CAN CORPORATE CEO’S REALLY BE SERVANT LEADERS? - PART II

Todd Teske’s Servant LeadershipTalk (With Tom Talking Between The Lines)

In Part I of this topic, I provided a lead-in regarding how to determine if a leader is a servant as told by Robert Greenleaf.  Following that introduction, here is Tom’s two cents – on multimillionaire CEO Todd Teske’s talk on what he calls his servant leader journey, for what it is worth. 

At his first job out of school at Arthur Anderson (the accounting firm that found itself in hot-water for cooking the books for Enron) Teske’s motivation was to “make money” and to “show the world I was going to make it”.  He continued down that path while at Arthur Anderson until he got married and began asking himself “What kind of life do I want?” His answer in part was to “save up enough money to buy a house and have a foundation to start a family”.  Then his daughter was born and “all of sudden this bundle of joy comes along and now I’ve got responsibility for that”.  And he gave up on “being this driven I wanted the next job, I want the next promotion so I can make more money”, and decided to abandon the sinking ship of Arthur Anderson, to go and work for small engine and associated equipment manufacturer, Briggs and Stratton Corporation.    

While at Briggs, his son was born, and Teske continued refining his leadership style to one that mirrored his family life.  Teske believed that “servant leadership starts with parenting.  It starts with your family.  Leading your family.”  As his kids grew and entered the world of after school sporting events to learn the fine art of competition, Teske wanted “to be that dad who was there for his family” and make it to those after school baseball games and swim meets to watch their failures and successes unfold. 

He built on his family-first leadership style when he was promoted to President of the Products Group at Briggs. Starting out in that role he asked himself “What does a President do?” and realized he didn’t want to “go out and tell everybody what to do , because I have no idea what they should do”.  He choose the non-command and control method (the stick instead of the carrot?) path of focusing on trying to be “helpful”.  Being helpful to him meant getting “out of my office” and “sitting in meetings” where he “didn’t say much and listened a lot” and “then started offering suggestions”.  “And all of a sudden the people went; ok this is sort of interesting”.  And even though Teske’s tells us that his suggestions apparently didn’t have anything to do with the turnaround, he takes credit with the team by proclaiming, “we turned the business around”. 

Teske doesn’t tell us what that turnaround entailed, but the team-led results apparently played a role in getting the President of the Products Group promoted to Corporate “Chief Operating Officer and all this other stuff”.  It was there he “learned a lot along the way as a servant leader”.  He also does not tell us what sort of rewards the rest of the team received for their part in the turnaround, but maybe it is safe to assume they got to keep their jobs on the team, or at least most of them did if they survived any future downsizing or streamlining that might play out, or perhaps it is better not to jump to those sorts of conclusions.  The servant leader he was then was profoundly promoted to the CEO of Briggs where he was “ultimately now being in charge, being the CEO of a 2-billion-dollar company – and understanding at the time that there is 7000 people that now relied on me!”

He made light of his new found power position by joking with his now much bigger “team” that his real job was to “shake hands, kiss babies, cut ribbons, and give speeches”.  But then he would clarify for them, after the laughter and after shutting the plant down and making all the workers come out and shut-up and listen to his speech, that – ”You are the people on a day in and day out basis that, you are the ones that matter, whether we are doing good in the world.  I can make decisions, but ultimately what it comes down to is the decisions you make on a day to day basis, making those engines, making those products, that is really what matters.”  And switching hats from the servant leader to the mission-driven-leader he also told them – “ You’re the ones that fulfill our mission of providing power to people to get work done and make their lives better.”, which I wonder if the Briggs advertising teams ever looked into making a jingle out of based on the song POWER TO THE PEOPLE by John Lennon.  That mission also makes mowing the lawn or snow blowing the driveway sound pretty darn revolutionary and important. 

The workers apparently went back to the assembly line making engines with renewed zest and zeal and Teske tried to figure out what to do about all the new potential pesky perks his latest promotion offered. “Because all of a sudden, I started getting all these people inviting me to these cool things.  The Masters, I am a big golfer, I love golf.  I am terrible at it, but I love it.  The Kentucky Derby, the Packers in the Super Bowl.”  Regrettably, despite how much people wanted him, and cared about what he had to say, his passion for competitive professional sports would have to be put on hold as he was not able to “go to any of those, because they violate our integrity policy.” 

At first I felt a bit sorry for Teske at having to turn down all the free tickets, but realized that if he really wanted to go, he probably could have afforded to buy his own tickets (probably even in the luxury boxes, not the cheap bleacher seats) with the new found good fortune of the multi-milliondollar compensation  that came with the CEO title and the restrictive integrity policy.  Teske concluded this phase of his leadership journey tale by throwing at the audience the other sorry side of being a CEO – “You know CEO’s as a group are just slightly above politicians when it comes to respect and values and everything else, except individually people show you a lot of respect, wow I must be really important.”  I was wondering if he ever asked himself why that was the case – the lack of respect for the CEO issue, not his new found realization of the importance of CEO’s.

Teske’s struggles with power along his path to leadership, and the bragging he heard from former CEO’s, taught him to tell people that “being a CEO is what I do, […] not who I am!  Who I am is a leader, a servant-leader.  Who I am hopefully is a really good dad.  Who I am is hopefully a really good husband.  Who I am is somebody who wants to do things in the community to make the community better.”  And with a tip of his servant leader hat to the remaining workers at Briggs and Stratton, he pointed out that “at the end of the day it is about all these people that work at Briggs and Stratton today.  It is about all these people in the community who want to do good things in the community to make the communities better.”  He didn’t mention it, but an internet search reveals that during his tenure as CEO, employment had gone down from the 7000 folks who he said worked for Briggs in 2010 when he started, to just over 5000 in 2019 when he gave the talk.  My guess is that the 2000 or so folks who lost their jobs while Teske was out “kissing babies, cutting ribbons, and making speeches” probably weren’t integral to the “doing great things” that Briggs and Stratton was all about on that day. 

The grand finale of Teske’s talk was another tip of the hat to the Big CEO in the Sky who seems to be his ultimate guide in leadership.  In the beginning of his talk he temped the audience to listen to the rest of his talk by sharing from this ultimate source – “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy, but don’t love, I am nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s word with power revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain as day, if I have faith to say to a mountain “jump” and it jumps, but I don’t love I am nothing. “  He put his love-leader hat back on and wrapped things up by revealing that the opening  quote was from 1^st Corinthians Chapter 13 as cited in the “MISSION” and that the final verses reminded the listener-reader that “’love never gives up’, and there it is – ‘Love cares more for others than for self. ‘“

Teske didn’t clarify what his reference to the “MISSION” was, but it might be the book MISSION-DRIVEN LEADERSHIP – MY JOURNEY AS A RADICAL CAPITOLIST written by Mark Bertolini the  former Chairman and CEO of Aetna(the large health insurance agency who took away Bertolini’s CEO title after merging with CVS pharmacy).  Bertolini’s tale of CEO success and failure was apparently shaped in part by his own run-ins with mountains where he suffered serious injuries in a downhill skiing accident that forced him to rethink his own motivations as CEO.  Bertolini chose the more eastern-empire inspired paths of yoga and meditation to guide him to his tough-love or mission-driven leadership practice.  Unless I decide to go to the market and fork over some cash to get Bertolini’s book I may never know for sure where Teske got his inspiration for the Corinthian quote.  Doing a search for the term “love-leader” on the internet reveals that there are quite a few other former CEO types who jumped on the love-leader bandwagon by following the leader Saint Paul who is credited with writing the first guide on the importance of using love to navigate your way to success in the then Roman dominated empire.      

After this analysis of Teske’s talk, what I heard was that he was indeed a typical leader-first (as defined by Robert Greenleaf) power and money motivated guy, just like the rest of his fellow corporate CEOs.  He tried to temper his motivations for material goods, money and power by following policies that portrayed him as loving his family, his teams, and the communities where his corporation resided.  But in the end, money talks and leads to promotions and more money and power, along with some other temptations that should not be mentioned in front of corporate boards.  However, this is not the end of the story, but merely my opinion.  Stay tuned for the next part of this story to be told in a coming post where we will look into Robert Greenleaf’s “best-test” of the servant-leader and figure out if Teske was more of a “creaking gate” or a love-lead-leader.

CAN CORPORATE CEO'S REALLY BE SERVANT-LEADERS? - PART I

Servant-First Versus Leader-First

Over the years I have read a number of books written by and listened to talks given by Chief Executive Officers of Corporations and other upper management types, who are proud to announce their adoption of the “servant leader” moniker.  It is my opinion that the title proclamation has little if anything to do with the servant-leader as defined by Robert Greenleaf.  Greenleaf came up with the hyphenated version of the name and clarified what he meant by it in his 1970 essay THE SERVANT AS LEADER. 

Greenleaf answered the question “Who Is the Servant-Leader”, by describing two extremes of leadership that he believed existed.  There is the servant-first version where “becoming a servant-leader begins with the natural feeling that one wants to serve, serve first.  Then conscious choice brings one to aspire to lead.”  And then there is the opposite extreme of the leader-first who follows the leadership path because of “the need to assuage an unusual power drive or to acquire material possessions.  For such people, it will be a later choice to serve – after leadership is established.” 

The other day I received an email from the Wisconsin ServantLeadership group that contained a link to an excerpt from a talk titled Who I Am Vs. What I Do from Ted Teske with the tagline “Servant-Leader and CEO of Briggs & Stratton”.  As a former student of servant leadership, the email perked my interest so I clicked on the link and watched Teske’s talk.  Finding the excerpt interesting, I went to the Wisconsin Servant Leadership’s web page and found another link to Teske’s entire talk and listened to that as well.  You may read a transcript of Teske’s talk that I produced here.   

Teske’s talk provides some good insights into the life and thought of a corporate CEO and how the journey of leadership unfolds based on life changing events.  It also reveals the many leadership hats CEO’s can choose from in adorning their corporate head with as they guide their vessels around or into the rocks. And I also believe it reveals some of the inner motivations of CEO types, and that despite Teske’s claims to servant-leadership fame, he and his fellow CEO’s are really not worthy of the title as defined in the writings of Robert Greenleaf discussed above.  It is my belief that for corporations to be successful in their ultimate mission of serving the share-holder and growing the corporation through profits, mergers, and acquisitions, a leader-first  CEO must follow the path of power, profit, and material possession if they want to succeed in the world controlled by global corporations, even if who they are is not what they do. 

The successful corporate leader needs to be flexible in the image they portray to the selected audience if they hope to remain on top of the ladder, and so they have to be willing to change their leadership hat many times to keep up appearances.  But in the end what the audience should pay attention to is not the hat the leader is wearing, or the talk that they talk, but rather to look back at the path they have followed and find out what has or has not been trampled along the way.  For it is the walk they walk that defines them, not the talk they talk.  More on determining what the CEO walk is, after the talk, which includes some of my color commentary in Part 2 of this topic. 

Arrogant-Leader

Ar-ro-gance – a feeling or an impression of superiority manifested in an overbearing manner or presumptuous claims

Lead-er – a person who has commanding authority or influence

To proclaim oneself a leader is a declaration of arrogance.  Perhaps the best one can hope for following such a proclamation is for the pro-claimer to profess the arrogance in order to avoiding leading anyone except the leader down the path the leader chooses to follow.  In other words, I best just foolishly follow my own path, and warn the few potential followers of my chosen path of the folly they face in following me.  Anything less is nothing less than something used to lead fish into a trap. 

Todd Teske CEO Briggs and Stratton Servant Leadership Talk Transcript

What follows is a transcript of a talk from Todd Teske, The Chairman, President, & CEO of Briggs and Stratton Corporation on his servant leadership journey.  The talk was presented on April 2, 2019 at the Wisconsin Lutheran College in Milwaukee Wisconsin at the Wisconsin Servant Leader City Tour Series.  The transcript was written based on the video recording of the talk available at the following website:  
https://vimeo.com/wiservantleadership .  I will be posting some thoughts on this talk regarding Teske's version of servant leadership soon.  

So, let me just share something with you if I could.  “If I speak with human eloquence and angelic ecstasy, but don’t love, I am nothing but the creaking of a rusty gate.  If I speak God’s word with power revealing all His mysteries and making everything plain as day, if I have faith to say to a mountain “jump” and it jumps, but I don’t love I am nothing.  If I give everything I own to the poor and even go to the stake to be burned martyr, but don’t love, I have gotten nowhere.  So, no matter what I say, what I believe, and what I do, I am bankrupt without love.”  And that is where Steve ended.  

And so when Dick called me up, I have a tendency to be in front of people quite a bit, whether it’s video blog at Briggs, or something like this, or quarterly meetings in front of all our employees, that sort of thing it is always about the message – what do I want to convey.  So, when Dick contacted me about servant leadership, I jumped all over this one because this topic is really important to me.  And he asked me to share my journey.  

Now here is the problem Tom, there is no I in servant leadership, so I tried to figure out how to do this thing without using the word I, and unless I referred to myself in the third person which is kind of weird, I got to use the word I, so I apologize.  

So, what it caused me to do though is think about my life.  And how did I get on this servant leadership journey.   So, I am going to give you some specific dates, I am not going to take you all the way back from when I was born, don’t worry about that.  But ultimately there are some really important dates that speak to me in terms of my journey.  

The first one is June 15th 1987, that’s the day I started with Arthur Anderson.  Now growing up, my folks did not have a lot of money,  I was never wanting for anything, but we didn’t take vacations or anything like that, so what I really wanted to do, and I had to reflect on why did I think the way I thought, why did I act the way I acted was I was excited.  I was going to go make money, I couldn’t wait to go make money because I never had a lot of money when I was a kid.  So, I remember getting in my suit, and having the brief case and driving downtown to the Seven Seven Wisconsin Building and I was on my way to show the world I was going to make it.  And that is what it was about.  I never thought about servant leadership back then. 

The second date is June 16th 1990.  That’s the day I got married.  So, I married this really, really wonderful woman.  Who for now almost 29 years has put up with all my issues and faults and she has been a really great partner in life.  Did I mention she has been a really, really great woman?  She is here today; I got the date right.  You know what that was important, but it was still about, Kim and I were planners and what Kim and I wanted to do was save up enough money to buy a house and have a foundation to start a family.  

The real date that started servant leadership for me was August 3rd 1995, that was the day my daughter was born.  You see up to that point it was all about I want to be a partner at Arthur Anderson, I want to make all kinds of money, I want that kind of lifestyle, then all of a sudden this little bundle of joy comes along and now I’ve got responsibility for that.  And then Kim decided she was going (she was a teacher) and she decided she was going to be a 24-7 mom.  So, what was happening was all of a sudden, I went from being this driven I wanted the next job, I want the next promotion so I can make more money to what kind of life do I want.  

So, in April of 1996 I made the decision to leave Author Anderson.  I didn’t see my daughter, I didn’t like the lifestyle, so I left.  I went to Briggs.  And ultimately on August 2, 1997 was when our son CJ was born.  And so now all of a sudden, I had to decide, what did I want.  I never wanted to be CEO of Briggs at that point in time.  But it was important for me to be a leader to my family, to be a leader for my kids.  Because I contend that servant leadership starts with parenting.  It starts with your family.  Leading your family.  I wanted to be the dad that was there when CJ struck out and when CJ hit the home run.  I wanted to be the dad that was there when Taylor missed the flip turn in swimming and then got her personal best in a different meet.  I wanted to be that dad who was there for his family.  

So then continuing on at Briggs, on August of 2003 was another profound date for me, that is when I became president of our products group.  Now up until that point I was pretty much in finance, accounting, it was all about the rules it was all about the numbers, did the debits equal the credits, all about the good stuff for all the accountants in the room.  But ultimately this one was different, because I remember going up to Jefferson where my office was located and I sat in my office and I went – what am I supposed to do?  What does a president do?  So, I thought about it and I thought here is what I don’t want to do – I don’t want to go out and tell everybody what they should do, because I have no idea what they should do.  But you know there are some people that would do that, you guys referred to it early this morning, when you talked about command and control and things like that. So, I thought no, no, no, how can I be helpful?  

So, I just got out of my office and started sitting in meetings, didn’t say much and listened a lot.  And then started offering suggestions, I didn’t tell them what to do.  And all of a sudden people went, ok this is sort of interesting.  And this was a turnaround situation, and I didn’t have anything to do with the turnaround.  The team did, we turned the business around.  

And then I went on to be the Chief Operating Officer and all this other stuff and learned a lot along the way as a servant leader.  

But the next really profound date was January 1, 2010.  That was the day I became CEO of Briggs.  That was an interesting day, not the day itself, but ultimately now being in charge, being the CEO of a 2-billion-dollar company.  And understanding at the time that there is 7000 people that now relied on me.  

But here is what is funny about it, I relied on them.  You see I joke with the team all that time that my job is to shake hands, kiss babies, cut ribbons, and give speeches.  So today I have shaken hands, now I am giving a speech, I am working really hard today.  But I go in to our plants and we shut the plant down and we bring everybody together and I tell them that and they all laugh, right?  And I say no, no, you don’t understand.  You are the people on a day in and day out basis that, you are the ones that matter, whether we are doing good in the world.  I can make decisions, but ultimately what it comes down to is the decisions you make on a day to day basis, making those engines, making those products, that is really what matters. You’re the ones that fulfill our mission of providing power to people to get work done and make their lives better.  

Now what’s interesting about being a CEO is you have a choice.  I learned this early on, right after January 1st.  Because all of a sudden, I started getting all these people inviting me to these cool things.  The Masters, I am a big golfer, I love golf.  I am terrible at it, but I love it.  The Kentucky Derby, the Packers in the Super Bowl.  By the way I didn’t go to any of those, because they violate our integrity policy.  So, don’t go back to Briggs and tell them I went to those, because I didn’t.  But people wanted me to go with them to places, wow that’s really cool.  People wanted me to come up and speak.  Wow people care about what I have to say.  You know CEO’s as a group are just slightly above politicians when it comes to respect and values and everything else, except individually people show you a lot of respect, wow I must be really important.  

You see to this day, here is what I fight, every day.  Being a CEO is what I do, being a CEO is not who I am.  Who I am is a leader, a servant-leader.  Who I am hopefully is a really good dad.  Who I am is hopefully a really good husband.  Who I am is somebody who wants to do things in the community to make the community better.  Because here is the deal, there is going to be a day, where I am not going to be CEO anymore.  Now if it is all about I and me, and everything else, you hear it, I hear it all the time from retired CEO’s.  Because what they do is they say “Hi I am so and so, I am the retired CEO of - fill in a big company, and you know what I did when I was there?  I did this, and I did this, and I did this”  and you want to look at him, and you are really polite, and you want to go “you didn’t do anything, it is the people that work for you that  you had the privilege of leading, I have no idea how well you lead, but you had the privilege of leading the people who did all that.  So it is not about me, and I use the word I a lot.  But at the end of the day it is about all these people that work at Briggs and Stratton today.  It is about all these people in the community who want to do good things in the community to make the communities better.  

So let me leave you with this.  What I read to you to begin with was 1st Corinthians 13.  It was out of The Message.  And let me continue on with two more versus. But I think this second verse I am going to read to you really drives home what servant leadership is all about.  What it goes on to say – “love never gives up”, and there it is.  “Love cares more for others than for self. “