Midnight in San Francisco, and Andrew O’Brien, chief executive officer of Trinity Systems, a technology company, finally opts to leave the office. Nothing he could do now could prepare him any more for what awaited him the next day: the annual board meeting — in which O’Brien would have to explain why this fiscal year’s results were “unspectacular at best.”
This is the scene in a new book for CEOs titled “The Five Temptations of a CEO: A Leadership Fable,” ($20, Jossey-Bass Publishers) by Patrick Lencioni, president of the Table Group, a San Francisco Bay area management consulting company.
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“The Five Temptations” could be called a bedtime story for CEOs. It is the story of a rookie executive who learns that his company’s failures are linked directly to his own shortcomings — not problems with marketing, competition, or the economy.
Through O’Brien, Lencioni argues that all CEOs are prone to the same failures. Those who recognize these traps, he says, realize that being a CEO is a difficult but uncomplicated job.
Leaving the office, O’Brien heads for the Bay Area Rapid Transit station and takes a seat on a train. No one was around, except for an elderly man in a janitor suit with the name “Charlie” stitched to it. The two begin talking, and O’Brien is taken aback by the man’s failure to flinch when he finds that he’s talking to a CEO, and that he addresses him as “Andy,” a name O’Brien had worked hard to kill.
The man is eager to discuss O’Brien’s troubles. To humor him, O’Brien agrees to answer some questions. The first is simple: What was the best day of your career? The answer –the day he was promoted to CEO — shows Charlie that O’Brien is a victim of the first temptation: putting your career — and protecting your status — above your company’s welfare.
O’Brien admits to this one. Lots of CEOs are driven by ego, he says. But he dismisses the idea that he has fallen prey to temptation number two: wanting to be popular with your direct reports instead of holding them accountable.As proof, he tells Charlie that he recently fired his marketing director for failing to boost sales. The director was surprised, but he should have known he was in trouble, O’Brien reasoned.
But when pressed, O’Brien admits he never told the director he might be fired because he felt uncomfortable telling a marketing expert he was failing, and because he was one of the only people he could talk to about the pressures of being a CEO. But Charlie — who says his father was head of a railroad company — points out that holding people accountable means dealing with them, in spite of uncomfortable situations; firing someone in that circumstance is an easy, but unacceptable, solution, he says.
His interest piqued, O’Brien agrees to answer further questions. When asked about his vision for Trinity, O’Brien — after a bit of squirming — admits he’s been working on it for eight months. No good, says Charlie, who then reveals the third temptation: choosing certainty over clarity. Leaders, he said, must make their objectives clear. In following their mission, they must be prepared to act on incomplete information. The consequence of waiting too long is the loss of business.
If you make a bad decision, he explains, a CEO should utter three powerful words: “I was wrong.” Making good decisions with limited information is a skill to be cultivated, Charlie says.
But even CEOs who avoid these pitfalls can still fail. O’Brien learns that leaders who fail to allow their staff to debate issues — heatedly — often prevent good ideas from surfacing. Boring staff meetings, he learns, are a sure sign that a company is not dealing with its problems. The fourth temptation, therefore, is choosing harmony over “productive conflict.”
The temptation to wish for harmony may be a symptom of the fifth temptation: being afraid of vulnerability. CEOs must trust their people — even at the expense of getting burned on occasion — to get them to express their opinions. According to Charlie, being vulnerable among workers is a price CEOs must pay for a healthy organization.
“As crazy as it sounds,” he tells O’Brien, “my father never worried about being vulnerable with his people. He trusted them. That is what allowed them to feel comfortable having healthy, productive conflict.”
The story ends with O’Brien realizing that he had fallen asleep, and the whole experience with Charlie was a dream. But the next day, he examines some newly hung pictures of past CEOs and discovers that Charlie — whose full name is Charles Pierce — was once a Trinity CEO.
At the board meeting the next day, the trustees are willing to let O’Brien slide. The meeting is about to end when a consultant who had been sitting in interrupts. She points out that the members were about to adjourn without really dealing with the company’s problems. At this, O’Brien delivers a sensational speech, speaking of accountability, decision making, and vision.
In the final chapter, the scene shifts to a board meeting three years later, in which Trinity has turned its poor results around. The CEO, however, is someone new, who says he credits Andrew O’Brien for his help. He said he ran into O’Brien one night on a Bay Area Rapid Transit train.
Lencioni follows his fable with an overview of the five temptations and a summary of how to avoid each one. Every CEO must endure a painful self-assessment to identify these weaknesses and deal with them, he writes. In the back of the book biography — which states that Lencioni is a former vice president of organizational development at Sybase Inc. and a screen writer — it discloses that Lencioni’s biggest weakness is temptation number two: wanting to be popular instead of holding people accountable.
“The Five Temptations,” 134 pages with wide margins, is short enough to be read at lunch. By telling the story in a fable, as opposed to a solemn discussion of leadership principles, Lencioni succeeds in entertaining the reader just enough to slip him some useful information about effective management techniques.
