The script is overdue to get flipped, and the implications for executive search and CEO hiring will be profound.
Every Thursday in Chicago Comes Back, Emily Drake and Todd Connor provide resilient leadership insights to help your business move forward as we emerge from the pandemic. Drake and Connor facilitate Crain’s Leadership Academy. Drake is a licensed therapist, owner of the Collective Academy and a leadership coach. Connor is the founder of Bunker Labs and the Collective Academy and is also a leadership consultant.
Todd Connor: So, this week we saw a number of prominent brands, including Starbucks, Coca-Cola, Unilever, Adidas and a number of others, pull their ad spending from Facebook over the concern of the company’s handling, or rather failure to handle, misinformation and hate speech on its platform. If we expand our view here, what are the larger implications of this action?
Emily Drake: Well, for one, I think it underscores something we’ve been writing a lot about: As we co-create a new normal, companies increasingly just do not have the luxury of sitting it out or trying to create some bifurcation between politics and business. Consumers are at the heart of this, followed by employees. They will increasingly insist on knowing where their dollars are going and will care about the alignment of their own personal values with the brands that they choose to identify with and spend money with. While this #StopHateForProfit is specifically about Facebook, I think this is a larger trend that is unfolding.
TC: I want to pull this forward and think about implications for companies’ stock and bottom-line performance. If I’m an investor, all of a sudden the forecast on the financial performance of Facebook has less to do with marginal growth of its revenue-generating streams like Google AdWords, and more perhaps to do with Mark Zuckerberg personally and the company’s privacy and misinformation policies. And not just the policies themselves, but the leadership as a company that they show, or don’t show, around these issues. It makes for a much more nuanced consideration of the “performance” of a company.
ED: It is interesting to consider especially as the financial performance of Facebook has otherwise been strong. I think the larger trend for leadership is therefore going to be companies needing leaders at the helm that, first of all, have a clear values ethos for themselves, and secondarily can align their values to the markets that they serve. Silicon Valley hasn’t had the best track record here—allowing for lapses or gaps in moral or values-driven leadership in concession to the bottom line, though this might represent a moment in which the script gets flipped.
TC: The script is overdue to get flipped, in my opinion. I think the implications for executive search and CEO hiring will be fairly profound. All of a sudden, we need CEOs who know how to step into these heated environments, cast a clear values-based vision, and take action that’s in alignment with that vision. That skill set has little regard for your technical expertise of the industry in which you operate (i.e. technology, insurance, etc). The technical stuff can in some ways be learned or outsourced to competent executives, but this leadership capacity will be a more rare commodity. I would not be surprised to see some unconventional hires, like former athletes, retired military officers or even public-sector leaders coming into the leadership ranks of some companies as non-traditional recruits where the companies understand that the reputational consideration outweighs just the time-in-industry consideration.
ED: I think that’s true. I also think it’s true that things like corporate social responsibility, which typically is a secondary consideration, becomes a core strategic priority. It’s really just back to the basics of what a company’s mission statement and vision is. A lot of companies offer language that includes things like “make the world a better place.” Well, that is being pressure tested right now. Companies, as well as nonprofits and foundations, find themselves at a crossroads, where customers and employees wonder whether the actions match the words. Where they don’t, expect employees and customers to walk.
TC: As we’ve been talking about this, I googled Facebook’s mission statement, which begins as follows: “Founded in 2004, Facebook’s mission is to give people the power to build community and bring the world closer together. People use Facebook to stay connected with friends and family, to discover what’s going on in the world and to share and express what matters to them.” I think there’s a real question in people’s minds as to whether or how Facebook is “bringing the world together.”
So, in some ways, this is about misinformation, but I think the larger diagnosis comes from companies looking within to ask, “Do we have values? Are they true? Do they align with a mission? Does our business model work in support of those things? Do we hire and fire based on those things? Do we have leaders who can stand up without a script and talk honestly and sincerely about them?”
I think in a good economy, we are allowed to get away with a strong financial performance in spite of maybe not-great answers to those questions, but when tested, this stuff really matters.
ED: I agree, and you could say the same thing, this sort of pressure test of what’s at the core, is happening all around us at this moment. Marriages, relationships with children, relationships with co-workers and our relationship with our employer are all being exposed with new levels of transparency, which I think is wonderful, though I recognize it’s uncomfortable. This is the season that we are in: Reckoning with our past, our values, the truth, as it were, and ultimately the kinds of leaders that we need to get us through this moment and lead us into the future.