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 1st 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.
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