Entrepreneurial Leadership by Joel Peterson

Author:Joel Peterson
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Harpercollins Leadership
Published: 2020-02-21T00:00:00+00:00

RECAP

•Learn to give—and to receive—regular feedback, embracing the ten feedback rules until they come naturally.

•Make feedback fun, a way to learn and to grow, never taking offense, always seeing it as information that can either be incorporated or ignored.

•Consider hiring a coach to help you gain the skills you need, just as if you were an elite athlete.

STEP 4

FIRING WITH EMPATHY

Treat [the person you’re firing] the same way you’d want to be treated if you were in that situation. They’re still a good person, just not the right fit. So how do you help them move on in a productive way that allows them to maintain their dignity?

—Mary Barra, CEO General Motors, interview, Esquire, April 26, 2016

In 2007, after nearly a decade of spectacular growth, JetBlue began to struggle. A Valentine’s Day ice storm at New York’s Kennedy International Airport, a JetBlue hub, had stranded passengers. Hundreds of people were stuck in planes on the tarmac for hours. The episode revealed glaring weaknesses in our operating systems. In our boardroom, directors discussed not only the costly incident and its aftermath but the larger lessons we should draw from it.

Since its first flight in 2000, JetBlue had risen to become America’s eighth-largest airline. Much of the credit for that goes to its visionary founder, David Neeleman. But in the months after the so-called Valentine’s Day Massacre, directors slowly reached consensus that for all his brilliance as a company founder, Neeleman might no longer be the best person to serve as JetBlue’s CEO going into its next chapter. Even though he’d started the company and remained its largest individual shareholder, it was time to do what managers must do with employees for whom the job is no longer a fit—replace him.

Since I was the lead director, I drew the short straw. Another director and I went to his office and told David, clearly and directly, that we’d decided to appoint a new CEO and briefly explained why. To soften the blow, we asked him to remain as chairman of the board. David was upset and said we were making a mistake. We listened to his protests but remained resolute and moved the discussion to next steps, including a public announcement of the leadership change.

More than a decade later, David remains upset about the board’s decision. When I showed him the manuscript for this book prior to publication, David sent me a long email defending his actions and criticizing directors and his successor. It read, in part: “This is not to say that I didn’t make mistakes running the company. I did, but those mistakes were fixable and were in the process of being fixed before I was fired. The board acted way too hastily.”

Despite that, David and I have maintained a long-running professional relationship. I continue to consider him the greatest commercial airline entrepreneur of all time. I even personally invested in his launch of Azul, a low-cost airline based in Brazil, where he grew up.

Even the best leaders dread firing people.

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