Support Groups--Where CEOs Help CEOs
Bob Morris, chief executive, was talking about his goals.
“Every time I write down my fundamental life purpose, it comes out different,” he said. “But they all have the word ‘harmony’ in them.”
His light blue eyes looking from face to face around the room, Morris explained his difficulty finding a rewarding role in his months-old company, which operates a child-care center in Cypress and plans to open several more.
Sure, the sandy-haired 44-year-old said, he wants to earn $300,000 a year. But other things are just as important. “I need to find the niche where I get to come forth completely as a human being,” Morris said.
Group therapy? No--and yes. This was a meeting last week of the Summit Team, one of a growing number of forums in which top corporate executives gather in small groups, drop their facades of omnipotence and, in styles that range from strait-laced to funky, seek out the frank counsel of their peers.
At dozens of conference tables across the country--including nearly 50 in Southern California--these chief executive and near-CEOs, mostly of small- and medium-sized firms, are sitting down once a month to bare their hidden personal vulnerabilities, test business plans and build leadership skills in an atmosphere that combines support with surgically sharp criticism.
How do I go about firing my controller and making sure the new one doesn’t fail, too? What do I do about a son who got straight A’s in high school but won’t stop partying at college? Can I give my franchisees more say in corporate policy without diluting my authority? How do I meld my values and my business? These are the kinds of questions chief executives are paying as much as $10,000 per year to run by other chief executives.
“Only kings know the affairs of kings,” explained Bill Williams, president of the Executive Committee, the oldest and largest of the organizations that package and coordinate executive support groups. “They can come expose their downsides, their frailties, their concerns, their worries.”
Learned More at Parties
TEC, as Williams’ group is known, was founded in 1957 by a Milwaukee businessman who realized that he learned more during the cocktail parties at management seminars than at the formal sessions. Most of the nation’s 150 TEC groups, including 37 in Southern California, are run by Williams’ company in San Diego, while the original organization in Milwaukee runs groups in Wisconsin and Michigan. Participation has doubled to 1,600 chief executives in the past three years, Williams said.
TEC pioneered the format that other support groups have adapted. A TEC group of up to 14 chief executives, chosen to represent diverse industries, meets once a month for a full day at one of the member’s firms. In the morning, an outside expert makes a presentation on financial planning, marketing, taxes, investing, team building, current affairs or some other topic of interest to the group.
The heavy-duty work begins after lunch. Members present their “issues,” the business and personal challenges about which they have nowhere else to turn for advice. Their colleagues then drill them with questions, offer parallels from their own businesses and suggest solutions or, more often, the paths to take to find solutions.
In a typical exchange, James H. Furry, president of Grand American Fare, a Santa Monica company that operates 33 restaurants with total revenue of about $30 million, needed feedback on a management issue from his TEC group, which met in Lawndale recently.
Reason Questioned
The problem: Furry wanted his restaurants’ general managers to maintain a 5 1/2-day work week, but the managers wanted to cut back to five days.
“What is your fear about the five days?” asked Samuel K. Freshman, chairman and president of Standard Management Co., a real estate company in Los Angeles.
“I think it’s just another lowering of standards and expectations,” Furry replied.
“I wouldn’t care if my general manager worked one hour a day or one hour a week, as long as his supervisors were doing the job,” said Aaron Cohen, president of United Education & Software, a troubled chain of trade schools based in Encino. “A manager’s job is to make sure other people do their job.”
Michael W. Arthur, executive vice president of Los Angeles-based Sizzler Restaurants International, disagreed. “It’s incredible, the difference between when the general manager is in or not,” he said. “You can go in as a customer and see it.”
On this issue, Furry, a husky 40-year-old whose restaurants include the Saddle Peak Lodge in Calabasas and the Oar House in Santa Monica, acknowledged that he was not ready to change his mind.
“Why am I holding on?” he said. “It’s because it’s one of the reasons we’ve been successful.”
Afterward, Freshman reflected on the value of such repartee.
“Anywhere else,” he said, “everybody has an ax to grind or deal with. If you’re dealing with a consultant, they’re trying to sell more consulting services. If you’re dealing with your board of directors, it’s usually your relatives, your stockholders, your attorney, your key employees. They’re influenced in the advice they’re giving you by their relationship to you.
Unhelpful for Some
“TEC is the only place I’ve ever found where I get truly unbiased advice and sincere advice,” Freshman said. “It’s sort of a mutual exchange. You get out of it what you put into it. These people are more frank with you than even your spouse.”
Executives uncomfortable with give-and-take find groups such as TEC unhelpful.
“For the person who’s not willing to take a stand or take a risk, it’s not a good place to be, and if you’re not a good listener, it’s not a good place to be,” said Judith Segal, a Los Angeles management consultant who has worked with several support groups. “For the person who thinks they know everything, it is for them, but they won’t enjoy it.”
Each TEC group is led by a “chairman,” a management consultant who coordinates all the meetings and conducts monthly one-on-one coaching sessions with the members. A poor chairman may mean that a group goes over the same issues endlessly, Segal warned. Executives pay $7,200 per year to participate.
Similar rewards can be had for less. After Lon H. Records, president of Target Specialty Products, an agricultural chemical company in Cerritos, read about TEC in a financial publication in 1985, he decided to recruit a support group of his own.
Three and a half years later, the Roundtable--a dozen top decision makers, from a high school principal to other corporate presidents--is still meeting for two hours once a month to address members’ business and personal concerns. The dues are about $25 quarterly.
“I’m a big believer in networking,” Records said. “I am definitely not bright enough to be able to solve all the problems I’m faced with. Why should I try to reinvent the wheel all the time?”
At the Summit Team, members are intent on inventing whole new ways of conducting business.
Emotional Drain
Founded two years ago by Santa Monica management consultant Doug Kruschke, a former TEC chairman, the group has a decided “new age” focus. Many of the corporate chiefs who pay $9,800 annually to participate are veterans of therapy, est or other human potential programs. They hug and cry. When they understand a colleague’s comment, they say, “I hear you.” When they don’t, they say, “I’m not getting it.”
The 12-hour monthly meetings can be an emotional drain, careening from revealing descriptions of foundering love relationships to intense assessments of personal and business goals to heated discussions of participants’ corporate crises. The process of learning to peel back layers of armor and share openly with others in the group is as important, members say, as what is shared.
“We’re helping people to ask the question and answer the question, ‘What is real success for me?’ ” Kruschke explained. “ ‘What’s the best way for me to achieve that? What do I have to learn and develop to be able to do that?’ If people are interested in that kind of thing, they fit in our program. If those are weird questions, they don’t belong with us.”
While more introspective than a typical Summit Team program, the goal-setting exercise Bob Morris and six other chief executives undertook one morning last week at a hotel in Culver City demonstrated the group’s unconventional approach.
Morris talked about his personal goals--”to play a lot,” to stop smoking, to drop 15 pounds.
“I am about creating intimacy, more and more, with each person with whom I have a relationship,” he said.
And he read aloud the mission statement he had drafted for his new child-care company: “To serve the children, the parents, the community and the staff in a self-esteem-based child-care organization while providing an excellent ROI (return on investment) to the investor.”
Welcomed Reunion
Richard S. Lapine, president of Signature Housewares, a Camarillo firm with $7.5 million in revenue last year, was in tears. For months, Morris, busy with selling his successful photo processing lab and starting his new firm, had not brought any enthusiasm to the Summit Team. But now Lapine felt he had.
“I wanted to shout, ‘Welcome back!’ because, all of a sudden, I recognized the person who I’ve spent so many years with who was gone the last six months,” Lapine said.
Others in the group were moved by Morris’ description of his vision for better child care--so moved that Morris seemed to get more excited about his business as he listened.
“I just up-leveled the whole thing, the child-care deal,” he said. “I think that’s the only place meaningful work can be done.”
Kruschke smiled. His lecture, earlier, on the difference between pursuing goals that others consider important and goals that bring genuine satisfaction had been neatly illustrated. “The important thing is,” he told Morris, “you’re hooking up with your love.”
It isn’t easy. Mark H. Shaw, chief executive of the 190-congregation United Church of Religious Science, headquartered in Los Angeles, was joining the group for the first time.
“I’m a public speaker,” Shaw said as he introduced himself, “but the topic I never talk about is myself.”
Then, for more than an hour, he stripped himself bare, talking about the troubles of his childhood, his shortcomings as a leader and his doubts about his career.
As Shaw ended, the other executives sighed and shook their heads.
“I want to acknowledge,” Lapine said, “that’s an awful lot of sharing for someone who said they didn’t want to.”
