You Need Me, and Don’t Forget It!

December 17, 2007

While the reflector inadvertently joins with the CEO in creating a shared, distorted view of reality, the insulator tries to serve as a mediator between an ill-suited CEO and his organization. CEOs who need insulators tend to be abrasive or abusive leaders. These arrogant leaders often deny the negative impact of their personality on those around them. They thoughtlessly push away their best people, make impulsive business decisions, alienate large constituencies within the company, and poison morale. These leaders quickly find themselves at odds with their subordinates, senior executives, and boards because of their lack of emotional intelligence. And whether they are quietly off-putting or openly hostile, these leaders rarely feel concerned about, or able to, change their interpersonal style.

To compensate, these abrasive CEOs seek insulators, people whom they believe can translate their poorly communicated ideas into language their organizations can understand. They need people willing to intercede when they make self-destructive moves. Like the mother of a child abused by his father, the insulator is constantly apologizing to the organization on the CEO’s behalf: “He didn’t mean it.” The insulator is also much like the enabler – to borrow the language of Alcoholics Anonymous– who makes excuses for the alcoholic.

Insulators have some special characteristics. Many have passive personalities and need to be rescuers.Women in senior management positions are certainly not all insulators, but, for reasons that still have not been sufficiently researched, most insulators turn out to be women. And although they typically harbor no ambitions to be CEOs themselves, insulators crave control over both the leader and the organization. That contrasts with reflectors, who unconsciously try to control leaders by pleasing them. Thus, while insulators can be quite manipulative, they position their behavior to appear as though they are doing an altruistic service for their bosses and companies.

The insulator’s false humility can be grating, but it is often difficult to see what is toxic about it. In the short run, insulators appear to be helpful, even essential, particularly to those who don’t trust the CEO. The problem is that over time, insulators undermine the very authority of the leader they are seemingly trying to protect. Senior executives learn that to get anything substantive done, they must go through the insulating confidant, who quickly comes to be seen as the real power behind the throne. This arrangement has two problems. First, because the insulator’s formal power inadequately reflects her influence, she is often largely unaccountable for her actions. Second and more crucial, insulators feed the CEO filtered information about the organization; as a result, the CEO becomes dangerously cut off from the grass roots.

Jay Stephens was a CEO whose personality cried out for an insulator. After a successful academic career in engineering, he was tapped to take over the research operations of Pantreon, a large energy company. Stephens had a reputation for being brilliant but impossible, and his vicious tirades and abrasive personality were legendary. After making several important discoveries that had saved the firm billions of dollars, Stephens became the dark-horse candidate for CEO. When the board chose him as the new leader, he quickly replaced the old head of HR with Louisa Attwood, a junior HR manager who had helped him when he first joined Pantreon.

It soon became clear to senior management that Attwood was also being promoted to the role of CEO confidant. Whenever he felt the urge, Stephens would call Attwood for lengthy conversations – sometimes in the middle of the night. Frequently, these talks were opportunities for Stephens to vent his frustrations and to disparage whomever he felt had disappointed or betrayed him. Attwood spent most of her time listening and some occasionally offering to intervene in these interpersonal conflicts. She also saw her interactions with Stephens as opportunities to solidify her increasingly powerful role in their relationship.

Attwood had a privileged relationship with Stephens in that she was the only member of the senior management team who escaped the CEO’s attacks. In no small part,Attwood was chosen for this role because, as head of HR, she was out of the line of competition to succeed Stephens. But she was also chosen because of her intuitive ability to temper the CEO’s personality. Attwood learned, over time, to filter virtually every significant corporate initiative or communication that came from Stephens. She edited all his memos, coached him on board presentations, and frequently stepped in to do damagecontrol after Stephens had displayed his true colors. One of the inside jokes at Pantreon was that in her previous life,Attwood must have been a UN interpreter. Not that she was impartial. Senior executives who learned to manage Stephens by going through Attwood were dismayed when she injected her own perspectives into their communications.

During Stephens’s tenure as CEO of Pantreon, the company’s tradition of engineering innovation began a gradual but clear decline, and its marketing efforts also slowed. Sales fell flat. Not by accident, the boardroom became more fiercely contentious than ever, in part because of all the unspoken tension around Stephens’s behavior and the unacknowledged efforts to manage around it. Several key executives left the organization out of frustration at having an insulated and unreachable CEO whoforced them to go through a third party.

Because of Stephens’s relentless abrasiveness,Attwood continued to shield him from the organization – even managing to portray herself as a long-suffering martyr in the process. While Stephens never directly acknowledged his dependence on Attwood, he rewarded her with generous bonuses and option grants, which the rest of the management team resented deeply. When Stephens finally retired – after what many outside observers viewed as a mixed record at Pantreon’s helm –Attwood sought early retirement and spent a year traveling, ostensibly to recover from her emotionally depleting role as a kind of container of toxic behavior. But from the organization’s perspective, it was good riddance. The executives forced to depend on Attwood had come to deeply resent her power and her barely disguised need for control.

This all-too-common form of CEO–confidant relationship occurs in businesses of all types and sizes. It may be symptomatic of the ever-increasing complexity of modern corporate life, as well as of the inadequate screening of potential CEOs. Leaders who don’t know how to express anger or criticism constructively, or who inadvertently make provocative, demeaning statements to their direct reports, probably need some insulation to preserve their role and stature. The challenge is preventing that insulation from suffocating CEOs and their top management team members.

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