Become an Un-Leader

When I was a kid growing up in a small, middle-class town in New York State, our family once spotted the legendary comedian Bob Hope strolling through an airport terminal. He was a huge celebrity at the time, appearing in movies and TV comedy specials. We were thrilled to see him in real life.

As my sister remembers, our father urged her to approach Mr. Hope and say hello. “I don’t want to,” she told our father, “he’s a celebrity.”

“No,” our father said, “he’s just a regular person.” Our father insisted that she go up to say hello, so she did. She had nothing to fear, and nothing to be embarrassed about, just because he was Bob Hope and she was a kid.

Small as it was, that episode captured so much of how my parents saw the world, and in turn, how my siblings and I were raised. To my parents, who were the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe, it didn’t matter how modest a person’s circumstances were. That person was just as important as the Bob Hopes of this world. And the Bob Hopes were not gods, but regular, imperfect human beings, like you and me. You don’t put a person on a pedestal just because he or she has achieved great things. You admire a person’s accomplishments, but you also admire everyone for what he or she has done in life. Each of us has achieved something important, even if it is just going to school and doing our jobs and raising our kids as best we can. That, to my parents, was worth celebrating, too.

In keeping with these beliefs, my parents expected my four siblings and me to show humility toward others. This was a nonnegotiable rule. My family enjoyed a middle-class lifestyle—my father ran a small neighborhood plumbing supply store my grandfather had started. Yet during my childhood, and especially during my elementary and middle-school years, we were surrounded by people who had less than us, many of whom were immigrants. We were never allowed to flaunt our possessions or status. Once, a classmate came to our house, and she was surprised to learn we had a bathtub. Her family only had a shower. As my mother made clear, we weren’t to mention our two bathrooms to her because that might make her feel bad. Our family was no better than hers—and we had to act that way.

As an adult, I cherish the lesson of humility my parents taught, not least because of its relevance for leading an organization or managing a team. In organizations large and small, you often see leaders exploiting their status and power to make themselves feel good. They are keenly aware of their titles, and they get an ego rush out of being in charge. Invariably, these leaders demand more respect than they give, justifying the imbalance in their minds by pointing to their lofty position.

There’s nothing wrong with taking pride in your accomplishments, and there are certainly many ways to succeed as a leader. But if you’ve elected, as we have, to leverage your people as a strategic business asset, then bolstering your own status and position around employees isn’t your best move. Let’s face it, egotistical, self-interested, or self-absorbed leaders of any stripe usually don’t inspire people very much. These leaders might elicit fear, respect, or admiration, but not affection. And you need affection if you’re going to spur employees to pour their hearts into their work every single day.

If there’s one principle that has helped Kronos create an engaging culture in which people can feel inspired about their work, it’s humility. Affording your staff the same dignity and respect as you, regardless of their status, underlies anything else you might do personally or organizationally to create an environment where people love what they do. To shift the culture of your team or organization, start here, now, with your own attitudes and behavior. Then put structures in place to help the organization as a whole make the shift.

YOU ARE NOT THE COMPANY

There’s a name for the kind of humble CEO I aspire to be. I’ll call him or her the “Un-Leader.” If you’re a CEO, please feel free to borrow it and spread it around. No matter where in an organization you reside, try regarding yourself as an “Un-Vice President,” an “Un-General Manager,” an “Un-Sales Supervisor,” and so on.

Let’s unpack the mentality that defines “Un-Leaders.” First, such leaders appreciate that their team or organization’s success doesn’t all owe to their personal efforts. Some executives and managers like to think they’re indispensable. But Un-Leaders harbor no illusions about the unique value of their own contributions. As CEO of Kronos, I think of myself as just another team member. As I see it, the reason we have thousands of people in our organization is because we need thousands of people. It isn’t all about me, nor is it about other highly visible members of our leadership team. Kronites might enjoy varying degrees of responsibility and receive different compensation, but we are all fundamentally the same in that we all bear responsibility for Kronos’s success.

If you as a people manager accept that you’re not above other employees, then chances are you won’t take yourself as seriously as many leaders do. Some leaders form their identities around their company or their title. They are not Un-Leaders. A second feature of Un-Leaders’ mentality is an ability to put their work and their title in perspective.

I didn’t dream of becoming a CEO as a kid, nor was I groomed for the position as an adult. As I’ve related, my brother Mark founded Kronos, and in 1979 I came on board fresh out of college. I did everything for our start-up business, from marketing to customer service to janitorial. When a delivery arrived, I was the one who unloaded it. On weekends, I made service calls to customers.

I also spent a lot of time in sales. In the early days, I pounded the pavement, trying to convince anyone who would listen to install our product. One of our first customers was a fast-food restaurant in Chicago with 45 employees. I got to know the owner, who wanted to upgrade his Kronos system. The only time he was available was 4:30 on a Sunday morning in between pay periods. “OK,” I said, “I’ll do it.” I remember it was a brutally cold day, 20 degrees below zero Fahrenheit. I showed up as the restaurant was opening, and the manager turned on the griddle so that I could warm my hands. Another time, I got a call from a nursing home for a meeting with its board of directors. I was 23 and didn’t know what a “board of directors” was. I was nervous. It ended up being four Jewish guys in their seventies. They sat there drinking schnapps and vodka. All they wanted to do was shoot the breeze about who I was and where I was from. Finally, I said that I needed to go home, and that we’d pick another time to show them what Kronos did—I’d had too much to drink. “You seem like a nice guy,” they said. “You’ve answered our questions—we’ll buy from you!”

As the years passed, I worked my way up, but I didn’t think much about becoming CEO. For decades, we at Kronos paid little attention to career development or succession planning. Early on, we were working day-to-day, month-to-month, and year-to-year to succeed. After we’d established ourselves, we continued to assume that Mark would be CEO indefinitely. And in fact, he served as CEO for almost 30 years! When he stepped down, some referred to him as the longest-running founder leading a technology company in the state of Massachusetts. It wasn’t until Mark decided that he wanted to retire that we began talking seriously about succession, and that I began to think about taking over Mark’s role.

I became CEO in 2005, and although I was thrilled to lead, the transition didn’t come without bumps. For the first six months, my decision making wasn’t crisp. I kept turning to others for advice and approval when facing tough decisions. Finally, I said to myself: “You’re the CEO. You have to act like one by making decisions!” So I did.

Since then, I’ve acted decisively to implement my vision for the company, including our strategy of fully unleashing our people as a valuable asset. But I like to think that I haven’t let the power of my position go to my head. In social situations, I rarely volunteer that I’m CEO of Kronos. I say that I “work in software” or that I’m “with Kronos.” I might reveal my job title at some point, but people have to ask lots of questions to pull it out of me.

The truth is I don’t really want to be known or remembered as a CEO. I’d much rather that people know me as a good dad, husband, or friend. That’s easy to say, but I’m serious! If, for some reason, I had to step down as CEO, I’d feel sad, but life would go on. I’d have plenty to do to keep busy, and I’d feel happy and fulfilled. Being a CEO doesn’t define how I think about myself. As a result, I don’t spend a lot of time obsessing over my title, my authority, my power. Instead, like every other Un-Leader out there, I have more time and energy to think about what really drives the business forward: employees and customers.

HUMILITY IS POWER

A cynic might say, “Here’s a guy who is just not into being CEO. He doesn’t feel comfortable in the role.” I understand that perception, but it’s not true. I’m very comfortable being the CEO, and I’m perfectly willing to wield power when I need to, making bold decisions like taking our company private, investing in a new product initiative, going global, or transitioning our business model to the cloud. But even as I continue to steer the organization toward my vision, I remain true to my personal motivations. My goal isn’t to get my way for its own sake, or to have others acknowledge my authority. Rather, it’s to serve our people and promote my vision so that our culture becomes stronger and our company succeeds. That’s it!

A skeptic might also object that by expressing humility, I relinquish power and risk becoming a pushover. After all, it’s a dog-eat-dog world out there. Leaders who don’t aggressively stake out their territory and assert their dominance will have others trample on them. If I’ve succeeded as CEO, these readers might speculate, it’s despite my conscious efforts at humility, not because of them.

That line of thinking is likewise incorrect. As an Un-Leader, I wield more power than more ego-driven executives. Consider the process we deploy when acquiring other companies. In 2011, we bought Principal Decision Systems International (PDSI), a firm with about 65 employees that specialized in scheduling software for the public safety market. Since the company was performing well, we elected to let leaders there operate it largely as they had been, with our input. As CEO, I could have easily ignored PDSI and its employees, viewing my time as too important to spend on such a small part of our business. But as an Un-Leader, I didn’t think that way. From the very beginning, I connected periodically with Greg, PDSI’s founder and former CEO, who was continuing to run the company as a Kronos division. I also created a video to welcome employees. And several months after our acquisition, I supported Greg and former PDSI employees by appearing at their division’s user group meeting, where hundreds of customers had gathered. Arriving early that day, I spoke at length with Greg, learning all kinds of details about the company and its customers. When I addressed customers and employees, I warmly welcomed them into the Kronos family, making specific references to PDSI’s people and products.

As Greg remembers, PDSI employees felt skittish about becoming part of Kronos. Alongside the efforts of other Kronos executives, the attention I paid the company helped win its employees over. They came away feeling “absolutely welcome,” in Greg’s words. All along, I tried to make it clear how much PDSI meant to Kronos, and how important it was to us to have them on our team. That message made all the difference to them. Although many tech firms fail to keep new talent on board when they acquire other companies, the majority of PDSI employees remain Kronites today. That includes Greg, who today helps us welcome other new companies, large and small, into the Kronos family.

When we lead people, we often underestimate our emotional impact on them. Employees scrutinize us all the time—not just listening to the words we speak, but attending to all facets of our behavior, including our body language. When we are humble, and when we project that humility outwardly in our behavior, team members notice. They come to feel that their leaders respect them, are dedicated to their welfare, and are approachable. Over time, they perceive a deeper sense of kinship that they couldn’t feel if their leaders existed on some elevated plane.

Led by a humble leader, employees become far more willing to open up to their boss, person to person. Do you ever sense that your people are withholding important information—that you don’t know what’s really going on? It may be that your people feel uncomfortable communicating. They don’t trust you because to them, you’re different. Inaccessible. Unapproachable. You’re The Boss, and it feels scary to be themselves around you. So they keep silent, and you remain ignorant about important facets of the business, not knowing what you don’t know. Over time, that lack of knowledge takes a significant toll.

Don’t be The Boss. Be a human being. Invite your team members in by staying humble and putting them on your level.

It’s ironic, isn’t it? The more leaders and managers focus on their titles, the more they limit their influence. Feeling powerful and being powerful are two very different beasts. And contenting yourself with feeling powerful amounts to a wasted opportunity. Why not take advantage of the goodwill, trust, and heightened communication you engender by simply putting others on the same plane as you? It doesn’t cost you anything. In fact, it’s a much easier way to manage and lead. As an Un-Leader, I don’t have to think about conducting myself differently depending on who I’m with. I don’t worry about whether I receive all of the respect or perks or deference traditionally accorded to a CEO. I don’t work as hard to make myself likeable in the eyes of employees. More power with less effort—what could be better than that?

THE UN-LEADER IN ACTION

To wield influence as an Un-Leader, you can’t just think like one. You have to act like one. Many day-to-day leadership behaviors allow you to project humility and put people on your level. While some of them might feel uncomfortable or unfamiliar at first, none are complicated. You just have to decide to do them! Here are a few to focus on first:

Behavior #1: Forgo Special Perks

If you’re a senior leader, do you insist on taking private planes or traveling first class on commercial airlines? Many C-level executives do. I know because I belong to various CEO groups, and when I attend meetings of these groups, I sometimes spot fellow members boarding the plane and settling into their oversized first-class seats. Before travelers in coach have made their way to their seats, these CEOs have their drink in hand and are deliberating whether to order the pasta or the chicken. Not me. I pass through first class and into coach. Could I always fly first class if I wanted to? Of course. But I’m an Un-Leader. Kronites know that I fly coach just like they do, and that parity means something. It tells them I’m no more special than they are—that I recognize everyone’s worth.

I’m not saying Un-Leaders should never fly first class. The point is to live by the same rules as everyone else. If employees have to fly coach, then you should, too. Given how much I travel, I sometimes do get bumped up to first class. In these situations, I’ll take the first-class ticket. That’s fine—I’m still playing by the same rules as other Kronites. But on occasions when I’m bumped up and I happen to spot a fellow Kronite on a flight, I might trade seats with the Kronite. Can you imagine what an impression it makes on an employee to have the CEO gift you his first-class seat?

Forgoing perks and playing by the same rules as others extends beyond air travel. I don’t stay in luxury hotels when I travel on business (unless that’s where everyone else is staying). I don’t have a window office, because no leaders in our headquarters do. And I don’t get free lunch at the cafeteria in our corporate offices. I’m no better than our employees. If they pay for lunch, then so do I.

Behavior #2: Give Others the Limelight

When you’re in a meeting, it’s tempting to take credit, drawing attention away from your team members. Un-Leaders do the opposite. They look for opportunities to pump up others’ contributions and stature. As a member of my executive team tells me, I have been known to spotlight the expertise of Kronites when introducing them to customers, prospects, vendors, and other partners. I also tend to pick junior-level Kronites in meetings I attend and tout their role, responsibility, and achievements. I solicit their opinions, too, asking questions and listening carefully. When I give formal speeches, I take the opportunity to draw attention to small teams or groups throughout the company, including new employees who recently came on board during acquisitions. These gestures take virtually no extra time and effort. You just have to get in the habit of doing them.

Behavior #3: Show Gratitude

Another way to project humility is to thank people repeatedly, even in difficult situations. Like most companies, we hold annual budgeting meetings as part of our strategic planning process. These meetings aren’t always easy. Sometimes people disagree on key decisions, and tempers flare. The junior people on the finance team who run the numbers sometimes feel a bit roughed up, even though they didn’t do anything wrong. Sensing this, I turn to them at the end of the meeting and publicly thank them for all their hard work. I do this no matter how rancorous the meeting gets. It’s not only the executives making the final decisions who matter. The junior-level people worked hard, and they deserve to be thanked. When that gratitude comes from the mouth of the CEO, or from that of a midlevel manager leading a team, it sends a clear signal not just about the value that every Kronite brings but also about the importance of humility in our culture.

Behavior #4: Remember Basic Respect

We’re all busy, deluged by e-mails and meetings. It’s easy to forget basic courtesies, especially when it comes to frontline employees. Take some deep breaths and make it a priority to show respect for everyone. Hold the door. If you’re in a meeting and getting coffee for yourself, ask others if they want some, including the 22-year-old intern. If you’re walking with junior employees down the hallway, don’t walk ahead of them, but side by side. If you’re holding a meeting with your team, don’t sit at the head of the conference table every time. If you’re in an elevator with a group of people, look up from your phone and say hello. If you’re in a cab or a restaurant, talk to the people serving you. Ask them about their lives and thank them for their efforts. Practiced daily, little gestures like these make a big difference. And again, they send a message.

Behavior #5: Get—and Stay—in the Weeds

Some leaders believe they should focus on the high-level strategy, leaving it to others lower in the organization to perform more mundane tasks like interacting with customers and handling their complaints. That thinking is ridiculous. We have teams of sales and service people who care for our customers day-to-day, and as CEO I don’t micromanage. But I do frequently step in and interact personally with customers to address problems and gauge their satisfaction. In 2015, when customers complained about glitches in our flagship product, I worked with many members of our customer service team to resolve the problem, even though other executives in our organization were already involved. Over a period of months, I followed up with these employees, making sure that they and other teams in our organization were fixing the problems. Because I involved myself directly, frontline Kronites felt empowered. They knew that senior leadership understood their concerns and was taking action. They also got the underlying message: as CEO, I’m not too high up or important to concern myself with their work. Managers at any level can send a similar message. Spend as much time as possible in the trenches and get your hands dirty. Employees will notice.

Behavior #6: Admit When You Don’t Know

As an Un-Leader, I strive to remain keenly aware of the limits of my own knowledge. This opens up a space for fellow Kronites to come forth with their own solutions. Our culture becomes more innovative—a theme I’ll develop in Chapter 13.

As an organization, we’ve also become adept at recognizing our own limitations, and that has helped us immensely. In 2015, when we were developing an innovative new product, we didn’t assume that we knew everything. We assumed the opposite and brought in a series of outside consultants—customer advisors who met with us every few months during the design phase—to critique our new product and suggest improvements. Most people want to believe that their baby is beautiful, and it’s hard to stomach criticism or acknowledge imperfections. But in this case, the feedback—which included the need to improve the product’s appearance, functionality, responsiveness, and overall design—allowed us to launch a superior product. In one instance, customers told us that it was too difficult to add or schedule an employee and to edit an employee record. It took us a few months to handle feedback like this, but we adjusted the product accordingly, and the end result was much better.

Behavior #7: Solicit Feedback

Most leaders and managers know they’re supposed to give feedback, critiquing employees on their performance. But think about what it means when you turn the tables and ask others for feedback on your performance. Did they get out of a meeting with you what they had hoped? Did you deliver the guidance they needed? Did your reasoning make sense to them? By posing these questions, you’re again putting yourself on the same plane as everyone else. And you’re getting valuable feedback that can help you improve.

When I run meetings, I typically go around the room, asking people for their views before taking action. You might wonder whether people will readily communicate unpleasant truths I need to hear. I admit, there’s no guarantee that they will. But in keeping with our culture’s emphasis on trust (Chapter 3), I choose to take for granted that my people will be open and honest with me. And in fact, I do receive critical feedback all the time from others around me. Every week, executives or managers will make comments like: “You need to speak differently in front of this group,” or “I don’t think the meeting you led was all that successful.” Such feedback has led me to change my position on how I lead meetings, how I treat customers, or whom I hire for critical positions.

Ultimately, much of what our senior leadership team decides at Kronos doesn’t just reflect my ideas but is rather a direct result of employee feedback. That extends to all sorts of decisions big and small. For example, the appearance of our workstations, common spaces, and furniture in our headquarters reflects employee feedback. We had three or four manufacturers of workspaces set up their products. We didn’t tell employees who the vendors were, but we asked them to sit in the spaces and vote on them. About 800 Kronites cast their votes. We made our selection based on what people said they liked best.

THREE STEPS TO A HUMBLER ORGANIZATION

Modeling humility can go a long way toward shifting the culture of your team or organization and building engagement. To take it further, the organization can codify humble behavior, integrating it formally into its culture. Several years ago, when we were transforming ourselves into a company with cloud offerings, we set forth key desired behaviors for Kronites everywhere to focus on and embrace. One of these was humility. As we defined it, humility meant assuming “positive intent” and competence on the part of others, engaging others by asking questions and listening, and putting your own “agenda aside to operate in the best interests of the customer and company.” We also clarified that humility and “bold” leadership were not opposites, but rather went hand in hand.

Precisely how you define humility for your people is up to you. What’s important is to:

1.   Set a baseline standard with your own behavior

2.   Lay out clear, formal expectations about how people throughout the organization are to behave

3.   Infuse policies and processes with an ethic of humility

Our human resources department provides incentives to Kronites who refer new hires. We used to offer greater incentives for executive-level hires than for lower-level hires. Now we pay the same incentives for every hire. Why should we send the message that executives count more than other employees? Likewise, under our open time off policy (Chapter 9), Kronites, irrespective of their title or seniority, receive the same treatment when it comes to time off. We trust each of them to put in the time required to do their jobs well, and also take the time off they need to stay happy and healthy.

Imagine what you could accomplish if you removed the psychological distance separating you and other leaders from your employees. Imagine if other managers and executives in your organization followed your example so that humility became an entrenched part of the culture. That’s happened over the past decade at Kronos, and it has made it far easier for us to take other steps to change our culture, boost engagement, and become a billion-dollar company.

My parents had it right all those years ago: every human being counts equally. So the next time you meet someone in a social situation, try something different. Don’t blurt out your title. Tell them you work “in software,” “in retail,” “in manufacturing,” or whatever business you may be in. Small actions really do mean a lot.