Tag Archives: business situations

Madoff Accountant Friehling Could Be More Culpable Than Madoff

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If You Want the Swindlers, Get Their Accountants

“If you want the Mafia, get their lawyers,” explains Mitchell McDeere, formerly of Bendini, Lambert and Locke.

I think we’re missing the real villains in the Bernard Madoff affair. Madoff, in case you’ve been under a rock for the last few months, is the 70-year old investment fund head who just pled guilty to bilking investors out of $65 billion. (In reality, Madoff only bilked them out of the $17 billion they invested with him, not the $48 billion in imaginary profits.)

Without rehashing all of the details, suffice it to say that Bernard Madoff will be spending the rest of his life in prison – right where he belongs.

Let’s Not Stop at People Named Madoff

The swindled investors, understandably, want to squeeze the life out of everyone remotely related to Madoff. Besides Bernard Madoff, they want Ruth Madoff (Bernie’s wife and former employee). They want Mark and Andrew Madoff (Bernie’s sons and former employees). They want their pound of flesh from anyone whose name rhymes with Madoff. Though they’re missing the real villains.

The criminals they should be most angry with include the Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) and the SEC employees who failed to investigate reports of the fraud… and Madoff’s accountant. (We’ll save our contempt for the SEC’s handling of this mess for a later post; today we’re focused on the accountant.)

No one seemed to care this past week when David G. Friehling, Madoff’s 49-year old accountant, turned himself in to authorities to face criminal charges for his role in helping Madoff get away with the biggest investment fraud in history.




If the allegations against Friehling are true, in many ways his activity is even more vile and despicable than Madoff’s. If the charges are true, he is the most culpable of all in my opinion. Friehling, you see, was tasked with auditing Madoff’s business dealings and certifying the results. Specifically, Friehling has been charged with falsely certifying that he had prepared Madoff’s audit statements in accordance with generally accepted accounting principles. Those statements were sent to the SEC and to Madoff’s clients.

Friehling Could Be Twice the Criminal Madoff Is

We know Madoff is a criminal; and we hate him because he violated a fiduciary duty he had to his clients. He is a disgusting human being who should feel the full force of the law against him. However, if Friehling is found guilty, he deserves more punishment than Madoff for two reasons: 1) He violated not only a fiduciary duty to Madoff’s victims, but a regulatory duty as well; and 2) We need to do whatever we can to prevent another Madoff situation in the future.

Friehling’s firm was Madoff’s accountant and sole auditor for at least 17 years. In that time, Madoff made billions, while Friehling merely made millions. The kind of greed that drove Madoff will not be easily swayed by a few perp walks and 10 years in jail. (As I mentioned, Madoff is 70 years old, so he’s probably got ten years left.) Anyone wishing to follow in Madoff’s footsteps might be willing to trade billions today for a possible, though not probable, jail sentence down the road.

If You Want the Swindlers, Get Their Accountants

We’re back to the concept introduced by Mitch McDeere… Without a CPA to certify the fraud, you cannot defraud at the level of Bernard Madoff; although the government doesn’t seem to understand this. (Much like FBI Agent Wayne Tarrance had trouble understanding the concept when McDeere first introduced it to him.)

Friehling is the only person besides Madoff to be charged in the fraud so far; though he was released after his arraignment on bail of $2.5 million. At 49 years old, he poses a much greater flight risk than Madoff… Friehling, you see, has something to lose: The rest of his adult life. He faces a maximum sentence of 105 years in prison if convicted on all counts. Not enough, I say, if the charges are true.

Friehling has been charged with securities fraud, aiding and abetting investment adviser fraud, and four counts of filing false audit reports with the SEC. And while both Madoff and Friehling deserve to spend the rest of their lives in prison (if the allegations against Friehling are true), a greater example should be made of Friehling. His perp walks should be longer, his prison cell should be scarier and more bleak, and his name should become as well known as Madoff or Ponzi.

The same government that was asleep at the wheel during Madoff’s rise, should do everything in it’s power to prevent future Madoffs – and this means getting their accountants, and getting them good.

 

The Nerds are Taking Over – What The Terminator can Teach Us About Leadership

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Skynet is Here, and the Nerds are at the Controls

(Terminator fans can probably skip the next two paragraphs, as they’re just an explanation of the havoc we can expect in our not-too-distant future.)

Skynet, for the uninformed, is a computer-based defense system, created by nerds working for the U.S. military in the 1990s. Long story short, Skynet was put in control of all of the U.S. military’s weapons and given the task of protecting Americans from all threats. Skynet was such a powerful computer program that it “learned” at an exponential rate until it became self-aware.

Skynet, which was basically created to remove the possibility of human error in the event of an enemy attack, eventually turned on the very humans it was designed to protect (it deemed them a threat when they tried to shut it down), and it decided to terminate all humans to protect its own existence.

Can You Even Spell IT?

Welcome to 2009, where instead of Cyberdyne Systems’ Skynet program, we have our various corporate IT departments protecting us from ourselves. (IT, by the way, is short for Information Technology. An oxymoron really, since no one involved with technology is ever very forthcoming with any information.)

At my company this week, our self-aware IT department blocked our regional employees from accessing our own consumer-facing websites because they were “uncategorized.” Never mind that it is the IT department’s job to categorize these sites, or that these websites have been live and accessible for ten years.

This team also blocked employees in our corporate office from accessing our advertising agency’s demo site (where we login to view details of the current marketing programs and make changes to artwork, etc.). The violation here, you ask? Not sure, though the following menacing message appeared on everyone’s screen who attempted to access the website:

“This site is blocked by Corporate Policy.

Reason for restriction: Administrative Custom List Settings”

Aha! The three big threats to our internal network security are clearly computer worms, malicious viruses and “Administrative Custom List Settings.”

While I find this just a little bit humorous today, I was not laughing during the seven hours Thursday while I jumped through hoop after hoop to get the website lifted from the banned domains’ list.




Better Safe than Sorry

Of course, the nerd-driven event this week that clearly proved to be a sign that Skynet is upon us and is exponentially becoming self-aware, happened when one of our vendors (finally) disclosed that they had been “scrubbing” our customer email lists and destroying those that were equated with “domains that have suspicious registration and DNS configuration settings.” While I have no idea what that means in English, suffice it to say that this vendor, without direction from us, had been purging our records of valid customer email addresses because they didn’t like the way the email addresses smelled.

This vendor has potentially cost us hundreds of thousands of dollars all in the name of “data integrity.” The CEO of this company had the nerve to claim that it is better to be safe, than to be sorry.

Really? That’s what you’re going with here? No one asked you to protect us; and as it turns out, you were protecting us from nothing.

When we examined the recent email addresses they had purged (they kept a record of what they deleted in the past week), we found no malicious threats, no spammers and no breach to our data integrity. What we did discover were valid email addresses for real customers who were scheduled to be removed permanently from our database (like the hundreds or thousands before them).

The Tail Wagging the Dog

Prior to the anointment of the IT staff as Lord and Protector in the business world, we had the Admin Nazis. Those large women with cafeteria lady arms or the small, pale men who could stifle the joy of any young salesman’s first big sale with a simple and curt “paperwork’s not right; order’s rejected.”

I’m starting to miss the good old days where anyone in an administrative function believed the world revolved around them. When I was starting out in business, it was woe unto anyone on the operations side who tried to circumvent or curtail the self-important authority of an Admin Nazi. They could be very vindictive and selective in their enforcement of proper paperwork, you see.  

Back then we complained that the tail was wagging the dog; and we just lived with it because we could. As bad as the Admin Nazis were, they just made our lives suck; they didn’t actually control them.

If You’re Not Selling, then You’re Support

The only cure for the productivity-killing Admin Nazi was great leadership. Great leaders have a way of weighing inter-departmental priorities against the goal, and finding a solution that, although it doesn’t always please everyone, makes the most sense over both the short and long terms. They put administrators in their place by asking them to administrate and support the efforts of those who drive the real value for the company: those who touch our customers.

While great leadership was able to overcome the threat of the Admin Nazi in the past, it turns out that great leaders are often the ones who are allowing IT to build their version of Skynet at your company in the present. Because support for this over-protectionism comes from the top, trying to wrestle control from a nerd with network administrative rights is going to be a whole lot harder than getting Marge to accept a customer contract without the Ts crossed.

By the way, this is not the tail wagging the dog; this is the flea wagging the dog’s owner.

Your CEO is oblivious to what the real threats are or what they mean to your business, so she is forced to listen to the CIO’s version of reality. Chief Information Officers, it seems, are mostly frustrated former nerds with larger offices and tons of control.

Their power initially grew from a lack of knowledge and fear; although they gain more muscle every time some knucklehead in a cubicle downloads malware while registering for a free iPhone. Forget that the CIO’s team should have proactively ensured there were adequate protections against malicious computer code in the first place; it only takes a few hours of network outage for the CEO to give up a little more of her power to the CIO. It’s better to be safe than sorry, they’ll say.

I’ll Be Back

Cybernetic organisms aside, it’s time that leaders start asking tough questions of their CIOs and other IT department heads before we allow the nerds to give the computers all the control.

A simple “Why” can work wonders.

Every time anyone in IT appears to be protecting us from ourselves, the leader needs to ask “why?” And when IT answers the question, the leader needs to ask “and why is that important?”

Two questions is more accountability than most IT mangers can handle. They’ll either capitulate or their human-like skin will melt away, revealing their android inner self.

In case the IT manager insists on continuing with their course of action after the leader has asked the two “Why” questions, we recommend they follow up with something like “I’m not sure that’s in our best interest, can you put that request in-writing and give it to my administrative assistant Marge?”

(Marge, you see, misses her old role as an Admin Nazi.)

 

More Leadership Lessons from the Airline Industry – Delta Stubs Their Toe (Again)

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More Leadership Lessons from Delta Airlines

In a recent post, we admonished Delta Airlines for the ill-conceived, confusing Delta Breezeway enacted in late 2007. It seemed that even months after its introduction, most Delta gate agents and Delta frequent fliers still had no idea how to use them.

We are proud to say that between Thanksgiving and Christmas, Delta gate agents suddenly began using the Delta Breezeway consistently across the seven different airports we used. (This is a record, to be sure, as any Delta gate outside of Atlanta or Cincinnati employed a different set of rules when using the Breezeway for the first ten months following its inception.)

Congratulations Delta for finally making sense of something so simple – of course, we still believe you could have rolled this out more intelligently; employing proper project management principles coupled with better education and training.

Delta Airlines – Not Sweating the Small Stuff

The debacle that was the Delta Breezeway reveals a lackadaisical attitude in the Delta boardroom for truly serving the customer. Delta simply doesn’t sweat the small stuff. In any normal leadership situation the ability to not sweat the small stuff is an admirable quality. Given the razor thin margins of the airline industry, it’s almost required that you sweat everything – especially the small stuff that impacts your customers.

Southwest Airlines (SWA) gets it. The SWA leadership has always been known as a group that plans everything from boarsding a plane to their overall business health. SWA gets it; and they generally get it right the first time.

As a disclaimer, it’s important to note that none of the AskTheManager editors enjoys flying on Southwest. Their cattle call style of assigning seats and loading planes might make logistical sense – and families with kids seem to be okay with it – but it is terrible for business fliers who travel for a living. That said, SWA is the healthiest airline in America and deserves to be studied by those who are struggling. (Hint for the other airlines: look at SWA’s leadership, and how the company tests and measures before they implement wholesale changes.)




You Cannot Test Ideas in the Boardroom

Southwest’s style of loading planes, as we wrote, has been a nuisance for business travelers – especially those who like to lounge before they fly. We must know we will have the aisle seat in the exit row and we don’t want to have to fight for it.

In the airline industry, unloading and loading planes quickly – faster than your rivals – earns you a competitive advantage. SWA gets this. They’ve made a conscience choice to forego most business travelers in return for better margins. That is their choice.

It’s old news, but Southwest experimented with assigned seating for about a year only to decide to slightly modify their 36-year old cattle drive in favor of a more orderly numbered seating system. (To read more about this decision, here’s a news story from September 2007.) No assigned seats, but with less of a cattle call. The leadership lesson for Delta is not that they should switch to a numbered system for assigning seats, rather that they should alter the way they enact changes at their struggling airline.

Last month – just days after Delta completed its merger with Northwest and proclaimed that there would be no immediate changes – Delta made an enormous change to the way everyone, including frequent fliers, gains access to premium seats (exit rows, most aisle seats and coach seats near the front of the aircraft). They adopted, without warning or testing, a system that we’ve been told was in place at Northwest. They wanted everyone to pay extra for those seats.

While we’re are certainly not opposed to Delta raising revenue in creative ways, we were absolutely shocked to learn that as frequent fliers we didn’t even have access to those seats until check-in. You see, Delta wanted to sell those seats at a premium to regular fliers, so they blocked frequent fliers from gaining access to those seats.

They clearly tested this concept only in the boardroom, and it passed with flying colors.

Oops, Time to Reverse another Bad Delta Decision

To their credit, Delta only made their coveted Platinum and Gold members suffer for a few weeks before they reversed this idiotic and untested change. We can only imagine the emails that flooded Delta.com complaining of this policy (we know of a few sent by us that were not pleasant).

The moral of this story for all businesses is to follow the Southwest example. Even when the world was telling them for decades that their system for assigning seats should be altered, they resisted the temptation to enact wholesale changes and tested (for months, in controlled situations at just a few select locations) a new system before determining a course of action.

This is why Southwest has fared better than Delta and the other large airlines. The Delta leadership could learn a thing or two from Southwest.  

Email Etiquette Lessons from the Cleveland Browns’ Phil Savage – Dropping the F-Bomb is So Not Cool

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Phil Savage, Cleveland Browns GM, Responds too Quickly

While email etiquette in business has long been an important topic to the editors of AskTheManager.com, we’ve never pontificated on the importance of responding expeditiously. We’ve posted articles and opinions about email typos, email signatures, and we even ranked the worst email etiquette mistakes of all time in a two-part series. Had we weighed in on email response speed, we would have said speed is good.

That was until we read about Phil Savage. In Savage’s case, speed kills.

As first reported by the website deadspin.com, Cleveland Browns GM Phil Savage responded quickly Monday night to an idiot fan’s relentless and constant email criticism with the not-so-friendly reply “go root for Buffalo, f*ck you.” (Editor’s note: Phil used a vowel in place of the asterisk.)

You don’t have to be a seasoned leader to know that his response easily tops our list of the worst email etiquette mistakes ever. It’s hard to beat the F-bomb when it comes to what you shouldn’t say in a business email.




The Email Etiquette “24-Hour Rule”

Firing off an angry memo or cursing someone out over the phone ten or more years ago was not a big deal – in the Internet Age, angry responses will haunt you forever. Just as we learned from Alec Baldwin’s “thoughtless little pig” rant that you shouldn’t leave nasty voicemails, we now know from Phil Savage that you shouldn’t write “f*ck you” in an email.

(Seriously, didn’t we already know that?)

Before the onset of the World Wide Web, it was common practice for enlightened leaders to withhold a response when they were irritated. In a proper display of etiquette, they practiced the 24-Hour Rule – that is, they would wait twenty-four hours before sending a nasty note or letter. The prevailing wisdom assumed (correctly) that whatever made them angry today would seem less important in twenty-four hours.

It’s been almost 72 hours since Savage’s savage reply to the thoughtless-little-pig-of-a-fan, and we’re pretty sure it all seems less important now. 

 

Leadership Lessons from the Airline Industry – Delta Bats .500

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Leadership Lessons from Delta Air Lines

 

The editors of AskTheManager fly virtually every airline that caters to business travelers (i.e., the big ones), but we really seem to love Delta for some reason.

 

Delta is not always the cheapest, the friendliest or even the most convenient, but as one of the editors stated so ineloquently, “Delta is the tallest midget in the room.”

 

Delta made two changes in late 2007/early 2008 that provide great lessons in leadership. One was a terrific move and the other, not so much. (It’s important to note that more often than not, you can learn more from a poor leadership example than from a good one.)

 

Delta – A Swing And A Miss

 

We’ll start with the lesson where Delta stubbed their toe. If you’ve flown Delta in the last eight months, you’ve probably noticed the red signs on long stands that detail the Delta “Breezeway.” (As a Delta Platinum flyer, TheManager is on a Delta flight every week.)

 

These signs designate that one side is meant for the loading of travelers who are members of their mileage program (Delta SkyMiles) and one side is designated for everyone else. Sounds simple enough, right? Wrong.

 

Although it has been more than 250 days since Delta launched their Breezeway program, gate agents at virtually every airport apply their own rules to the Delta Breezeway. (Perhaps, they would all benefit from reading the Delta press release that attempts to explain the Breezeway. You can read that article by clicking here. If you work for Delta, I beg you to read it.)

 

The confusion that frequent travelers relay to me when I’m flying is all the same, “I’m not sure when I’m supposed to use it. In some airports they have the Breezeway open when they call for First Class, in others, they still tell you to wait for your zone.”

 

So Where’s The Leadership Lesson?

 

It seems that the Breezeway was an idea cooked up at the Atlanta headquarters and that all of the resources for the project went toward printing and mounting the great “Breezeway” signage in all of the airports. Perhaps Delta could have rolled this out more slowly and used some of their budget to educate the gate attendants in each city on the proper use of the Breezeway.

 

Flight attendants have confidentially told me that more passengers complain about varying Breezeway rules than anything else – and this is eight months after the rollout.

 

While consistency has improved slightly since its inception, Delta management stubbed their collective toes big time on this one. Instead of making the breezeway something that would attract more frequent flyers as a value add, they alienated most of us as we and the Delta front line employees scratched our heads over what in the heck the Breezeway stood for.

 


But Delta Management Did Something Good Too, Right?

 

Oh yes, Delta management hit a home run in 2008 with the release of their new safety video. A safety video? Yes, a safety video.

 

Instead of trying to be as stale as the peanuts on other airlines, some genius in Delta management understood THE GOAL of the safety video. (Of course, all of you know the goal is to make sure that we all get to our destination safely, though it seemed airlines assumed the goal of the safety video was to put the passengers to sleep so that they don’t want the free soft drinks and coffee.)

 

The guy or gal at Delta who dreamed up their new safety video has done something that no other airline has ever accomplished – they succeeded in getting more than 75% of the passengers to watch the entire thing.

 

For full disclosure, it is important to note that since the new video was released, I’ve seen it more than 30 times and I’ve watched it end to end every time. I, like my fellow passengers, am mesmerized by it.

 

The lesson here is this: let’s all stop doing things for the sake of doing them, and let’s understand WHY we’re doing them in the first place. Delta did just that with their new video and it worked – people are watching and paying attention. If you don’t believe me, check it out for yourself:

 

 

By the way, all of the uniformed crew members in the video are reportedly Delta employees, including the luscious lead flight attendant and the little guy with the shiny teeth.

 

Knowledge Hoarders & The Mack Truck Theory

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Q. I’m the office manager at a large Midwestern distribution company. We sell a variety of products to retailers across the US, and have a sophisticated computer system that can show the status of orders with just a few clicks. My problem is that the operations managers like to work the orders on legal pads and only update an order status when the full order ships. Customers call constantly wanting an update on their orders and the operations managers are never available to take these calls. What do you suggest I do? Todd in St. Louis, MO.

 

Interesting problem, Todd. As surprising as your issue might seem to someone working with technology on a daily basis, there are many industries where technological advances meant to improve productivity are simply underutilized.

 

Knowledge Hoarding

 

The reasons many people continue to underutilize technology vary from a simple fear of computers to a lack of training to general laziness to a lack of oversight to the ever-insidious knowledge hoarding. While all of these reasons could be bad news for your business, knowledge hoarding is often the most damaging.

 

From updating customer records in a CRM tool to repair orders in body shops, I’ve seen too many instances of salesmen, managers and other associates hoarding knowledge in an effort to make themselves seem indispensable.

 

Regardless of why your operations managers refuse to properly enter order status on incomplete orders, the customer satisfaction issues that arise from it can damage your reputation and harm your company’s ability to grow. It is clearly a practice that should be stopped immediately.

 

When I’ve encountered similar instances, I generally take them to the highest level in the company. Surprisingly, about half of the leaders I’ve approached with these issues are reluctant to do anything to change these practices. Their argument is simply that the knowledge hoarder is a long-time, trusted manager who already enjoys great productivity. There’s no need, in their minds, to force change onto such a valuable employee.

 

The Mack Truck Theory

 

The next words out of my mouth are “so you don’t subscribe to the Mack Truck Theory, do you?”

 

After a few seconds of puzzled looks, I generally ask them if this trusted manager, let’s call him Bob, drives to work, walks to work or takes a bus. Whatever the response, I then ask what they would do if Bob was struck and killed by a Mack Truck on his way home tonight. How would they identify and service Bob’s customers?

 

This is usually followed by a few more seconds of puzzled looks and the standard “well, I don’t know” answer.

 

No One Is Indispensable

 

The truth is that in more than 30 years of management I have never, ever met an indispensable employee or manager. I’ve met some truly great ones, but I’ve never met anyone that was actually the “glue” holding the entire company together. This is not to say that I haven’t worked with CEOs who believed someone in their employ was indispensable. Unfortunately for these CEOs, their beliefs in these superstars keep them from growing others in the organization.

 

I generally argue that these “indispensable” people are really hurting the company more than they are helping. The company is better off without them. By hoarding knowledge, they are, in effect, running their own businesses within the confines of your business.

 

When they leave, and they often do, they take with them customer histories, relationships and knowledge that they would have shared with others had they cared more about your company and less about making themselves indispensable.

 

But What About Todd’s Problem?

 

Todd, my advice to you is to first introduce your company’s leaders to the Mack Truck Theory and then offer to train the operations managers on the proper use of your order fulfillment system. If that doesn’t do the trick, let me know and I’ll pass your resume around to companies I know in the St. Louis area. 

 

J

How Do You Spot A True Leader?

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Q. I’m faced with reducing headcount because of the economy, but I’m afraid to make broad cuts because I don’t want to lose the true leaders in my company. How can I identify the true leaders from the wanabees and the blowhards? My biggest concern is that I think I’m too old to know what makes a great leader today. Mitch in Norfolk, VA.

 

Mitch, there seems to be confusion about what makes someone a “True Leader” in today’s business world. When we look at the historical examples of great leadership – George S. Patton, Teddy Roosevelt, Henry Ford, for example – we find terrific examples of leaders who accomplished great things given their circumstances, the existing societal cultures and political climate. More recently, we might look to business giants such as Ted Turner or Lee Iacocca as examples of great leaders, though, again, these men accomplished their greatest feats given their circumstances and certainly prior to the wireless world of today.

 

When we think of these great leaders of the past, we should try to remember the historical context and be careful not to confuse the traits required of today’s leader with those from the past. When we examine the names above, we think of qualities such as vision, character and drive. These men got things done, and they did so through the efforts of the entire team.

 

True leadership today, however, is not only about getting something accomplished through others – any manager can cajole, threaten and beat their team to accomplish some short term goal. True leadership is about accomplishments that come from a culture of high performance created by the leader. It still takes vision, character and drive; though it also requires something more in today’s society.

 

In Patton’s time, seventeen-year-olds could be ordered into battle knowing they probably would not survive – and, they were proud to do it. Today, you might have trouble getting a seventeen-year-old to show up to collect his paycheck every Friday.

 

To avoid sounding like a curmudgeon, I should preface the remark above with this: the good old days weren’t all that good. Information Technology created choice, and delivered versions of choice to all corners of the globe. For Americans, this choice involves working where we want, when we want, and if we want.

 

As recently as the early 1990s, if a teenager quit his job at the local fast food restaurant he might spend weeks finding a new one. He would drive, walk or bike to each of the competing restaurants in the area, spend thirty minutes at each location filling out an application, then have to go back another day for interviews. Today, being out of work is no big deal. A teen can pull up Monster.com on his mobile phone and apply for positions before he leaves the parking lot of his former job.

 

Given the technology-aided lackadaisical nature of this generation of workers, how does a company increase productivity and drive profits without creating disgruntled workers ready to walk off the job at the drop of a hat? And, how can that company know which managers they can afford to lose and which ones they should keep at all costs?

 

(Hint: Patton would have a tough time getting someone to work the grill at McDonald’s in 2008.)

 

Compassionate, humble leadership by middle managers (those closest to the workforce) is the key to growth and prosperity for businesses of any size today. Inflation, unemployment and a weak dollar are going to force corporate America get lean again, but only those companies who deliver True Leadership to their rank and file can expect to weather the economic storm.

 

Unfortunately, when corporate America is forced to get lean, we tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater. (Terrible cliché, I know, but appropriate.) We take the term “Right-Sizing” too far and we right-size ourselves out of leadership and straight into management. Leadership is vapor (and we need to cut costs). Management is measurable (and we can justify the position). Management is black and white (you can see management in an organizational chart). Leadership is grey (and, well, who’s going to miss it anyway).

 

So what’s the answer for the CEO or midlevel manager faced with the task of stripping a few million out of the budget? Identify your leaders, and find a way to keep them. The hard part here is that unlike in Roosevelt’s day, leaders today don’t carry the biggest stick or speak the loudest at meetings. True leaders in today’s business world are driven to improve the company’s bottom line, and not their own – that makes them tough to spot, especially when you’re faced with cutting the fat. We can easily spot the sycophant or the blowhard, but today’s leader is a little less assuming.

 

Today’s true leaders check their egos at the door. They don’t demand a better parking space or perks not provided to all stakeholders. They may sit in the biggest office, but they’d rather be closer to their team. True leaders don’t “tell” as much as they “teach.” They don’t “order” as much as they “empower.”

 

Sift through your organization and find the teams (small or large) that are performing with high morale and low turnover. Enlist the leaders of these teams to help with the company’s right-sizing. Odds are that these leaders will help you make decisions that benefit the entire company and not just themselves.