It was the night before a multi-day program with the executive team of a global investment bank from Mexico City. The CEO called and told me he was leaving the company and was asked not to tell his team by his European boss. He wondered how that might affect the team building and integration program we were planning.
I was honest and told him that our work was about behavior, emotion and trust and to involve the team in the planned activities, to ask them to take risks both physical and emotional without sharing his now eminent departure could leave the team feeling betrayed or at the least abandoned. But he had to “follow orders” and so I said we would strengthen the team with our time together and they would handle the leadership change with new found tools and skills.
After the first morning activities that ended with our innovative trust building sequence, the CEO came to me and said he had no idea how profound the training could be and that he just could not keep his secret any longer. “So we called all three teams together and he told them a story about a man who had lost the “zero sum game” and did not balance his family life and work life successfully resulting in a separation from his family. His wife and kids were in another city and now he finds that he has both a job opportunity in that city and the opportunity to put his family life back together. And he told them that he was that man and so he was going to leave the company.
It turns out that he was deeply loved and highly regarded by his team and there wasn’t a dry eye to be found. Several of the men walked away from the group to hide their tears.
As a program designer and facilitator the challenge was how to shift the goals of the program, the so called “deliverables” from integration and team building to strengthening the team to manage change. There is always crossover with team building. A strong team can manage change better and so some activities just needed different language and focus. We also chose different activities that involved “changing the game” so the team was forced to deal with unexpected situations and rule changes.
LESSONS LEARNED
- Balancing home life and work is a challenge even for the most gifted among us and failure to do so can be very painful.
- What we are “made of” or who we truly are is not seen until we have to chose between two “rights”. Chosing between right and wrong is easy. This CEO was in a dilema and chose family over career.
- Change is inevitable. We can rarely control it but we can always prepare for it.
- Successful leaders are often effective because they inspire love and loyalty. When the Director of HR at HSBC wanted to surprise the group we were to work with by having them camp out instead of being in a nice hotel, I explained that they might resent the surprise (and I don’t like surprises) but he said this team would “lay down in front of a truck” for their CEO so if he wanted them to camp, they would camp, and he was right.
- Often people really don’t know what to do. They weigh their options and do the best they can. Make the best decision they can. There are always costs involved. Which ones are you willing to pay?