of a family business, the relationship of founder and successor must be mutually respectful. Both Playboy and Trek became stronger companies when both parent and child led them together. Too often, the founder's legend undermines the credibility of a successor, so powerful and so dominating that it not only overshadows but also disables the adult child, who remains stymied forever in a teenage psyche. John Burke and Christie Hefner were able to make their way by building an enduring internal framework of self-awareness, skill, and passion. In doing so, they did not just perpetuate the myth of their legendary parents, they wrote compelling stories of their own for the next chapter in the family business. And they continued to build on their family's legacy and abiding values.
“This company does great things for people, many of which people never see,” John says. “We're here for a much bigger reason than just making money. That came from my parents. Nobody else.” And it comes now from their son.
John Burke knows whom he follows, but he has never followed his father blindly. Perhaps it's summed up best in the way John Burke describes his father, with a mixture of admiration and understanding: “He's a legend. That's just the way he is. Cut him some slack.”