Too many ‘chiefs’ in a company can ultimately weaken the corporate ecosystem

By Andrew Hill

If I have ever written “C-suite” unironically, let me apologise. The more I come across it, the more I dislike it. The idea of a “suite” is disturbing enough. Reeking of bathrooms and bad hotels, it appears to have nothing to do with the typical openplanworkplace. It is the C-part that really worries me, however, not because it may give occupants of the suite delusions of seniority,but because it may give them delusions of control. Whatever we may choose to call the place where the chiefs gather, it is getting crowded there. Korn Ferry,the recruiter, has just published its list of the top 15 “most in-demand executive positions for 2015”. All but one are chiefs of somedescription, with the top five headed by commercial, innovation, digital, cyber security and sustainability officers.
Among the other roles, Korn Ferry singles out chief executive officers who, it points out, “are always in demand”, partly because theyare the rare generalists making sense of the world for their teams of specialists. I think the “chief” designation is a handicap in this respect, however. The very survival of the term C-suite is a throwback to the rigid hierarchy inhabited by Jack Lemmon in The Apartment . In the film, he lends his own flat to philandering senior colleagues in exchange for elevation to a wood-panelled office and the key to, yes, the executive washroom. With promotion to chief comes a sense of impregnability and an understanding that as, say, the new cyber security or sustainability officer, you are the one protecting the business from hackers or global warming.
The chief executive embodies this fallacy of infallibility. As decision-making expert Helga Drummond pointed out in a Gresham College lecture last week, success — presumably including success that leads to promotion — “confirms our competence [and] tells us we cannot fail”. She added: “Research shows players will bet more if they can deal the cards, because they feel in control and feel comfortable about taking bigger and bigger risks.” Atul Gawande, the surgeon, described in his second Reith Lecture recently how the existence of penicillin had fooled doctors and their
patients into thinking medicine was about simple cures, rather than complex solutions to messy problems. The corporate world is similarly deluded in thinking that individual chief executives are a wonder drug that can be injected into ailing businesses. It is better to think of companies as systems. They may not work at all without some sort of hierarchy. But they work much better if managers and leaders recognise that they are merely a single, if important, component and that effective procedures and clear designation of individuals’ roles and responsibilities help the whole work smoothly. I certainly feel more confident about chief executives who recognise the limits of their chiefdom, like the head of one big UK group I met recently. He said he had just two ways to influence the company: by setting the tone and culture and by “building the machine”. What does the machine look like? Dr Gawande favours mundane checklists for keeping even brilliant surgeons and their teams out of trouble. The aviation industry introduced “crew resource management” in the 1980s, to reduce fatal cockpit mistakes. Scenario planning companies now apply computer power so organisations can simulate crises and practise decision-making, lessening the risk that leaders will be misled by their gut instinct when under pressure. Reliance on mechanical process alone is clearly dangerous. It could “induce mindlessness”, in the words of Prof Drummond. Rigorous procedures and training should instead free innovators to take the necessary risks and leaders to react in the right way to inevitable challenges.
In his compelling book Confronting Mistakes, which outlines lessons from aviation disasters, Jan Hagen points out that crew resource management includes rigorous checks and intense training for flight crew. But in due course, the industry recognised it also had to train team members to assert themselves better. “They were taught to view themselves as the captain’s colleagues, not his inferiors, and to assume the responsibilities that came with this level of empowerment,” he writes. In short, if the C in C-suite stood for colleague, and everyone had a key, we would all be happier and safer.