As with his management team and employees, Pressler set the stage for working well with the company’s board of directors by being straightforward, communicative, and organized and by listening well. Gap Inc. had had only two CEOs in its entire history. As a first-time CEO, Pressler did not pretend to be an expert in working with a board, and his disarming candor about being a neophyte was exactly the right approach. The board was thrilled at the prospect of starting a partnership based on mutual openness and respect. “Later on, when I started to present strategy to them, they were very dynamic and engaged,” Pressler says.
Related Quotes
6.2. The Board
“Good CEOs walk in with a presentation of where the company was, where it is now, and where it’s headed this quarter and in the years to come. They tell the board what’s working but they’re also transparent about what isn’t and how they’re addressing it. They present a fully formed plan that the board can question, object to, or try to modify. Things might get a little heated, a little bumpy, but in the end everyone walks out of the meeting understanding and accepting the CEO’s vision and the company’s path forward.
Then there are the great CEOs. With great CEOs the meeting is smooth as butter.
Pressler’s process was as important to this as the specific expectations he set. He conducted one-on-one interviews with the company's top fifty managers, asking each of them the same six carefully considered questions to get their insights about the business, to solicit their advice, and to see what themes emerged. He and the Gap Inc. communications department also created a weblog for all the company’s employees, posting all of his activities and what he was learning. As a result, “people saw that I was genuinely engaged and was willing to listen before I talked about where we needed to go or communicated a vision or approach,” Pressler says. “And that put people at ease. More important, people felt very connected to the learning experience I went through, and all those folks in the field who felt underappreciated began to feel that they were significant. I wasn’t making promises or changes as much as being a listening post.
Pressler felt many pressures, both from within the company and externally, to make changes fast, to be decisive, and to set bold visions. But he recognized that these were seductive traps. He did not allow himself to be portrayed as a savior, he most certainly did not attempt to be a know-it-all, and he made sure to keep open to the torrent of data and information that flows into any leader when they start a new role. He remains steadfast to his agenda of listening and learning, working with his management team, spending time on the sales floor and in the stockrooms at various company stores, and describing the discoveries, thoughts, and ideas to the management team and the company’s employees at large.
What Pressler did instead was formulate an agenda for his first hundred days as CEO. the backbone would be one-on-one meetings with Gap Inc.’s fifty top executives, as which he would ask each executive the same five questions:
- What about Gap Inc. do you want to preserve and why?
- What do you hope I do?
- What are you concerned I might do?
- What are you concerned I might not do?
- What is your most important tool for figuring out what the consumer wants?
“Similarly, when Terry Semel became chairman and CEO of Internet bellwether Yahoo! in May 2001, he had a twenty-one-year track record building Warner Bros. from an $850 million single-revenue-stream company operating in one country into an $11.5 billion diversified entertainment and consumer products powerhouse with operations in fifty-five countries.
At GE, Immelt relies on the board to take the pulse of the company, to gauge whether the business is humming along smoothly or there are glitches that need attention. “I asked each of our directors to visit the GE businesses twice a year,” he says. “You’re never going to know the intricacies of this company. There’s too much mass. But you can get a feel of the culture. So when they go to GE Aircraft Engines or GE Medical Systems, I want them by themselves [without corporate management], so they can make their own assessments - maybe we’re pushing too hard or maybe we’re not pushing hard enough.”
At The Home Depot, all directors were required to visit eighteen stores every year and spend two hours on each visit speaking with employees and customers. When he became CEO in 2000, Bob Nardelli continued that tradition and enhanced it: “I pair two board members with every division president and every functional leader for a full day. I look for their advice and counsel. These are CEOs and experienced men and women in their own right. I took advantage of their experience. Rather than being intimidated by it, I reached out and said, 'You go in and assess, give me your view of the individuals and their staffs.’ So the board is helpful.