How to Avoid Compassion Fatigue

[00:00:00] Mo Fathelbab: Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, president of International Facilitators Organization, people and Strategy is a podcast from the SHM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week we bring you in-depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders.

For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by Kevin Cox, president LKC Advisory. Welcome Kevin.

[00:00:36] Kevin Cox: Thanks, Mo. It's good to be with you. How you doing? Good, good, How are you? Things are good here. Having a, having a good day.

[00:00:42] Mo Fathelbab: Well, great to have you with us. Kevin, I've read, your story, but I want you to share with the audience a little bit about your career journey and what brought you to the field of hr.

[00:00:53] Kevin Cox: I, found this profession. I didn't even know it existed when I was in graduate school, and, decided to turn it into a master's at Michigan State. had a terrific learning opportunity then, and then I've had a chance to work with three great companies. most of what I've done has been in hr.

There have been some times when I've done some things in addition to like strategy and business development. Things of that nature. But, I got my start at Pepsi. I was there for about 16 years. And I think most of my better habits, I think I learned when I was at Pepsi, spent 14 years at American Express.

So crossing not only a great brand from one great brand to another, but a different industry to move out of packaged goods and into financial services was a, big opportunity for renewal for me. Did that for about 14 years and, I was the head of HR there, in, in that company. And then I left to, to join a very troubled GE General Electric, back in 2019.

And I spent, five years and a few months, helping to transform GE and turn it into the three terrific companies that, that, that it is today. Then the thing that attracted me to HR back then is, I'm a guy that would have trouble declaring his major. And, I love the fact that HR is always changing.

It's very dynamic. No two days are the same. And that variety and that challenge is. I think what fueled me, through most of my career,

[00:02:28] Mo Fathelbab: I was just, in a conversation about Pepsi not long ago, and I actually, was struck to find that even 30 years ago, they had a great feedback process and, they were very, ahead of their time, so to speak, and that even today some companies struggle with whether or not to do feedback and whether to do it correctly.

Can you tell us about that?

[00:02:51] Kevin Cox: I love that point that you're making and in fact, I wish. Some days going back to the old days as just nostalgia, trying to get the better of you. But, I was telling a young, very talented person that I'm mentoring just this week, about the importance of feedback. And the story that I told her was, honestly, whatever I might have become, or whatever I might have accomplished, had more to do with leaders that I worked for who sometimes saw more in me than I saw in myself.

They had the courage and they had the good nature to give me that feedback. And, some of it stung. I mean, some of it was really hard to hear, but all of it made me better. And I worry today that the feedback culture in most companies is much more watered down. It's much more safe. And, I feel like, the growth of better executives.

Is stunted by the fact that we don't have a great relationship with the term feedback. I hope that's one of the things we get back to, but you're right.

[00:03:57] Mo Fathelbab: And, on the topic of feedback, in your article, less is more. you also talk about feedback being personal and not automated. Can you say a little bit more about that?

[00:04:08] Kevin Cox: The best feedback has to be personal. It can't be generic. It can't be, yeah. I think generic is probably the best word, though. That might be safer. It's far less. Interesting is far less useful. Back at Pepsi, we used to have a term called camera lens feedback, which meant that if you're gonna give somebody feedback, it needed to be something that you have seen or you have witnessed, like, like a camera would witness someone as opposed to third party feedback or sort of, Hey, I've heard mo that, that you're not as timely as you need to be.

And I. Complaints that you don't show up to meetings as prepared as you need to be. That feedback lands one way. A much better way to say is, Hey Mo, you and I have had two meetings over the last three months, and I noticed in both cases you didn't really seem to be prepared for the meeting that we were having.

you weren't on time and you hadn't read the pre-read. You know what I mean? The, way you take that feedback in the latter case is more personal. It's more direct, and it's kind of. Versus this sort of generic, the, walls are talking kind of feedback, which I think makes people defensive, paranoid, kind of shuts 'em down.

And by the way, for our audience, that's totally fiction. Mo's been very timely and, and very prepared. So,

[00:05:34] Mo Fathelbab: thank you. So Kevin, you've, been, involved in not one, but 10 CEO successions, in your career. how did you develop some, the expertise in the subject and, you know. Tell us what you've learned along the way.

[00:05:49] Kevin Cox: You know, Mo, you and I have, talked about, I also have this love of flying airplanes and there's a connection there. I think the answer to your question is, experience is a fantastic teacher. Whether you're learning to fly a plane or you're learning to do CEO succession. And I would say that, you know, we have an expression, the aviation community.

A good pilot is always learning like you are never. A hundred percent proficient. There is always something more to learn and I feel that way about succession as well. the first couple that I was involved in, I'd like to think I did a credible job. you know, a, pretty good job. I read, I consulted with people that I knew had done this.

but you do get better as you go along. You see mistakes that are going to tend to happen, and you figure out different strategies. To avoid making them, you understand the psychology of succession, which is really complicated. really complicated. And you understand when people get pretty, anxious about it or pretty, uptight about it, you understand why that is and what you can do to take a little bit of the, air out of the balloon so that doesn't have, so it's mostly been through.

Through the, experience piece, but it's also part of those 10, some of them I've been an HR head for some of them. I've been on the board of directors of companies, so I've, you know, I've been on both sides of the desk, if you will. And, you learn things differently whether you are sort of trying to be the showrunner for succession or whether you're actually trying to be the board.

Responsible, ultimately foresee succession.

[00:07:30] Mo Fathelbab: So before we dig into the succession piece, I'm curious about, your aviation lessons and, do any of them translate to hr, so to speak?

[00:07:42] Kevin Cox: Yeah, I learned to fly late in life. So, just like four years ago. And, it is a, like most things, it's better to do that when you're younger.

if you need to learn another language, learn it when you're younger. And so it was tough and it was tough to learn to do that. With a full-time job, like I had at GE at the time. But it really did help me understand a few things about myself that I think are translating into hr. One of them is people learn differently.

You know, I've learned about myself. I'm a much more visual learner. Like if you show me someone's name on a piece of paper, I'll probably remember that forever if you just tell me that name. I probably won't. Problem with aviation is a lot of your instruction comes through your headphone by the instructor that's sitting beside you.

So it's a very auditory learning experience. So one, I think I learned to appreciate different ways of learning and you need to adjust as a leader, I think, to be able to do that. Another one I learned that I thought was really useful to me is risk management. Now, you might not think about that. Sort of as an HR professional, but I think maybe you should, boards of directors are often the ultimate risk managers.

They're there to make sure that the company's growth strategies are safe, growth versus kind of dangerous, risky growth. As a pilot, one of the things you're taught to do is manage as much risk as you can by using things like checklists and using things like flow to try to. Take all of those little mistakes outta play to create the space in your mind to deal with something really challenging, like losing your engine or traffic in the pattern that you might have conflict with or something like that.

So I think I've learned to appreciate risk management, more and to anticipate risk and kind of look for it. I know a guy who, when he gets in his airplane, even if he's by himself, he says to his airplane. How are you going to try to kill me today? Now, that sounds grim, but what he's basically doing is putting himself in the mindset of a defensive driver.

Like, get ready for risk and get your mind right, and get very focused on risk so that you can be safer. And people said, gosh, that sounds awful. And I said, well, to me it sounds empowering. I, you know, the ability to, try to manage and control that risk which HR people are facing. I think more risk in organizations today than they did when I started out.

So those are just a

[00:10:18] Mo Fathelbab: couple examples. You also mentioned situational awareness. I'd love you to touch on that a little bit.

[00:10:24] Kevin Cox: there's an expression, how do you know somebody's a pilot? Give them 30 seconds and they'll tell you. So I don't wanna wear our audience out with that. But pilots are really big on what they call sa or as you said, mo situational awareness to sort of had your head on a swivel is another term we use to sort of always be.

Thinking about 360 degrees and what's going on to know where you are in space. So that situational awareness and I, feel like learning to fly sort of retrained my brain that I ought to be thinking about the same thing in hr. I ought to be trying to look at the horizon. I look at things that are here and close to me, but always sort of know where I am in space or maybe in hr in context.

So important to me, I think.

[00:11:14] Mo Fathelbab: Okay. So onto succession planning and CEO succession specifically, which is an obsession of yours, and I'd love to just hear what led you to become obsessed with that?

[00:11:24] Kevin Cox: I've always put CEOs on impossibly high pedestals. I, think this is a weakness of mine. I, want them to be superhuman.

You know, I accept the fact that they're at the, top of the organizational food chain. That sort of, there's so much pressure on them that those jobs are so lonely. Honestly, they're so difficult. They're under so much pressure. So I really want them to be perfect. That is not fair. That's my problem. but I sort of start out believing that, look, you've got the job, so lead us perfectly.

You know, this, the organization is counting on you. So I think my love of, or my obsession, as you said with the subject starts there. It's such an important job in a. That I study it and I've, had the privilege of working, I think for actually only like five different CEOs over 30 years, which is a smaller number than you might think.

And each of them very different than the other. Each of them, they were all great, but each one brought different skills to the party. So I started to think about how do you replace that when the time comes and somebody decides that they want to retire? The best situation, you know, how do you make sure that you have somebody capable and, viable to take the baton from them and not miss a step with a company?

And, you don't have to read very far in today's papers or your newsfeeds or wherever you're getting information to see examples where that's not going very well. And I've, often said. The fastest way you can destroy shareholder value is get CEO succession law. I mean, you, can literally cost your investors and owners billions with a B of dollars if you get that wrong.

And to sort of end that on a positive, if you get it right, you can create billions of dollars of shareholder values.

[00:13:26] Mo Fathelbab: So, Kevin, can you please share a, great success story of a CEO transition? Ken

[00:13:33] Kevin Cox: Schnat was the CEO of American Express, I think for about 16 years. he had spent most of his career at American Express, so he was definitely, revered by the organization and thought of very highly by the board.

So the, probably the epitome of tough shoes to fill. And when it became time for Ken to move on to his next chapter, which is. unfolding even as we speak. And he's, having a great time and doing a great job of it. It became time to think about how do you, do this? Well? And I think that's the story of the board being thoughtful, planful, putting the pressure on Ken and myself to develop credible internal successors that was Ken's job, come up with more than one choice.

Internally that you feel like would be viable and able to be the next CEO and C? Certainly Ken and I were partners in trying to figure that out and develop those executives to give them the best chance to win. And then how do you actually compare that to what you think the challenges of American Express are likely to be in the next five, let's say years.

So a lot of strategy comes into play in something like that. And just to make sure that you are not. Only restricting the range to internal candidates. How do you think about external candidates? because what you really wanna pick is the best person in all the land, whether they're internal, which is everybody's preference or external, which you occasionally do.

You just wanna make sure that you get an absolute winner and that you've done all the due diligence to come up with the best example you can. And I, I, think it's one of the better examples. In fact, I really don't know of a better one where the outgoing CEO, in this case, Ken, felt great about the, result.

I'll never forget the day that they literally handed off to each other, Ken's last day of work, and what a proud moment that was for Ken and for Steve, the successor, and for all of us really. So Ken felt good about it. Secondly, you had Steve, the Steve Quey, the successor, an internal candidate, who felt great about it.

He felt empowered. He felt in charge, he felt motivated, he felt respectful of Ken's legacy, but eager to kind of build on Ken's legacy for the future. So he felt good about it. And then you had the board of directors that. As they should. And so to me, if you're a hockey fan, that's the hat trick. you get one of those things, you're doing pretty good, get two of them.

That's a good day. If you get all three, that's probably the, the ultimate in, in what you're looking for.

[00:16:25] Mo Fathelbab: Tell us the ingredients that made that succession so successful.

[00:16:29] Kevin Cox: I think that, there's, a term that, great process leads to great outcomes. You hear that sometimes in, in HR and in business.

I generally think that's true. so a good process, which really is ideally something that's like five years from the handover point, you have to start this sooner than most companies wanna start it, to do it right, to test executives in a couple of different opportunities and roles to get your questions answered.

So it, you know, a good process. I think they started. At the right time, and they stayed the course with that. Of course, I think they were good candidates Internally, I think we also considered, I know we considered, external alternatives because at the end of the day, what you want is the fairest in all the land.

You know, you want the very best, whether they come from inside the company, which is generally preferred and ideal or outside the company, which sometimes needs to be the case. You wanna make sure that you got the very best, and there's no doubt about that, and that you could not have done any better. And I think that's the way we try to do it.

So those are just a couple of the ingredients that, I think made the Amex one pretty successful.

[00:17:45] Mo Fathelbab: All right. And so now I'm curious now about a situation that didn't go so well.

[00:17:49] Kevin Cox: Well, you, as you can imagine, it's the of that, it's a board that is, maybe in some denial about. You know, I think in terms of pilot terms, how rapidly the runway is rising to meet you.

Like you're going, we're gonna have to land this plane very, shortly. We don't have as much time as you think we have. So I think they misage the, timing of, this. I don't think they followed a great process. And that's related, you know, when you get into a little bit of a panic mode. Then you scramble and process goes out the window and you're, sort of doing the best you can.

So I think you get some drama with that. I really don't care for horse races. And so that is to me, defined as a very public that we've got Candidate Mo and we've got candidate Kevin and the whole organization knows that they're locked like Rams in the National Geographic, documentary or somebody, they're gonna kind of beat it out and may the best ram win.

You know, to me the, although that feels Darwinian and good to some people, and then my example, Mo and Kevin are both pretty good people and if, Kevin is defeated by Mo, he probably leaves, and so the company le loses 50% of the, executives in the horse race because you made it public, because you made it sort of a winner take all.

And because Pride is.

In my not so good example, there was a horse race involved that had all of those dynamics. And then most importantly, the biggest mistake that I think that, situation exemplified is the board did not spend enough time talking about what the requirements of the next CEO we're going to be. Back to context.

What are the big questions this company is gonna face over the next five years? They skipped over that part and they just wanted to go to, is it Mo or is it Kevin? Like, who do we like the best? Who presents the best, who's best in the boardroom, who's fastest on their feet? you know, that sort of thing.

And so I think those are some of the components of a not great outcome. they made their choice. They hired that CEO, didn't last too much, more than a year. And again. In the course of that year, shareholder value was destroyed. And in the course of getting it right and sort of redoing it, more shareholder value was destroyed.

And again, I find that, a great example of how not to do it.

[00:20:34] Mo Fathelbab: So a five-year runway suggests perhaps that companies should always be planning for the CEO succession. 'cause some CEOs, you know, involuntarily are fired 'cause something goes wrong or God forbid got shot like the case of our United Healthcare CEO recently.

So how do we plan for that?

[00:20:56] Kevin Cox: Well, I think it's a parallel process. that's a, wonderful question. the way I think about it is there's what I call planned succession. That's kind of five year, three year, two year, one year touchdown. and then there's in a parallel, what I would call emergency succession and I took home with me in my briefcase.

I was a more analog guy back then, than a, digital guy. But, I literally had a, in case of emergency plan. If something were to happen, heaven forbid someone were to pass away, someone were to quit unexpectedly, you know, that's not a good time to scramble. And I wanted a playbook that would say if that happened.

Would we name an interim? Yes, we would. Who would that interim be? It would be this person. would we use a search firm? Yes, we would. What search firm would we use? The whole idea was to be able to kind of mobilize very quickly and, you know, I felt it was my job to come up with that. But then review that with the board at least every year because things change.

You know, the willingness of a board member to step out of a board role and be an interim, that might work in 2015. That might not work in 2016. So, but I, think you raise a great point that succession, there's a plan, variety of it, which is ideal, and then there's sort of the unplanned things happen that is also part of a, good comprehensive succession process.

[00:22:27] Mo Fathelbab: Thank you. That's helpful. Kevin, can you, we have, you know, our audience is obviously HR professionals and CHROs. What is the delineation of the role of the HR professional or CHRO as compared to the role of the board in this process?

[00:22:44] Kevin Cox: I think that question is a really important one to get succession right.

Thanks for bringing that one.

If you are in a company that has a board, whether it's public or privately held, the board is really the group that needs to be responsible for the decision of the next CEO. And most boards that I've either, been staffed to or I've set on myself will say that the selection of the CEO is the prime directive.

It is the board's most important. Responsibility, the decision of who's going to be the CEO. So I've always been very clear that, my job is not to be the king or the queen maker. It's not to be the picker of who it's going to be. That job belongs to the board. It's also not the incumbent ceo, EO, the outgoing CEO's job to do that, although many of them wanna do it.

and I can understand that. it's gotta be the role of the board. The role of hr. To me, I think I might have used the term showrunner, kind of a Hollywood expression, but I felt like my job was to sort of put the tracks down of the process and remind the board, you are here. This is what you just finished, and this is what's coming up next.

Let's stay on track. Let's not panic and sort of go off script or come off process. Again, just give the board situational awareness about how they're moving toward it to make a decision. And sometimes I'm thinking of one example in particular. Sometimes I had half the board was saying, what's taken so long?

This process is too slow. Let's just pick. And I had the other half the board saying, what is your rush? What is your hurry? You know, we love the incumbent. Why don't they just stay longer? And so part of your job in HR is to try to. Get the board on one page, one way or the other. Are we gonna move faster, slower?

Are we gonna stay the course kind of thing. So that's, I think what the role of HR is. And by the way, I realize a number of the audience may not be heads of hr. What can be relevant to those of you who are not yet CHROs? You're doing the same thing in critical role staffing. Like there are jobs at a factory.

There are jobs in a regional sales district. There are jobs in a, in the finance function, you know, you, pick what you're talking about. In software engineering, there are jobs that are es especially critical to the outcome of the organization. And your job might be to figure out who the right successor is for those jobs, not just to see a job.

A lot of the same principles apply, spend the time on what do we really need. And let's get alignment around that before we jump to the, who's the right and best person to take this position. So the same kind of planful thinking and the same kind of strategy I think can apply, in all parts of the organization.

[00:25:50] Mo Fathelbab: Good stuff. Good stuff. Thank you, Kevin. Last question, what piece of advice has shaped your work or personal life?

[00:25:57] Kevin Cox: HR is sort of a, almost a. Religious pursuit. And I, here's what I mean by that. We were taught to believe that what we were doing was more important than any other part of the organization.

And we were, not obnoxious about that. We were not bragging about that, but we just got up and we sort of put our clothes on every morning to go to work believing that we are essential to the performance of this company. That attitude and that mindset and that sense of responsibility again reminds me of a flying if.

If you are, it's called a PIC or a pilot in command. If you are the pilot of in command of a flight, you are responsible for the safety and the wellbeing of your passengers, your airplane, and the space around you. It's an awesome responsibility. I really remember feeling that way when I was back at. That attitude or that mindset, again, you can't be arrogant about it, but to sort of believe deep in your heart that what I do really matters.

That's the most important, gift I was given. And I try to take that same gift with me to American Express and the ge and even in my current role in some of the advisory work I'm doing, I really try to bring that forward. So that's the one I, think I'd like to end on. I got a lot of great advice, but.

But that probably really made the biggest difference to me,

[00:27:25] Mo Fathelbab: and it's a perfect one for our audience, and that's where we'll end it for this episode of People in Strategy. A huge thanks to Kevin for your valuable insights. You can follow people in Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on a podcast visibility.

So if you enjoyed today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you can find all our episodes at our website, shrm.org/podcasts. Thank you for listening and have a wonderful day.