Sustaining Credibility

When your actions and track record support it, “I am good at what I do” is not hubris but an honest self-assessment.

Its counterpart, “I am not that smart,” is also an honest assessment. It's the recognition that becoming good at something doesn't mean that you know everything, that humility can create the drive for continual improvement. Both statements reflect a leader's self-awareness, which often forms through the relentless pursuit of self-improvement. While we are born with certain leadership abilities, others can be built through hard work and sweat equity.

This pursuit, along with all the family successor's leadership pursuits I have discussed thus far—stepping out of the shadows of a predecessor, the process of learning through action, developing a mission, vision, and values—are the outgrowth of pursuing differentiation. Differentiation is a process, a long walk in the same direction. It is not a one-time event from which a person moves on to more challenging tasks. It is, rather, an ongoing pursuit of truth, of living from our true selves, bringing forth what is within us, and giving it full expression. Jean Moran speaks of the value of being fully expressive, as her father was: “‘I'll tell it like it is,’ he would always say, and he did until my mother would tell him to be quiet and stop airing all our dirty laundry in public. ‘You don't need to tell everyone everything that's going on in our family,’ to which he responded, ‘Maybe what's going on with us will help them.’ People could relate to him, they connected with him, and I think they loved him.”

Strong successors are continually working to differentiate by developing their sense of self, fully expressing it, and always with the thought of helping those in their care, whether it be family, employees, or members of the community. To make a difference is to first be true to yourself—not for the sake of being unique but for the sake of personal fulfillment and the future success of the family business. The ultimate goal is not to be different, but to be true to yourself and your family. As a leader walks the journey of differentiation, he or she earns internal and external credibility. In herself and with those whom she leads, she builds believability—that she is ready to lead. Simply, she leads fully aware of what she is and isn't well-equipped for. She leads authentically.

Regardless of past successes, strong leaders don't ignore their weaknesses but always ask, “Where can I improve? What do I need to do to become a better leader?” The challenges of five years ago aren't the same as today; the most credible leaders pursue self-improvement for tomorrow. Continual improvement is a fight to stay in reality, and hence, stay credible. When a leader succumbs to the myth that “I have arrived,” he or she risks succumbing to hubris that prevents the family business from moving forward. It also blinds leaders to frailties within the organization, like personnel issues, internal conflicts, or a division that is underperforming.

“How do I continually stay in the reality of the situation?” This is the question that every leader must continually ask to sustain credibility. Leaders are not afraid to test that credibility. In fact, they seek it out. Testing never stops, even when a leader has achieved enormous success, in part because these leaders never stop pushing the limits of their potential.

Just as we need to meet the life cycle challenges of our youth, we also must meet the life cycle challenges that we face in adulthood. This requires continual learning and evolving. In Chapter 2, I discussed the life cycles from birth to early adulthood. But the life cycle and its challenges continue through adulthood. As an individual ages, he or she faces new and different challenges. In mid-life, women (35–45) tend to shift their focus from others (e.g., children) to themselves—what they need to be fulfilled. One can think of it as a move from parent to adult. Men in mid-life (40s and 50s) start to think about realistic outcomes of their professional life, and refocus on the key relationships.¹ All of this demands continual learning. If we rest on our laurels and don't grow and adapt, we will get stuck. Continually pursuing both greater self-knowledge in leadership and technical experience is crucial.

Respectfully Pushing the Limits

Successors who earn external credibility respectfully push the limits of their leadership, perceiving the risk of failing to deliver on their promises. To build credibility is to build small success upon small success. As Ivan Lansberg writes in “The Tests of a Prince”:²

Earning the confidence of stakeholders is the essence of building external credibility.

When that credibility is earned, the successors can push the succession process forward. It is rare to see a parent just step back and hand over the reins. Most often, the next generation needs to push the process, with a sense of respect and empathy for what they are asking of their parents.

Before successors take over leadership, they have already learned that credibility is built over time. When children learn to differentiate from other members of the family, they build credibility. Jean Moran, successor of LMI Packaging, saw that she could not compete with her sister's beauty and charm. Instead, she says, “I decided, ‘I will get love if I'm responsible and intelligent.’ And I spent the rest of my life doing those things, because that is how I got rewarded, when I was responsible and smart.”

A leader loses credibility, however, if he is not constantly building it through successes and overcoming failures. Adapting to the new challenges of their lives and career perhaps is one of the reasons leaders often work 70-hour weeks. It's not just because they have a lot of work to do, or that they can't stop. Rather, they relish the challenge of an ever-changing environment that calls for continual improvement and innovation. It's all about the work, not necessarily about career advancement. This is what energizes leaders.

Becoming the leader of a family business involves a dynamic change in the successor's relationship with his or her grandparents, parents, siblings, and sometimes cousins. To move from child (son or daughter) to peer (CEO), from sibling to boss, involves a change in the dynamics of relationships. As we will find in Chapter 9, Lanse Crane faced new challenges in relating to his brother when he moved from being only a brother to also his brother's boss. Children hate to play follow-the-leader when the successor is their sibling. To become the person to whom a brother or sister or a parent is answerable takes a considerable amount of credibility, empathy, and humility. Through this, the successor builds trust.

Defining Success: Future Forward

Richard DeVos and his partner (co-founders) embodied the Amway culture that they wanted to build, and the company rotated toward the magnetic north of their personalities. “The problem with a cult of personality,” Dick DeVos says, “is that when the personality dies, that magnetic center is also gone, and a company can wander.” It took Richard's son to translate the Amway culture, its ethos and values, into a mission statement. He articulated its ideas and ideals and oriented the company around a vision for its future. Dick parlayed Amway's essential values of freedom, family, and hope into a goal for the future: helping people build better lives.

Success is not arriving at a goal; it is the incremental process of becoming better and better at the things necessary to achieve our goals. Leaders who continue to build the family legacy define success looking forward, not by what they have accomplished. Leaders who pursue continual improvement learn from the past while focusing on future success and what they need to learn to make that success possible. John Burke said that his father's most legendary attribute was his ability to look down the checkerboard a few more moves than anyone else. A leader's long view guides a successor's next move. A successor who continues to build on a founder's legacy must have a comprehensive view of success that harnesses past accomplishments to build a strong future. It is more than beginning with the end in mind. It's believing there is no end. The next accomplishment—and there always is one—is what drives the pursuit of success. This is what keeps the innovator from ever feeling that they have arrived. They are never there; they just get closer. It's not where they want to end up, but the next thing they want to do, that matters the most. The future does not collapse into a terminus but expands into limitless opportunity.

Know Thy Motives

Making a better life by bettering oneself is both universal and deeply personal. Salvatore Ferragamo brought it to America, where his son Massimo continued to drive it forward: “I need to take what I've been given and make it the best that I can make it.”

A leader's fire is in the gut. Leaders ignite their passions with that inner fire and continue to stoke it; they don't turn to other people and other ideas to get fired up. These leaders have developed a sense of what they want to accomplish, and are relentless in achieving that goal. As a result, they have enough self-confidence to persevere through the rigorous process of trial and error toward building internal credibility. Self-confidence cannot be borrowed from parents or peers. External validation is powerful but fleeting for those who are constantly craving the applause of the crowd. Self-confidence creates its own applause, as performers no longer play to the crowd but delight instead in their own accomplishment.

Ironically, it is self-confidence that keeps a leader from self-absorption and consequent craving for external validation. Dick DeVos remembers his father as a supremely self-confident leader who was irrepressibly optimistic: “His gift was to encourage others, and he used it to develop all his business relationships.” By contrast, DeVos says, “Many first-generation founders of businesses can be extraordinarily self-absorbed so that they don't have the energy to encourage others. They need to be right, to compete, and to succeed so that they can be on top to be seen and applauded by others. The instincts that drive success in business, if misapplied, can drive family members away.”

DeVos makes an important distinction. It's not the desire for success, but the desire misapplied, that frays the family ties that bind a business together. Motivation is everything. Internal motivation to continually improve wards off the complacency that comes when one is externally motivated.

Leaders who are externally motivated rise only to the level of others' expectations, which are either too high or too low and rarely as realistic as the leader's own. Many leaders provide a compelling rationale for this external motivation. Jean Moran's father handed her the company legacy, and she made a vow: “There was no way I was going to let this business fail.” She didn't want to let her father down. As noble as this promise sounds, it betrays a fear of disappointing a person, and it is not nearly as powerful a motivator as self-approval. Jean Moran kept learning about the company, but she also kept working on herself, and understanding her motivations, so that later in her career she realized, “I was trying to do what I thought would get everyone to love me. As long as I do the best that I can, that is all I need to do.” Through leadership coaching, reflective retreats, and being open to the input of others, Jean was able to better define success for herself.

Massimo Ferragamo brings an even deeper insight about the internal release from trying to please someone else. “When I know I have done the best I can, there is almost an internal forgiveness. I don't have to be my parent.” This realization helps the successor become the owner in his or her own right. If a successor owns his or her goals and objectives, and takes the time to develop a unique vision, he or she will own that vision. The motivation to achieve that vision is extremely high. Like Moran, leaders don't want the family business to fail on their watch. Conversely, if a successor adopts a hand-me-down mission (and vision of his or her parents), he or she won't own the mission in the same way. Nor will he or she be motivated to continually improve. The reasoning goes, “If it is not my mission, then I won't own it. And I won't be passionate about or accountable for achieving the mission.”

A person's sense of what he wants to accomplish helps him understand what it takes to get there, what he is able to do, and the help he needs to do what he can't. This is why the most credible leaders build strong teams around themselves. They understand that being the best they can be is not limiting when they have the self-confidence to make themselves better by making people around them better. That is the opposite of self-absorption.

The Necessity of Continual Development

Stepping out of the founder's shadow is to step into the sunshine. Many successors prefer to remain in the shadows, though, because the light exposes who they are. Yet that is the necessary starting point for the work of continual self-development—reality.

As I've already argued, the mythology that surrounds a legendary founder helps those who follow find their footing. It provides a context for organizational values. The trouble is that it is hard for successors to step out of the myth and establish their identities in the reality of their abilities and limitations. Just as a myth conceals a legendary founder's mortality, weaknesses, and failures, successors can also perpetuate a myth, often unintentionally, to conceal their own vulnerability. What if I'm not really a strong enough leader to make this business a success?

It is easier to escape into a myth of invulnerability than it is to engage in the hard and honest work of continual development. Relentless pursuit of self-improvement punctures the myth that an initial success is an ultimate success. It wards off the mindset, “I have arrived.” It embraces the inherent vulnerability present in leading and creating a dynamic vision. A little success goes a long way only when leaders do not use it as an excuse to rest on their laurels and instead use it as impetus for further success.

Vulnerability, along with true humility, is the quality of character that most contributes to the work of continual improvement. The leader who is vulnerable and humble refuses to hide in the shadow of the predecessor's mythology and resists creating his own myth. He or she welcomes failure because it reveals what must be mended in order to build future success.

Dick DeVos did two things crucial to his continual development. First, as I have already noted, he demythologized his iconic father by stripping away the cult of personality that surrounded Richard DeVos. His son acknowledged the mortal behind the myth, and the mortality that would eventually extinguish the personality. Dick DeVos says, “A personality is inherently time-limiting, because personalities die.” In addition, a huge personality can only carry ideas and values so far if systems are not in place to reinforce them and continue them into subsequent generations. A personality inspires, but values are the substance of the company that people care deeply about. Dick DeVos established a framework for those values that ensured that the American way would continue to provide economic opportunity and ownership to thousands.

Second, Dick DeVos refused to ride on his success. He became exceptional at his job, in part because he understood that the hard work of continual learning would compensate for not being the smartest man in the world. But he was smart enough to know that intelligence is not a fixed quantity. People can raise their IQ by challenging their minds, especially when they apply their minds to goals they want to achieve. And Dick DeVos did just that: “I was a builder-creator. I built and continued to create the business with new ideas, new approaches, that took it to a higher level of performance in multiple dimensions.”

Leaders who learn from their past to build a vision of the future tend to ground themselves in reality. They seem to be able to accept feedback that reveals their gaps and strips away illusions. Strong leaders do not indulge themselves with illusions. They base their reasoning on actual facts, of which they see the essence. They do not commit the sin of believing in their own mythology, or, as Napoleon Bonaparte once described, of “making pictures” of the world as one wishes it to be, rather than as it is. The generative leader builds a system for getting realistic and practical feedback on their performance on a regular basis. They use criticism as motivation and encourage honesty and forthrightness. This feedback is the fuel for continual learning.

Disciple of the Disciplines

The handmaiden to self-development is self-control. Leaders who are servants to a calling and legacy have learned to master themselves. Their constraint and self-discipline give them the self-assurance they need to lead the organization through its highs and lows. In crisis, people do not look for the most charismatic and eloquent leader; they look for the person who knows what to do and does it decisively. This is the leader who has already tested him- or herself, made critical decisions, and taken responsibility for his or her life and the lives of employees.

Successors who perceive themselves as victims, even subtly, are debilitated by persistently looking outward. They look for someone to blame, while those who take responsibility look relentlessly within. They change themselves. When Mike Hamra came to the crossroads to stay with or leave Hamra Enterprises, he was clear with his father: “Unless we work something out, I'm leaving because this is not working for me.” In other words, “If this doesn't change, I need to go.” As Mike remembers it, his initial approach smacked of blame and indignation bordering on self-pity. He said, “Headquarters was my father's domain and I was kept out…you promised a succession plan and never followed through…I felt embarrassed…I had a great career and gave it up for you….”

However, when Mike shifted his orientation from what he demanded to what his father needed, the onus of responsibility shifted from his father to him: “I can change if my dad won't.” He began to think of ways to keep his father involved with the business. Mike followed Victor Frankl's dictum, “When we are no longer able to change a situation, we are challenged to change ourselves.” Mike took ownership of himself, his emotions, and the company in a way that included his father.

Self-confidence is not the absence of fear or doubt; it is, rather, the ability to recognize these emotions and move forward in spite of them. Emotions are a natural and normal response to external stimuli. The differentiated leader is one who can sit with the emotion and provide a measured and thoughtful response. Emotional health is not the ability to release emotion, to “let it all out.” Rather, it is the ability to recognize our emotions and to develop the skill to manage them, especially when the situation calls for a measured response. Family myths tend to distort reality. Uncontrolled emotions cause the same kind of distortions, and lend themselves to creative storytelling. Children are known to tell “whoppers” when punishment is imminent; fear drives the telling of the tall tale. Adults have the same propensity to create stories that are emotionally driven, especially when they feel that they have been slighted or misunderstood. The more insecure and fearful of vulnerability a successor is, the more emotions escalate and stories follow.

I have discovered that the best way of dealing with insecurities is to be honest about one's vulnerability with people that you trust and in an environment that is safe and free from blaming: Invite people you trust into your internal dialogue, and listen to their feedback. It reveals reality while pulling one back to the discipline of self-improvement. Having a support system (coaching, mentors, friends) is essential to managing your own vulnerabilities. When leaders seek out honest feedback, they verify their intuition with the facts. They are more alert, more intellectually active, and less willing to be satisfied with superficial answers. These are emotionally healthy leaders because they lead with an acknowledgment of their feelings, balanced with the objectivity of their mind. They are mentally tough.