An Executive’s Guide to Looking Effective (Without necessarily being effective)

Originally published on Medium:

The cool thing about getting a job as an executive is that because it can pay so well, you can leave a company or a department after a couple years with a lot of money in your pocket. In all likelihood, the long-term consequences of your short-term decisions won’t be too apparent. This is especially true if you’re in a publicly traded company where “performance” is measured every 3 months instead of years or decades.

If you’re an executive, your ability to make effective strategic decisions is secondary. Actually having knowledge of how the business works is tertiary. After all, you don’t really need to stay there that long if you’re good at negotiating salaries and bonuses and you’re smart with your money.

To show your value to shareholders and investors what’s more important are the optics. What you actually accomplish isn’t necessarily as important as what it looks like you’re doing to improve the business on a quarterly basis.

Here are a few tips to help you look like you’re worth the large amount of money they’re paying you.

 

Adopt an “executive persona”

Think of the most iconic, charismatic leaders in the business world. They’ve all got a persona (whether it’s real or not):

• You can be the tough, all-nighter-pulling, Alpha executive in a well-tailored power suit.
• The supermom exec who successfully finds the balance between crushing board meetings and coaching her kids’ hockey team
• You can be the quirky, hoodie-wearing Silicon Valley CEO.
• An executive who wears the same outfit on a daily basis to “save their mental energy” for more important decisions.
• You can pretend that you’re the rebellious, “think-outside-the-box”, jet-setting, risk-taking, jeans-wearing, entrepreneurial exec.

Here’s a persona that many an executive in the financial industry has adopted almost too well.

It doesn’t matter which persona you pick. You just have to make sure that the persona you pick follows these two criteria:

1. It just has to be different enough from the person you replaced. This will give both employees and shareholders the impression that you’re there to shake things up and make some sweeping changes for the better of the company.
2. It has to be believable enough to show off your authenticity. For this, I would do what the most successful WWE professional wrestlers do. They take a real quirk in their personality and just exaggerate it to a point that it becomes a new character.

WWE Hall of Famer Donald Trump using his created “executive persona” in the ring alongside Stone Cold Steve Austin, Vince McMahon and Bobby Lashley.

Be “helpful”

Always present yourself to your employees (preferably when in a group setting) as someone who is willing to provide executive help for any “roadblocks” they might face in their day-to-day. Don’t actually help them, though. You’re busy. Actually helping takes time and effort that you don’t necessarily want to get mixed up in. We’re talking optics here. You need to project an image that you’re willing to help.

Remember, you must only ask how you can help when you’re in a public setting. That way, whoever actually wants to ask for help will have to do so in front of the entire company. Putting people on the spot like that will reduce the likelihood of them asking for anything for fear of looking foolish, weak or incompetent in front of the rest of the company. At the extreme, they risk asking something inappropriate from the high-level executive and get themselves fired.

Either way, the result is that you look like the benevolent leader with an “open door” policy, but because everyone’s so scared, you won’t actually have to do the work of making any changes.

Make your micro-management and bullying tactics look like you’re just “hands-on” and “getting shit done”

Yes, we all teach our kids that bullying is wrong. In this case, since you’re the boss, it’s not really bullying. No, not really. You’re simply showing employees that you’re forcefully getting things done. You’re not ineffectual like the last exec. As the new leader, you don’t want to get bogged down by useless processes. You are simply “passionate” and can get emotional when it comes to making sure that the business succeeds under your tenure.

To make it look like you’re getting things done, make sure that all emails you send to your middle-managers get marked as “Important” or “Urgent” or “Priority”. Ensure that cons

equences for employees who don’t respond to these emails on time are made clear.

You might be seen as micro-managing, but really, you simply want to make sure that your employees are staying focused on the strategic tasks at hand. You’re simply showing that you’re “hands on” and interested in how the business functions. It’s part of “being helpful”.

Of course, the most important thing if you get called out on your aggressive behaviour is to never apologize. Employees should just be grateful that you are sharing your wisdom and helping them succeed in their day-to-day.

Offer your employees “training opportunities”

Offering skills training to employees looking for both lateral and upward moves in the company is necessary. That should be standard in any good company.

However, if you want to look like you’re a great executive going above and beyond, you need to sponsor mandatory training programs that will make your company look like it’s also socially conscious and woke.

Here are some examples, in no particular order:

• Diversity training courses
• Anti-bullying classes
• Mindfulness training
• Anti-harassment training
• Business ethics
• Environmental consciousness training
• Employee engagement initiatives
• Et cetera…

Sure, those types of training programs can have some inherent value, especially if your company has a history of harassment, bullying or even employee burn-outs. However, the biggest value that they bring is really how good it makes the executive (and the company) look to employees, shareholders, the media and even the general public.

Let’s face it. The courses themselves can be empty or simply lip service. But for a relatively low investment, an executive can now have a great PR talking point. Now, his HR minions can brag about the company’s commitment to “preventing harassment in the workplace”, for example. Whether this actually stops sexual harassment in the company is irrelevant. The executive can now wash his or her hands when wrongdoing is reported because current employees have already received the training. If future harassment happens, the exec can always point to this training and say that the company isn’t to blame for the inappropriate behaviour of a few “bad apples”.

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Being an executive can be a great, but difficult job opportunity. Latest studies of the S&P 500 companies show that the median tenure of a CEO for example is about 5 years. In that short a time, could you really make a huge difference to justify the bonuses and salary that you negotiated so well? If you’re exceptional, sure. If you’re able to ride an upward trend and make it look like it was your leadership instead of luck, maybe. If you can turn a company around from the brink of bankruptcy, of course.

The truth is, making a difference in a company is difficult. Sure you can make strategic decisions, but for the most part, results of those will take a lot of time to actually show. You can only be shown to be effective by what you look like you’re doing during the quarter, not by what you’ve done. So instead doing the actual heavy lifting with results that won’t be seen until after you leave, just do the noisy, but ineffectual things that everyone will see. If you’re good, you can sell them on the value that you added to the company as you leave laughing to the bank and on to a new executive job at a different company to start the process over again.