Great CEO with horrible management style

Question

I'm a relatively inexperienced HR professional. I've been with my organization for 1 year and have a situation that I feel very positive about, but am unclear about my next steps.

Here is a little history.

Our CEO is a very good person with very poor people/ management skills. He uses "machine-gun" style questioning in meetings, believes everyone should just "grow-a-pair", has somewhat unreasonable expectations and doesn't transfer knowledge without belittling the person for having to ask.

He's been very approachable with me, because I don't respond with any emotion. I've been able to coach him on not talking about other employees with employees, no more yelling, doing PIPs, weekly 1 on 1's, and regular reviews. Things are getting much better. Everybody wants the company to succeed and grow, and they are willing to put the work in for us to get there...

But there is still a sense of overall fear. The employees are afraid that if they make a mistake they will get fired, even though there is NO evidence to support that. There has been only 2 people fired in the last 2 years; 1 for theft and 1 for poor performance; and both were allowed to work until they found another position.

My two main questions are:

1. How do I get the CEO to understand that better training will prevent the slow transfer of knowledge and that softening his approach will get better results from the staff?

2. How do I help the staff in getting past their fear response?

Thanks in advance for any assistance you may provide. Chris

Answer 1

Everybody including the CEO needs to understand that he is not a manager, doesn't want to be a manager and shouldn't be wasting his time managing. The CEO should be a leader (i.e. the person who decides what to do and not how to do it.). It's not to make the CEO the king or to excuse the behavior, but to realize leadership and direction is a rare commodity in most companies. Dont' waste it. Everyone has their roles to play. Let people do what they're good at.

Relative to the size of the company limit the levels of employees the CEO meets with. The level of fear is probably a good indication of those to exclude. The CEO has a lot on his/her mind and can't be expected to feel the same sense of urgency and level of detail on all subjects. Imagine you're trying to negotiate a benefits package for your company, but someone wants to complain about the coffee machine and multiply that by 100 and you have a day in the life of a CEO.

Discourage people from asking the CEO questions. If he can answer it in 30 seconds but it takes you 30 minutes to find the answer elsewhere, go find it elsewhere. Let everyone know it's not about their time it's about the CEO's time and it needs to be rationed. Imagine needing the CEO for the most important question only to wait in line with the 10 other people who are going to ask such inane questions.

If there is confusion over what the CEO meant by a particular statement or any other type of clarification, suggest they bring it to you or someone else close to the CEO and work out some of the details and then report back to everyone.

Arrange more casual times for the CEO to be around with other people that isn't just business. Maybe a monthly lunch or something. I heard one CEO mention that no one ever came into his office with good news. It can wear on a person. Make people aware of it.

Answer 2

The company should replace the CEO.

That can simply mean to hire a new CEO to replace him, if he is an employee CEO.

Except he is an owner CEO, as common in small companies. It is often the case that the owner or founder of the company "naturally" became CEO when the company was founded.

That makes it more complicated, but not fundamentally different.

An owner CEO has two separate roles, independent from each other:
As the owner, he is leading the company on a strategic level to ensure it's success.
As the CEO, he is doing the executive work on the top level. He cares about the strategy, and what needs to be done to support it. He gets these things done, by doing them or delegating them.

There is nothing preventing the owner CEO to delegate the CEO work to an employee. For him as the owner, it is very much in his own interest to have a good CEO. And if he happens to be not a good CEO, it can be very useful for the success of the company, on the level of reaching strategic goals, on the level of productivity and for building and maintaining a healthy office culture.

The case described in the question is, according to comments, about an owner CEO. The whole problem is about what to do about the difficulties of his CEO work. Whether he is interested to hire an external CEO will depend to a large extent of whether he actually likes the work he is doing. He may see that he's somewhat ineffective, but still enjoy his job. On the other hand, he may be unhappy or frustrated from seeing he is just not good in doing what he does.

The owner could of course stay working where he is, even in close contact with a new CEO. Apart from micromanaging his CEO, he can choose his level of involvement: Vor example, the owner may hire new developers personally, but completely keep out of hiring or replacing office staff. He actually may not even know or care about their number.

Hiring an external CEO can be expensive, but it can increase revenue by potentially much more. It's a question of strategy for the owner.