You Are Fired!

Yesterday I had a sales presentation with a senior vice president of a huge software company. I introduced him to our approach on Sustainable High Performance and shared some of our tools and strategies with him. He was extremely excited about our work and totally understood how the performance of his team and his own could be significantly improved. After discussing some more details he came up with one big BUT. He said, "I am certain that if I invest in my team to improve their sustainable performance, I might get fired."  He was very serious about it and told me about the perception in times of cost cutting and how the corporate culture doesn't support it. Only investments that are at the core of the business can be made. That statement cracked me up because what is more at the core of business than high performing people? As you can imagine, I went home without a new exciting deal - but instead, with a new perspective on how poisoned many corporate cultures are, how trapped many senior leaders are and how little knowledge there is about what it takes to deliver high performance. I guess the great news is that there is plenty of room for improvement and tons of work to do  :-)

By Jogi Rippel, CEO and Founder
TIGNUM - Institute for Sustainable High Performance

Comments

[Jim Remsy]

You got me. I totally see how i react to the cost cutting and how my colleagues deal with it. Pure short term thinking which might be ok when in a super survival mode. But let's be realistic- most of us are not and we could step up. But most people around me are afraid of impacting their career negatively. Really sad to realize it. What's the price for it?

[SteveO]

Unfortunately, this is what happens in a crisis. Leaders either fight (to improve), flight (avoid the challenges by leaving the company), or freeze (use the crisis as an excuse to do nothing). When so many CEOs and exec board members are getting their pink slips its a scary time for leaders with any guts to do what's right. In the US you add the invasive media and the meddling government and its even worse. You're blog is right on but I'd love to see some leaders step outside of this frightening norm.