The right ones

Jim Davis
president, Chevron Energy Solutions Co.

As leaders, it’s important to get your
employees in the right places to succeed.

“A real critical part of a leader’s role is to
make sure that they have the right team in
place in the right roles, so you can delegate
critical initiatives to them, so that you’re not
trying to carry the weight of the whole company on your shoulders,” says Jim Davis,
president of Chevron Energy Solutions Co.
“The collective strength of that leadership
team can be leveraged exponentially further
than an individual strong leader can.”

You have to look for signs from people
inside and outside your organization to see
whether people are effective.

“Typically, you’re going to get lots of different feedback from that person’s peers, possibly from their supervisors, possibly from
their customers or suppliers,” he says. “You
may even observe it yourself in meetings
and interactions.”

The difficulty becomes that leaders tend
to put off unpleasant things and hope they’ll
blow over instead of reading the signs.

“It’s like a warning light on any dashboard
… you better pay attention when that red
light comes on,” Davis says. “Business is the
same way. You have warning lights that
come on, on your financial dashboard or in
terms of managing your people, and it’s just
like the warning light on an airplane — you
better pay real quick attention to it because
something really bad might happen if you
don’t deal with that right away. Rarely does a
warning light come on and it’s good news.”

When you see or hear the warning signs,
it’s important to point out the signs to the
person who’s struggling.

“Gather the information and the facts, and
then you sit down behind closed doors with
that individual,” he says. “You’ll find quickly
that, that person also recognizes that they’re
in a difficult role that may not be the ideal
fit for them.”

Doing this sooner rather than later helps
both parties involved.

“If you react early enough, oftentimes,
there’s not permanent damage done, so you
can work with that individual to manage
them out of that role and into a new role,”
Davis says. “The problem is when you let it
fester, and suddenly, there’s damage done to
that person’s career, reputation, relationships internally as well as the damage that
might be done through your organization as
well as to your customers, suppliers and
financial results.”

If it gets to that point, then it’s too late.
“You’ll find it’s too late to manage that person into another role in your organization,”
he says. “It might mean that you’re left with
nothing other than to manage that person
out of your organization. That is, in many
cases, the fault of that person’s leadership in
ignoring all the warning signs”