Authors: Reynold Levy
My own decisions about when to leave various positions were largely determined by what had been accomplished during my tenure. Had important milestones been reached, rendering it less productive, less necessary, and less satisfying for me to stay in place? Was the
institution ready for another leader? Was I physically and psychically ready to move on?
I
N DECIDING WHETHER
and when to step down, a CEO faces a serious danger. Will his or her tenure in office be so long as to conflate the interests of the incumbent with the needs of the institution? Is the very personal identity of the officeholder so intertwined with his or her institutional role that voluntary separation becomes too threatening to contemplate? It is always a bad sign when the board member or the CEO appears to need to occupy the position more than the institution needs that individual to serve. Trustees and CEOs hold institutions in trust for service to others, not the other way around. Often, when lengths of stay are prolonged, a key attribute of good governance—healthy turnover—is ignored. There is then a major risk that talented potential successors inside the organization will leave in search of challenging service opportunities elsewhere.
At Lincoln Center we enjoyed a rigorous nominating and governance committee process that annually assessed trustee performance. Not infrequently, improvement was called for and, on rare occasions, a request for the resignation of a negligent or disappointing trustee was in order. We also benefited from an annual executive committee review of CEO performance. Both processes created regular opportunities to discuss succession and its timing.
In my case, the board twice requested that I extend my stay. First from seven years to nine, and then from nine to twelve. These discussions about transition also led to the selection of Katherine Farley as the chair designate, a post she held for a full year before she formally succeeded Frank Bennack. Part of our thinking was to ensure that Farley remained as chair when I left the CEO post. The next president would then have at least a couple of years to serve with an experienced board leader at the helm.
There is wisdom in knowing not only when to leave your post, but also when to really “let go.” In his definitive work on the subject of corporate CEO retirement, Jeffrey Sonnenfeld reaches this conclusion: “Corporate leaders who leave office positively and enthusiastically may meet both their personal needs for renewal and the needs of their firm and society.”
1
For an excellent example of proceeding just this way, I think of the conduct of Harvey Golub, the CEO of American Express. When retiring, he decided not to be the chair of the board when his successor, Ken Chenault, became the CEO or even to remain on the board as a plain director. Interviewed in
BusinessWeek
, Golub, who became and remained during much of my tenure a trustee of Lincoln Center, acknowledged how much he had enjoyed his days in the driver’s seat. He was available for advice if and when Ken needed it. “If Ken wants my input, he knows where to find me.”
2
For Golub, retiring meant truly departing from American Express, not casting a shadow on his replacement.
It is said that Episcopalians always leave the scene without saying good-bye, whereas Jews always say good-bye and never leave. Harvey said good-bye
and
left, clearly an ecumenical approach. And a model worthy of emulation.
Y
OU CAN LEARN
a lot about any destination—a hotel, a gym, a hospital, a college, or an employer—by how each greets you and how each bids you good-bye.
Are you welcomed by name? Is the place prepared for your arrival? Are you thanked for completing your term of service? Are you asked genuinely about what might be improved, and is there intelligent feedback to your suggestions? Well-functioning organizations should always conduct exit interviews, particularly of their most valuable personnel.
And what about your length of stay? Have you ever felt that the vacation you planned was longer or shorter than the destination warranted? Or that the third year of law school was one too many? Or that you were discharged prematurely from a hospital stay?
These sorts of issues are different in degree, but not in kind, from those that involve you and your employer. Throughout our tenure, from entry to exit and at all points in between, how we treat one another matters. And when it comes to the CEO, the impact is far-ranging and often enduring.
When Leonard Lauder, the then CEO of Estee Lauder, decided in his capacity as the chair of the 92nd Street Y’s search committee to offer me the post of executive director, little did I know how consequential
this decision would be. At the time, I was just thirty-one years old. Henry Kohn, the president of the board of directors, called me with the good news. But he didn’t mention that my predecessor, once removed, would remain something of a fixture at the place. His name was Carl Urbont, and he and his predecessor, Jack Nadel, had together served more than sixty years as CEO of the Y. When Urbont resigned, Jack Boeko was appointed executive director, but he departed some eighteen months later.
Throughout the search for Boeko’s successor and during his brief term of service, Carl Urbont held the post of executive vice president, supposedly in charge of fund-raising. Actually, Urbont acknowledged that he was unfamiliar with raising funds and had engaged in very little of it during his long tenure. It struck me as awkward in the extreme to have my predecessor working every day only yards away from my office at a salary higher than my own, and with a full-time assistant at his disposal, assigned to a task he was admittedly incapable of completing successfully.
As it happened, I was too self-confident and too challenged by the state of drift and underutilization in which the Y found itself in the summer of 1977 to be very much bothered by his presence. He could have been an irritant. A constant second guesser of my every move. He could have been an in-house critic with the trustees, whom he knew very well, and with staff, many of whom he had hired or who had previously reported to him. That the board of directors did not recognize the potential for mischief in Urbont’s continued presence, holding a job for which he was clearly unqualified and with which he was very uncomfortable, well after retirement age, seemed amateurish.
Almost twenty years later, as I became the president of the International Rescue Committee, all was not well with the organization. My predecessor, Bob De Vecchi, and the leader he followed, Carel Sternberg, were the only CEOs the IRC had known in its storied fifty-plus-year history. Strapped for resources, having great difficulty finding enough cash to meet payroll, and organizationally challenged, the institution, I learned after the fact, needed rescue almost as much as the refugees it served. Rather than bid De Vecchi a fond farewell with warm thanks for his extraordinary service, which had been heroic in many ways, the IRC’s board of directors saw fit to elect him to be one of its own.
Playing that role was an invitation to Monday morning quarterbacking. Perhaps I should not have been surprised, because the IRC was institutionally immature, and nowhere more so than at the board level. Some key players, like John Whitehead, Winston Lord, and Dr. James Strickler, were outstanding leaders and recognized the need for change in board composition and expectation. And De Vecchi never once interfered with my chief executive role. Nonetheless, on the board there was a trustee married to a senior staff member who reported to me. On the board were also both a father and his son and a husband and his wife, serving simultaneously. As was the case at the Y, there was no common understanding about the financial obligations or the service requirements expected of trustees. It is hardly surprising that their charitable contributions and commitment of expertise and service were highly uneven. Taken together, they left a great deal to be desired.
Neither the Y nor the IRC could find a red carpet to roll out for their new CEO. Each was thoroughly unprepared to greet me and had given virtually no thought to an appropriate orientation or introduction to the institution, its key actors, and its formidable challenges.
Later, after I had announced my plans to step down as the CEO of the IRC, I interviewed with the search committee of Lincoln Center, chaired by the president and CEO of the Hearst Corporation, Frank Bennack. It was the IRC and the 92nd Street Y all over again. Strange governance practices seem to follow my career path. Serving on the search committee was my friend and former CEO Nat Leventhal. Leventhal, who had been president of Lincoln Center for some seventeen years, was an extremely close friend of his successor, Gordon Davis. They had practiced law together. They had both served in the administrations of Mayor Lindsay and Mayor Koch. Davis was also a trustee of Lincoln Center for part of the time that Leventhal served as president. Leventhal must have been pleased that Davis was selected to take his place, and he must have been saddened that Davis’s tenure as president lasted only nine months. Not only was Leventhal then given the opportunity to help select a second successor by serving on the search committee after Gordon’s resignation, but he had earlier been elected to Lincoln Center’s board as a full-fledged voting member.
Such a state of affairs is an invitation to difficulty and discomfort.
To put a new CEO in the position of being judged by a predecessor who held the post for almost two decades was problematic. Leventhal now served alongside trustees whom he knew quite well and staff with whom he had worked closely, if not actually hired. The temptation to ask him how I was performing and vice versa must have been irresistible. It is a credit to Leventhal that I cannot recall a single problem. He addressed all of his questions and observations to me only, personally and confidentially. I felt completely free to ask for his advice. Not everyone would have been as circumspect and thoughtful.
There was no organized preparation for my arrival. No formal briefings. No systematic way to meet key trustees, donors, and constituents. No budget for the following year. Few fund-raising plans were in place. I felt very much on my own.
Surprised by these experiences, I drew lessons from them. When I took my leave of the Y, the IRC, and Lincoln Center, I refused to become a trustee, to serve in any way (unless explicitly asked to do so by my professional successor), or even to be a member of an emeriti group. Nor would I play any formal role in the selection process for my successor.
Having served for eight, six, and twelve years, respectively, at the Y, the IRC, and Lincoln Center, there had been ample opportunity to influence the culture, the staffing, and trustee expectations at each organization. That was enough, indeed more than enough. There is a time to pass the torch. The responsibility for the future of an institution resides in the staff and the board being left behind.
In politics, from my viewpoint, nothing brought more honor to George W. Bush than his conduct after leaving office. Unlike his handpicked vice president, Dick Cheney, who was an incessant source of consistent and shrill criticism of President Barack Obama, Mr. Bush simply refused to publicly comment on the performance of his successor. The same can hardly be said of Jimmy Carter, with his running commentary on many of the policies of his successors, which accounts for his relative unpopularity with all of them.
A departing CEO should do everything possible to ensure a solid first year of institutional performance after his or her departure. Mobilize staff to present thorough and thoughtful transition briefings. Offer the successor an opportunity to meet and greet key figures in an efficient, congenial way. Kick no cans down the road. And then leave the
premises. Lock, stock, and barrel. But be available to provide advice whenever it is requested.
It has been rumored that some outside candidates to succeed the handpicked successor of Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, as the CEO of Microsoft, were put off by the presence of both men on the board of directors and decided not to compete for the job.
Can you blame them? Those privileged to be in charge in government, in corporations, or in nonprofit institutions should first and foremost ask what is best for citizens, shareholders, customers, patrons, and clients. Rare are the occasions when retired CEOs hanging around the institutional water cooler can be helpful to such key stakeholders. Resist the temptation to continue to feel needed. Do not stay beyond what the organization realistically requires.
When in doubt, leave.
Consider the words attributed to Oliver Cromwell, speaking to the Rump Parliament in 1653: “You have sat too long here for any good you have been doing. Depart, I say, and let us have done with you. In the name of God, go!”
W
HY DO OTHERWISE
intelligent and sophisticated board chairs and those closest to them fail to speak frankly with each other and with their CEOs about individual and collective performance?
Why is it so difficult to point to areas in need of leadership improvement and to insist on the development of a plan to remedy a state of affairs requiring high-level attention? For that matter, why do so many trustees of an institution fail to call themselves and their CEO to account for serious performance shortfalls?
Gary Parr once commented at a meeting that the New York Philharmonic had experienced fourteen successive years of operating deficits.
Fourteen
. It carried out two conductor searches, one resulting in the retention of Kurt Masur, the other, Loren Maazel. Both were widely regarded as botched in process and disappointing in outcome. The board also took the orchestra on the round-trip to and from Carnegie Hall that squandered credibility and goodwill. This is not a record of performance to boast about.