8

Inspect Your Prospects

By this stage you’ve identified a few promising protégés—and gone out of your way to make sure that you include talent that doesn’t look like you. You’ve worked to inspire your protégés to deliver passion as well as top-notch performance, and you’ve offered instruction to help them close skills gaps so they can fully realize their potential.

But sponsorship is an investment, and like any investment, you have to keep an eye on it. Are your protégés developing as you hoped, rewarding your commitment? Is it time to stay the course, make some adjustments, redouble your efforts, or even reassess your commitment? No investor gets it right every time. It’s important to know when to cut your losses and move on. And although inspection is discussed in detail here, since it’s a logical time—before deciding whether to ramp up your commitment to in a prospective protégé—some kind of inspection should be occurring throughout the relationship, from the start to its maturity. It’s tempting to think that after you’ve known someone a few years, you can put the relationship on autopilot, but that’s often unwise.

In CTI’s survey, we asked sponsors what would signal they should end a relationship with a protégé. The top signal, which 73 percent cited, was a lack of loyalty, displayed by protégés who bad-mouthed them, damaged their reputation, or had undermined their trust in some other way.

Trevor Phillips, for example, remembers a protégé who “thought my sponsorship gave her permission not to have to do the job. She thought it was enough for her to tell people, ‘Trevor has said this. You must do it.’ And then she didn’t do the work herself. She arrogated my authority and abused it. So I fired her.”

After loyalty issues, the second biggest signal for severing a relationship with a protégé (56 percent) was performance concerns, which included protégés who made too many mistakes, didn’t live up to expectations, or needed too much oversight. Sponsership shouldn’t be hard work, it should be the protégé who does the heavy lifting: letting you know about skills gaps or difficulties on the job and reaching out to you for instruction or advice.

Let your prospective protégé know that it’s their responsibility to find touch points that don’t burden you excessively. “Let’s grab a quick breakfast tomorrow morning,” he or she might suggest, having checked your calendar and made sure that you will be in the office early. Or they might reach out with a suggestion: “I see we’re both going to that company offsite on Friday. I’d love to drive together: it would give us a chance to get caught up. I’d be happy to swing by your house to pick you up if that makes it easier.”

But if you find that you’re the one who always has to reach out, or if they reach out so much that they are a burden, then it’s time to first instruct them as to your expectations, and then, if that fails, consider removing them from your pool of protégés.

Sponsors also cited low ambition (51 percent), failing to work well with a team (50 percent), and not acting on feedback (32 percent) as signals that they should terminate a sponsor-protégé relationship.

Other than disloyalty, which is a red flag that suggests you should immediately severe the relationship, these problems don’t offer easy answers. If someone isn’t performing as expected, is it time to terminate the relationship, or to provide more guidance? If they lack ambition, could you spark it? Maybe they can learn to do teamwork better. Perhaps you could express feedback more clearly. Or maybe you really do have to end things. Making this decision is incredibly complex, and the examples in this chapter provide a few different ways to respond.

Of course, inspection of your protégé shouldn’t always turn up problems. Hopefully you’ll discover achievement and payoff—signs that you should continue with your alliance. Some common things that sponsors in our survey say their primary protégés have done for them include:

•Going the extra mile (54 percent)

•Performance that makes the sponsor look good (44 percent)

•Building the sponsor’s brand as someone who picks and nurtures great talent (38 percent)

•Lightening the sponsor’s workload by taking on responsibilities (37 percent)

•Giving the sponsor honest, critical feedback (32 percent)

•Leading with a yes (30 percent)

With that data in mind, let’s take a look at how three highly successful executives inspected their protégés and reacted to what they found—both good and bad.

Rewarding a Protégé Who Delivers

Michael Roth, chairman and CEO of advertising giant Interpublic Group (IPG), empowered and inspired Heide Gardner as part of his successful quest to make IPG better able to win talent and business in a diverse and global marketplace.

Gardner is just one instance of how sponsoring has played a role in Roth’s remarkable career. Currently, he’s keeping an eye on a protégé who’s done so well that he’s a strong candidate to succeed Roth at the helm when he retires.

The first meeting with this future protégé was dramatic. Before he became chairman and CEO, Roth was on IPG’s board and was attending a board meeting when a young man burst in. He asked the board members to stop what they were doing and listen to him.

“I said, ‘Who is this guy, interrupting us?’ It turned out he was the person who dealt with reporters, the communications guy for IPG, Philippe Krakowsky. He was coming to tell us that he’d been on the phone with the press, and reporters had the story that we were discussing at that very board meeting. And they were calling Philippe for comments. So he thought he’d better come and tell us there was a leak out there about the very thing we were discussing. ‘This is why I’m here to talk to you,’ he said. ‘This is how the press thinks you’re going to vote.’

“He handled himself very well at that board meeting,” Roth says. “Obviously the press felt very comfortable talking to him directly, the board was comfortable with him, and he’d made the right choice to interrupt us. So he’d covered two difficult constituencies, the press and the board, very well.”

That was the beginning of Roth’s identification of Krakowsky as a possible protégé. As time went on, he realized that Krakowsky, talented as he was with communications, had the potential for more. “He has an enormous capability of relating to people, whether they be high-level or starting out. He can talk to them, really tell them what they have to know, what’s going on, and do it straightforwardly and diplomatically.”

When Roth became IPG’s chairman and CEO, he learned to value Krakowsky even more. “I was coming in and didn’t know much about the industry or the organization. I did know something because I was on the board, but I wasn’t in the bowels of IPG. I needed someone to help me navigate through this crazy group of people. Philippe did that.”

It turned out, Roth wasn’t the only one Krakowsky was helping this way. “When it came time for me to form my leadership team, what was clear to me was that everybody at IPG would call him for advice, everyone would call him to say, ‘How should I approach this situation?’”

So Roth decided to give Krakowsky a chance to apply his people skills to more than the firm’s PR. “We had this person running HR here, a buttoned-up guy from another company, I inherited him, I didn’t hire him, and he didn’t belong. I went to the board and said I’m going to replace the head of HR. They said, ‘With who?’ I said Philippe. People looked at me nervously. He didn’t have HR experience, and I said that’s why I want him.

“My entire career,” Roth adds, “I’ve picked people who are in different jobs and switched them up. I only go for talent and smarts. I don’t care about their background, I don’t care what school they went to.”

So Krakowsky became head of HR, an especially important role at IPG just then, because its talent was under siege.

“We had financial control issues then,” Roth recalls, “which frankly is why I became the CEO. We had to deal with getting our books and records correct. We actually stopped issuing financial statements until we fixed the control issue. And at the same time, we had to run a business, so HR was very important because people were nervous we were going out of business. And we were nervous as to whether they would go work for other companies, because IPG’s financial results were down and everybody else’s were up.”

As Roth watched closely, since these matters were so critical to IPG, Krakowsky did the job: retaining the talent IPG needed, hiring and promoting others, and also helping keep clients confident that the firm was going to be just fine. With Krakowsky having proven performance and loyalty in his new role, Roth began to prepare his protégé for even bigger things.

“Because of his success and his intelligence, I gave him another responsibility, chief strategy officer,” Roth says. “He didn’t have direct experience there either, but he learned fast. Part of my role is to make sure I have a successor, and I was shaping Philippe as one of the key candidates, so I had to give him operating experience. He got it. He did really well.”

As Roth watched, Krakowsky delivered there too, implementing major strategic actions, such as embedding digital and emerging media capabilities across IPG’s portfolio, and designing integrated, cross-agency client teams. Based on Krakowsky’s continued successes, Roth made him head of one of IPG’s most important units, IPG Mediabrands. There he effectively managed an organization with over ten thousand employees, while strengthening the group’s digital and data-driven marketing.

In this position, as in other senior positions, inspection was straightforward: Roth could easily assess whether or not Krakowsky was delivering, since his success or failure so clearly impacted the overall organization’s performance. But also key to Roth’s inspection was watching how others in the organization interacted with his protégé, and built bonds of trust.

“All I want to know is if someone is real, smart, accessible, and can communicate without bullshit. Philippe is like that, and those are traits, in this industry, that are hard to come by, because everyone here is a salesperson. And people within IPG know that too. They go to him unfiltered to get his advice. They trust him, they trust his advice.”

Roth has seen both Krakowsky’s performance—delivering in multiple roles across IPG—and witnessed the fact that not only Roth himself, but also others throughout IPG, trust him. As a result, Krakowsky is now on the short list of candidates to succeed him.

“If you look at the studies on best candidates to succeed as a CEO,” Roth says, “the best source is internal, a candidate who has been groomed by the existing CEO. I moved Philippe, over fourteen years, from a communication officer, to head of HR, to head of strategy, to head of Mediabrands, to potentially being the CEO.

“He may get the job, he may not, there are other good candidates too, but it was all very intentional on my part.”

It was intentionality based on inspection, since only after Krakowsky delivered and proved his trustworthiness in each role did Roth give him another, greater one.

Deciding to Terminate

Around the same time that he started to sponsor Krakowsky, Roth recruited a man, whom we’ll call Myles, to run a line of business within one of IPG’s units. In this role, Myles delivered in ways that were once again easy for Roth to see, since Myles was responsible for the entire line of business.

“He repositioned the offerings, he hired great talent, he was a success,” Roth says. So Roth decided to make Myles head of the whole unit, even though Myles had little experience with much of the administrative and client relations work that the new role demanded.

“Look, I take bets on people,” Roth says. “As I did with Philippe, I put Myles in a job he wasn’t trained for. He’d done a great job where he was, and I thought he could convert that into running an entire unit. And he couldn’t. It was a mistake.”

It was a mistake that Roth caught quickly. He’d given Myles specific numbers to meet; he also checked in with major clients. Because he was watching closely, he soon saw that Myles wasn’t delivering the numbers or handling clients well. Even worse, when Roth called him in for a talk, Myles made excuses but failed to provide a set of solutions or a detailed plan.

“He kept telling me he was going to fix it. And I gave him plenty of opportunities. But nothing changed. The numbers didn’t get any better. The clients weren’t any more pleased.”

In this case, since Myles was so senior, Roth couldn’t end the relationship without also ending Myles’s employment as IPG. So he did so. Even though Myles still had the talent that Roth had seen and cultivated in him, he’d failed to live up to expectations, and he had delivered excuses and empty promises rather than real change.

Putting an End to Unacceptable Behavior

In the case of Myles, the big problem was a failure to meet his numbers, but a more frequent scenario involves a failure of soft skills. The CEO of a public relations firm in Los Angeles, whom I’ll call Marty, was actually in the process of ending a sponsor-protégé relationship on the day that we had our interview.

He had been sponsoring a woman, whom I’ll call Carla, for six months—ever since he’d noted her brilliance at taking ideas from the creative team, packaging them to appeal to clients, and crafting a relationship that would benefit both the agency and the client.

So Marty gave this brilliant talent a promotion. “She was already senior, but we gave her the chance to create and define a whole new department for us, running a large portfolio of clients.”

Carla—as good as she was at making presentations, handling clients, and leading a small team where she was absolute boss—failed miserably at the more subtle leadership skills required to found and lead a department.

“I was giving her constant advice and coaching,” Marty says. “But she couldn’t handle ambiguity. She was driving the train as fast as she could, leaving others behind, trying to make everything perfect by saying, ‘If you don’t do it my way, you’re wrong.’ But to lead a department, you have to build consensus. You have to lead through influence. You have to sculpt fog.”

Marty inspected Carla by talking to her subordinates, Carla’s immediate boss (Marty’s number two), and Carla herself. “Her boss said she was a mess. When I gently told Carla some of her boss’s criticisms, Carla asked me to fire her boss. It was crazy. I tried to give her one more chance. I told her, ‘I want you to go home, think about things, and write them down. Think it through rationally and calmly and write down what you want me to do.’ I thought that would temper her.

“It didn’t,” Marty says. “The next day she filed a formal complaint about her boss with HR. So I had to have HR go in and talk to the whole team. It’s become a massive pain in the neck for me.”

Carla flunked several big tests of a protégé. She’d underperformed, but given that she’d only been in the role six months that wasn’t an unforgivable problem. After all, Marty took on Carla as his protégé aware that he’d have to develop her and instruct her. But Carla also failed to listen to him, and compounded that mistake by making his life more difficult. Those are utterly unacceptable behaviors. Good protégés will free you up to spend more time doing work you love and adding value as only you can. They most definitely will not increase dissension in your team and drag you into messy personnel fights.

At the time we spoke, Marty still hadn’t decided whether he was going to dismiss Carla from the firm or simply move her into a different position; but what he was certain about was that this talented woman was no longer his protégé. “It’s wrenching,” he said. “I’ve never had this happen before, and I’ve invested so much. But I’ve got to think about what’s good for the firm. Sponsorship isn’t about me helping her. It’s about the two of us together helping the business.”

Forgiving a Big Mistake

Another common scenario is a protégé who is neither a complete success, as Philippe Krakowsky has been for Michael Roth, nor a straightforward failure, as Myles and Carla were. Sometimes, when you inspect a protégé, you find big flaws, but you also see ways to work with them and turn the relationship around. Kent Gardiner, who we’ve already seen is a pro at sponsorship, tells of an example.

“There’s a woman inside my practice area whom I’ve been sponsoring since she just joined the firm,” Gardiner says. “It was a gradual, steady, and ultimately relentless process of building up her skills and introducing her to clients.” It was with the latter part that this lawyer, whom we’ll call Melissa, encountered problems.

“I introduced her to clients and reassured them that she would take care of them day-to-day,” he says. “Then my role would winnow down to the most strategic needs they had, as opposed to the more-detailed, daily needs they had.” That’s exactly the sort of benefit that a protégé should provide for a sponsor. But Melissa unintentionally did the opposite.

“She had certain characteristics, a glibness, an almost snarkiness in how she communicated,” Gardiner says. “She was unduly critical of lawyers at other firms, criticizing their judgment. She didn’t recognize that the client had reposed a lot of trust in those other lawyers, and that the client might think, If she’s trashing other people like this, who knows what she’ll say about us? She assumed a level of intimacy with the client that she had no foundation for.”

Gardiner was in touch with both the client and other people on his team, but his inspection wasn’t quite close enough: he didn’t realize how big the problem was until the client, citing issues with Melissa, took its business elsewhere. “She’d gotten us fired from a relationship,” Gardiner says. “So I had to decide, am I going to keep trying with her?”

It’s a tough decision, and one that most sponsors may face at some point with a protégé. There are no hard and fast rules—unless the protégé shows disloyalty, in which case you must walk away immediately. Gardiner balanced several factors in his decision: Melissa’s grave mistake on the one hand, and her talent and ambition on the other, as well as the difficulty of what she was attempting: to become a top trial lawyer as a young woman, in a field that is dominated by older men. He also considered whether the flaw she’d displayed was fixable.

The answer, in the end, was to double down on instruction but get a little help for it. “I saw,” Gardiner recalls, “that her snarkiness was because she was very insecure, even though she was monumentally talented. So I decided, ‘We’re just going to power through this.’ But I realized, I might not be the best person to tell an insecure young woman how to deal with powerful senior men. So I got some of my colleagues, senior women with long experience, to talk to her about client boundaries.”

Fifteen years later, Melissa is now a senior woman herself. “It’s become a triumphant relationship,” Gardiner says. “She’s fabulous. She’s learned her lesson, she’s learned how to be a good manager of relationships. And now, thanks to her, we have a much wider client base than before.”

When the Protégé Won’t Change

An executive whom I’ll call Roberta is now leading HR at one of the world’s most important technology companies. But in her prior position, at a financial services giant, she brought in a young woman whom we’ll call Tanya.

“I saw Tanya as our next superstar,” Roberta says. “I’d already figured her into our succession plan.” But despite her enthusiasm, Roberta kept a close eye on Tanya. Or rather, she used the eyes and ears of others to help her inspect her prospective protégé.

“I asked people on her team about her skill sets,” Roberta says. “It turned out that no one would vouch for them. I asked her direct supervisors about her value add. They weren’t seeing it. Everyone liked her, they said she was friendly, but the deepest relationships aren’t forged at happy hour. They’re formed around the trust and integrity you develop working tightly together on a project.”

So Roberta called Tanya into her office to offer some advice. “I told her to ask more questions of her team and her supervisors, since she was new. When you don’t ask questions, I explained, the perception is that either you don’t care or you’re a know-it-all. And I told her that she had to be more than just friendly. When she met with her team at the office meet-and-greets, she had to ask what they were up to so she could get her job done.”

Tanya said that she understood and would do better. But when, after another three months went by, Roberta asked business leaders about Tanya, they said that she was always sitting in on their meetings but had nothing to say. Meanwhile, Tanya hadn’t been reaching out to Roberta. She hadn’t been proactively offering reports on her efforts and progress. She hadn’t confessed that there was still a problem and hadn’t asked for more ideas.

Instead, it was again Roberta who had to call in Tanya, who again said that she’d heard the message and would do better. Concerned, Roberta now decided to attend a few meetings with Tanya and introduced her, to make it easier for her to contribute. Still: nothing. As Michael Roth had experienced with Myles, Roberta began to feel that Tanya was just making excuses and not being honest with her. Besides her disappointment with her performance, Roberta now felt that she couldn’t trust her.

When Tanya’s first year was up, Roberta was ready to sever the relationship. And since she had hired Tanya into a position that was senior enough that it didn’t leave room for too many mistakes, she dismissed her from the company.

“It was a horrible situation,” Roberta says. “I’m still certain that Tanya was remarkably talented. She just somehow couldn’t ask questions, couldn’t ask for help when she got in over her head, couldn’t speak up when she had to. Not everyone, no matter how many directives you provide, is capable of earning sponsorship.”

But for those protégés who do work out (and many do quite splendidly), after you’ve inspired, instructed, and inspected them, it’s time to make things explicit and formalize the relationship, in your eyes and in the eyes of those around you. It’s time to instigate a deal.