Becoming a leader: Is “killing your old self” a good idea?
- John Donovan — the former CEO of AT&T — cut his teeth at a consulting firm where he opted out of a self-centered commission structure.
- Playing for the team’s success, rather than your own success, is just one of the many mindset shifts required to make the leap to leader.
- When Donovan promoted people he told them: “We’re asking you to be very different.”
Earlier in his career, when John Donovan [the former CEO of AT&T Communications] was a partner at a big consulting firm, his CEO at the time introduced a new incentive system for how people would divide commissions based on their specific contributions to landing new business. The goal was to train a spotlight on individual accountability and thereby increase productivity. Instead, it created a system in which people spent an inordinate amount of time on gaming the system to maximize their share of the commission pie. “It was a noble impulse,” Donovan recalled. “But it created this adverse behavior where everybody wanted to show up at every meeting.” For Donovan, who had grown up with ten siblings and had been captain of his hockey team during high school, the new approach cut against some of his core beliefs about teamwork. So, even though he was entitled to a percentage of much of the work that he helped land for the firm, he decided to opt out of the new system. When people were tallying percentages, he would always say the same thing: “Put me down for zero.”
Donovan knew he would be giving up some compensation, but it didn’t matter to him. He had pivoted many times in his career and sometimes took pay cuts of more than two-thirds as he moved from head of sales in a big organization, to being an entrepreneur, to going back to business school, to running a startup. He had done a simple calculation earlier in his life that if he worked really hard — a big differentiator is simply the “raw tonnage” of effort that people put in, he said — he could probably be in the top 5 percent of just about any field, and he figured he would be fine financially. So his career planning was less about moving up, and more about gaining a broad set of experiences. For him, it wasn’t a hard decision to stiff-arm the new commission system. “I’d rather do the right thing and let the chips fall where they may,” he said.
In the months after the new plan was implemented, he started getting more calls of congratulations from colleagues for doing things he had not done. Because he made it clear that he wasn’t vying for his share of the credit, they assumed he was working in the background on more deals than those in which he was in fact participating. The feedback reinforced a powerful lesson for him about what happens when you focus on the success of the team rather than playing for individual credit. “If you figure there’s a karma pool out there floating around for credits, you have to stop playing for credits,” he said. “I remember the day I realized that, and I probably never again needed to involve scorekeeping in anything that I did. When you play for outcomes and not for credit, then it creates a virtuous cycle where people want to help you and you want to help them.” The approach paid off, as he was soon promoted to lead the consulting firm’s telecommunications practice team.
“When you play for outcomes and not for credit, then it creates a virtuous cycle where people want to help you and you want to help them.”
John Donovan, former CEO of AT&T Communications
Playing for the team’s success, rather than your own success, is just one of the many mindset shifts required to make the leap to leader. It means thinking as if you run the place and focusing on what is best for the organization rather than your part of the business and your career. It means deciding what you stand for as a leader. It means learning how to make decisions based as much on gut as on data, navigating all the balancing acts that make leadership so challenging, and dealing with relentless pressures and second-guessing as work consumes more of your life. It requires working on your self-awareness, because the signals you give off as a leader carry outsize impact. It means focusing on developing other leaders and learning how to mentor yourself as well as others. It requires developing a new vocabulary. When Donovan promoted people into leadership positions, he told them, “We’re not asking you to do more of what you did before. We’re asking you to be very different as a person and do different things than we’ve ever asked you to do before.”
To drive home the message, he handed them a small card with phrases that he wanted them to use more often, including “I’m sorry,” “I don’t know,” and “How can I help make you successful?” He told them to develop a crisp and clear elevator pitch to explain where they were leading their group and why it was important to the organization. He told them that their core tools of the trade had to shift from spreadsheets and emails to a microphone, and to learn how to give impromptu speeches to provide context, clarity, and inspiration to their teams. “Making the leap to leader requires killing your old self,” Donovan would tell people.
