Henry L. Meyer III doesn’t want to be the best violin player. He
also doesn’t want to be the best trombone player. Likewise for
the oboe, kettle drum and viola.
But he does want to hear the strings grow softer while the
brass intensifies and the percussions pipe in. He wants to hear
the strings play quickly to intensify their sound, joining the others
as he conducts the orchestra to the song’s dramatic conclusion.
While many people may want to be the best musician, Meyer
wants to be the best conductor.
“I really think of myself as the orchestra leader,” he says. “I
can’t play any of the instruments as well as the people I’ve got.
They can only play notes. They can’t play music unless somebody is coordinating it.”
As chairman and CEO of KeyCorp, his conductor role hasn’t
been without challenges. When he took the reins in 2001, Key sold
a significant amount of loans in its portfolio to exit riskier businesses, but doing so resulted in a $1 billion charge against its earnings. On top of that, analysts wrote that year — and for the next
three years to come — that Key was one of seven banks that
would get taken over.
As a result, the board wanted the senior management team
strengthened and performance to improve — not easy tasks for a
new CEO, even if he did have the inside knowledge from having
spent his entire career growing with the company, and it was that
previous experience that guided Meyer in what to do.
Meyer had been part of a team in 1994 that had established Key’s
values following its merger with Society Corp. He knew those values — teamwork, respect, accountability, integrity and leadership
— were crucial to success and that some of those needed to be
more heavily emphasized, and he set shorter-term goals that
would get them out of the cellar.
“We set the middle as our goal when we were dead-ass last
because that was moving past half the field,” Meyer says.
Build a strong team
One of Key’s values is leadership, and while that extends
throughout all levels of the organization, it starts at the top.
Meyer needed solid team players to strengthen his team to get
the organization moving forward again, so he looked for those
that didn’t need to be lone rangers.
“There’s a saying that one of the great football coaches used,
and that is that the best 11 can always beat the 11 best,” Meyer
says. “The 11 best would be individuals. The best 11 is a team.
When your strategy is relationship, it means you have to hand off,
you have to count on, you have to trust and value your partners.”
One way to gauge teamwork in a person is to role-play with
a candidate by providing him or her with a situation and asking what he or she would do and how he or she would handle
the problem.
“If every word is, ‘I, I, I, I do this, I would do this,’ that’s different than saying, ‘We’d get the legal department on this … and
we’d talk to HR,’” Meyer says. “Those are giveaways. What’s
the mindset? Especially if I ask you in a situation, and I haven’t
sent it to you, your initial reactions are going to be sort of the
way you would systematically go through solving the problem,
and we just look for trends.”
Meyer also likes to meet candidates in different settings to
better gauge if they’ll fit with his team.
“You can tell a little bit more,” he says. “Not everyone drinks,
but with a glass of wine and a more relaxed atmosphere, you
can get another insight into somebody — how social are they?
How comfortable are they in that environment?”
In one such situation, Meyer remembers a man who seemed fixated on the wall behind him and became frustrated that the man
couldn’t look him in the eyes.
“This isn’t somebody I wanted to work with,” Meyer says. “He
wasn’t shifty, but just the idea that you can’t look somebody in
the eye just doesn’t sit well with a banker. What are they hiding? That’s a very important factor. Very few people flunk that
test. He did. I’m sure he’s a good banker somewhere, but it
wasn’t going to be in our company. I don’t believe there are bad
people, but I believe there are bad fits.”
Key also uses psychological testing, and while it has never
hired or rejected someone solely on the test’s results, Meyer
says it’s an excellent tool to confirm or correct the instincts
you usually have already.
With one individual, the man said all the right things, but
Meyer just felt like he was acting.
“The tests came back and said, ‘Don’t hire this guy. There’s no
team in him — he’s an actor,’” Meyer says. “I was like, ‘Wow, I
thought that, too.’ Most of the time it confirms or raises a,
‘Wow, we all thought this way; maybe we should do some more
interviewing.’
“It’s very valuable. There’s just a ton of data behind some of
the tests that they do and what it tells you.”
Additionally, it’s important that several different people assist
in the hiring process, so at Key, five to eight people will interview candidates.
“If we all came from different backgrounds, we’d look at
somebody differently, so have that input and variety of background,” Meyer says.
Before getting interviewers together to discuss what they
thought of candidates, Meyer suggests speaking with people
individually to avoid groupthink.
“We’ve all had experiences where there’s a loudmouth in the
group, and usually the loudmouth gets his or her position out first,”
Meyer says. “Sometimes that will reduce the amount of opinion on
the other side, so groupthink is people who don’t want to talk, nodding their heads, but my experience is they almost nod their head
regardless of which positions — it’s just sort of the first position.”
He says this can be particularly damaging because if one person has concerns about a candidate, but everyone else loves
that person, that one interviewer will be less likely to raise
those concerns for fear of being chastised or accused of not
being a team player.
“Eliminate the opportunity for groupthink by getting opinions before it’s part of a massive opinion,” Meyer says.
Through this type of process, Meyer was able to bring on a
new chief financial officer and someone to head the national
banking group. He’s hired several key leaders since those initial hires, and the mix he has now has strengthened the company’s leadership.
“I hope the next CEO and even the person after him or her
doesn’t have to go outside as much,” Meyer says. “We really
have … some outstanding individuals who are also good teachers. I’m more focused on internal development, so we don’t
have to go outside in the future.”
Hold people accountable
Another value near and dear to Meyer’s heart is accountability. This starts with listening, which is one of the most important characteristics a leader should possess. When Meyer’s
youngest son was 4 or 5, he came home from preschool one
day and asked what Meyer thought was a riddle — why do people have two ears and one mouth?
“Damned if I knew,” Meyer says. “I was thinking left brain and
right brain and sort of was taking a minute.”
His son interrupted his thought process before he could find
a conclusion.
“Dad, it’s so simple,” he said. “Listening is twice as important
as talking.”
That preschool lesson showed Meyer that even with a
Harvard MBA, he still had some learning to do, and that skill
helps him recognize issues and hold people accountable.
“Listening is terribly important, and when somebody isn’t working out, you hear it,” Meyer says. “It isn’t stabbing in the back. It’s,
‘Gosh, that didn’t work the way, and that person didn’t do the …’
It’s not overwhelming, but you start to hear it.”
He regularly eats in the cafeteria so he can talk with employees, and the things he hears are often a basis for looking into
what could be deeper problems. If it’s performance issues,
reviews can easily confirm or correct these issues, but when
Meyer took over as CEO, reviews weren’t done consistently, so
he raised that expectation of his managers.
He holds reviews with his senior members every six months
and expects employees to have one annually. That accountability helps managers better address performance problems
throughout the organization to ensure efficiency and progress.
When issues do arise, reviews need to be more frequent, and
communication is key.
“You have to sit down with the person and let them know that,”
he says. “How unfair would it be if two or three of my senior people got together and said, ‘John or Jane just isn’t making it,’ and we
never told them? How do they know they’re supposed to improve?
At about the sixth month, you sit down with the person and say,
‘Look, it doesn’t appear to be working. You got to work on this, this
and this. We’re going to get together every month and just check
the progress.’”
While sometimes we hold on to employees who are good people but fail to perform, sometimes we hold on to people who
meet numbers but do so in a demeaning manner. Meyer would
rather see those “talented” people go to another company if
they aren’t on board with Key’s values and ways of working.
“You have to define what your best talent is,” Meyer says.
“Those people that are walking away are very good at something,
but they’re not very good at everything. … They’re valuable in one
small sliver, which is generating business. We really are a relationship-oriented company, and while I kid about I can’t play all
the instruments, I don’t think anybody can.
“You need teammates. You need people to help you, and back
to the 11 best, we really believe that if you don’t have team-work in your chemistry, in your DNA, that you’re going to be
valuable somewhere else. Yes, we’re losing some good producers, but they’re not good employees in the broader sense.”
Regardless of if the problem is performance- or attitude-driven,
if things don’t improve in six months to a year after the initial
review, make a bigger decision.
“I don’t think you can do it much shorter than that because then
you’re just not giving the person the chance to improve,” Meyer
says.
Act quickly and don’t drag out the process of letting those
people go.
“We’re all worried about making mistakes because it’s people’s careers,” Meyer says. “But usually the die is cast in the
organization long before those of us at the top making those
decisions make the decision.”
When you make the decision quickly, while it may be hard,
Meyer says you can at least take solace in the fact that most
people will ask you, “What took you so long?” reiterating that
you made the right decision to help move the company ahead.
“My experience is I will make a mistake, but I’m going to be
right a lot more than I’m wrong, and the company has benefited
so significantly by acting faster as opposed to just throwing life
preserver after life preserver,” Meyer says.
These expectations for managers to perform reviews and
employees to do their jobs properly emphasize accountability
and help illustrate that value in employees’ every day work
lives. As a result, the number of completed performance
reviews has significantly increased, and Meyer and his team
better know where people stand and of what they’re capable.
Teamwork makes the difference
Meyer learned how important the teamwork value is during a
case study discussion while attending Harvard Business
School. In a class of about 80 students, his professor asked if
anyone would like to present the case they had been asked to
prepare. Meyer thought he had it nailed, so he, along with
about seven others, raised their hands, but the professor started at the opposite side of the room with the presentations.
“By the time he got to me, my answer was mathematical, analytical, shallow, not very creative, and I learned so much just in the
time he went around,” Meyer says.
By hearing a former marine talk and take one approach and
a woman from the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra take another, it opened his eyes to different viewpoints and how collaboration could reach the best solution.
“The light went off that people’s backgrounds help give you a
view that you just won’t have, and when you’re making important decisions … how crazy would it be for me to make that
decision just on my background?,” he says. “I want the two
ears and one mouth.”
While listening to others viewpoints and discussing ideas,
you may run into some harsh disagreements, too, so it’s important to help everyone work collaboratively to come to the best
plan, and as a leader, you can’t come off too strongly.
“If people have a strong opinion, there’s usually a good reason for it,” Meyer says. “Trying to be the orchestra leader, I
look for them to try to come to the middle. I learned this early
on: If I say, ‘This is what I want to do,’ there aren’t that many
people that say, ‘Let’s go right or left — that’s what he wants to
do,’ so I try very hard not to give out where I want to go right
away.”
Instead, Meyer takes a more passive approach to voicing his
opinions.
“If anything, I learned in business school that trying to plant little seeds, so they think it’s their idea to go the way I originally
wanted to go, is a very acceptable way to get everyone on board,”
he says.
After reaching conclusions, it’s important to support each
other in getting there, and Meyer notes that aside from ethical
and legal issues, very few paths are black and white.
“There’s a lot of gray on how to get from here to there,” Meyer
says. “One good example is here at Public Square. I could ask
my management committee members on how to get from
KeyBank’s front doors to Tower City the fastest way or the way
with the least disruption, and some of them will go left, and
some will go right, some will pass one of the quadrants, and
some will stay away from the quadrant.
“They’re all going to get there. There is no right or wrong.”
While everyone takes different paths to get to that final destination, Meyer recognizes that he may have to step in once
and awhile to override the team if people get off path.
“I, by position, not by individual, own the corporate strategy
because it’s the product of the board, and the board represents
the shareholders, so if we get off of that, then I have to step in,”
Meyer says. “Below that, if what they’re doing is consistent
with getting there, then that’s their decision. They have to run
that. They have to own that.”
Having a values-focused leadership style has made a difference and allowed Meyer to grow Key’s net income from $132
million in 2001 to $1.06 billion in 2006. And with $4.9 billion in
total revenue in 2006, the analysts wrote that Key is now one
of the players doing the buying instead of being bought. That
growth has created a change in the migration pattern at Key, as
well.
“There was a time back in that 2001 period where we were
feeding more banks,” Meyer says. “Today, more banks are feeding us, and that signifies a change.”
Now, above his original goal of being in the middle, he wants
to move higher.
“We don’t want to be in the middle of the pack,” Meyer says.
“Whose goal in life is, ‘Hey, I want to grow up and be in the middle?’ … We’re not in the middle — just above it. Our goals have
moved up, so that we can think of ourselves as winners. Our
goal is not to be No. 1 because No. 1 is usually never No. 1
twice in a row, but if we can be in the top quartile in terms of
performance for our employees, clients, communities and
shareholders, this would be a stock everyone would want to
own.”
As he moves in that direction, he has to continue to lead by
example.
“You can’t talk the talk,” Meyer says. “We’re too transparent
for that. In any business, people know if their leaders are walking or just talking.”
For instance, When Meyer is out with clients, he’ll order a
bottle of wine, but it will only be a $40 to $50 bottle.
“I don’t buy $150 bottles of wine because I don’t drink them
at home,” he says. “If I treat the company’s assets the same way
I treat my assets, then I’m walking the walk. That’s what I
expect people to do.”
When people see you walking the walk, they’ll know how to
act in their own situations, as well.
“I don’t have a company car,” Meyer says. “I drive my own
car. That tells people that when you’re in Cleveland, take a cab.
Don’t call a limousine because that isn’t the way Henry does it.
People aren’t stupid. They can pick up what the signals are,
and if you send the right signals and walk the right walk, good
things will happen as long as you’re walking the right way.”
HOW TO REACH: KeyCorp, www.keybank.com or (800) KEY2YOU
