A Tough Executive decision 

In the year 2007, I was the Chief Delivery Officer of this medium sized global software company. One of my responsibilities was to recover software development projects which were unprofitable and going downhill. 

Our projects used to be on average about US$15 to $20 million. They were large projects with a mix of re-usable and custom code.

There was a project with a Bank in another country which was going downhill for the last two years before I took over my new job. One of my first tasks was to recover this $20 million project and bring it back to profitability while delivering successfully to the customer.

Over the next year and a half, I made, several trips to this country to meet the CEO of the Bank. The CEO was pock marked, looked slick with dark hair gelled and combed back. He had a deep voice and piercing eyes. He appeared powerful, reticent to hand over control, had a reputation of arrogance and was feared by his employees. He was managing the project himself since he had secured the budget and this was his flagship initiative. 

In our first meeting he said that nothing is going to change by a different person coming to meet him. I told him that I was new in my company, the boss of the previous person, I had come with the purpose of rescuing the project and he should give me a fair chance. I laid out a fresh plan to pull the project out of the doldrums. 

I played equally tough with him and impressed upon him that his only chance of success was to cooperate with me and we would have the wherewithal to complete the project successfully. Faced with my no-nonsense determination and with no alternative, the CEO decided to cooperate with me. This and subsequent actions over many meetings developed a bond of trust between me and the CEO and the project was soon coming back on the rails of success as I had planned. 

For every review meeting I would travel to the country personally to give confidence to the Bank CEO. Since the project was so critical for our company, I could not hand over the responsibility for guiding this project to completion to any of the employees who reported to me. 

However, for one of the review meetings, I could not travel due to some other event where I had to be present and which was more important. I called upon my Delivery Head Kumar and his Deputy Jeff  to attend the review meeting. I had no option but to do this much against my wishes. Unfortunately, both Kumar and Jeff were the same people who had got the project into a mess in the first place. But they were the only people who understood the project and were also the only employees who were senior enough to represent the company at the review meeting with the CEO of the Bank. Kumar was a very senior employee who was in charge of the software delivery for a couple of continents. His teams put together would have totalled 1500 employees or more.

I summoned Kumar and Jeff to my office and instructed them exactly what updates, plans and reports were to be given to the CEO. Since I had a foreboding about this meeting, I warned them individually and bluntly that should they disobey my explicit instructions in anyway whatsoever, I would construe it as an attempt to sabotage the recovering project. I also told them that should that happen, they would be removed from their current roles. 

I had decided to send Jeff also because he was a frequent visitor to my office. I thought Jeff understood me well and was aligned better with my thinking. I also had greater confidence in him. Jeff was meant to be a check on Kumar's conduct of the meeting and a means of obtaining true feedback about the meeting. I had to be very careful with this project.

Imagine my great disappointment, when I  discovered after a few days through an email from the CEO that he was unhappy again with the progress of the project.  It was clear me that Kumar and Jeff had contradicted my explicit instructions which they were to follow at the review meeting.

I could not be sure why they had both behaved in this manner. Was it due to the fear of a dominating CEO, or was it due the lack of courage to hold on to our plan in the face of difficult points raised by the CEO, or was it a deliberate attempt to undermine the progress made by the project over the last year and half? 

When I called both of them to my office and inquired about what transpired in the meeting, they both did not deny contradicting my explicit instructions. They both behaved as if there was nothing wrong in the way they had conducted themselves at the meeting with the CEO.

Such gross undermining of my direct instructions to the detriment of the business of the company could not be tolerated. I offered Kumar another non- customer facing role within the company. He chose to resign instead. Jeff also resigned. It is to be remembered, that the same pair of managers had brought this project to it's pitiful state before I had taken over the project from them. 

A little later, at Kumar's farewell party, I highlighted his projects which were doing well and praised his strengths, thanking him for his contributions over many years towards our company's success.

Mutual trust and loyalty are non-negotiable constituents of good leadership. Facts cannot be ignored or necesary actions postponed, else they will come back to haunt us.

Note: Names, including country names have been changed or omitted in order to respect privacy and confidentiality. The episode mentioned above is true in other respects.

Copyright: P Rajagopal Tampi 2022 (R) ©