Identify the best managers
Because Tech Data was the fourth company that Dutkowsky joined as CEO, one of his talents is to be able to come into a company and relatively quickly size up the capacity of the business and the management team.
“You really look very carefully at the domain knowledge that people have,” he says. “Do they really understand the business; do they bring expertise to the business? You look carefully at their leadership capabilities and you’re really interested in, ‘Do they match up with what your leadership philosophy is?’”
You then have to look at their pure leadership skills.
“Have they been able to scale up to that capacity and that requirement of the job?” he says. “When I joined Tech Data, what I found was the vast majority of the people on the leadership roles where very capable and had all of those skills and requisite skills that I was in. So the vast majority of them stayed in their jobs.”
To find out if you and another executive are on the same wavelength, you can’t just speak with them a few times and then make your decision.
“Really, what you do is you watch them in action,” he says. “You sit in staff meetings or team meetings and you try not to say anything. You try to just watch how the process unfolds and watch their leadership skills, competencies and core beliefs in action. You don’t see that the first day. You see that through a period of observation, and then you make a determination.”
You can’t always expect a perfect fit, which was the case with Dutkowsky when he was evaluating executives.
“But, I believed that if I could work with them, I could help them see my way that the company should be operated,” he says. “They were flexible and smart enough and skilled enough to migrate their mode of operation to more of the way I would like to see the company run.”
Getting them to migrate to your mode of operation may seem like a huge challenge, but Dutkowsky says it’s much more difficult when you join a company that is reveling in its success. When you take over a company that isn’t doing well, you need to jump on the opportunity and take advantage of managers who are looking at things with more of an open mind.
“In Tech Data’s case, where we lost money, people were very interested in finding a different way,” he says. “So, there wasn’t a lot of resistance to thinking about the business opportunity differently.”
Once you have chosen the people you want on your management team, you still have to watch their actions to monitor if they have bought in to your philosophy.
“It’s really easy to have people tell you what they think you want to hear, especially in the beginning,” he says. “When the new guy comes in, it’s really easy for the existing team to kind of mimic back the ideas and direction that the new executive is articulating. But, what you really watch for is the actions.”
For example, if you want to find out if the sales executives have bought in to your philosophy, go and make a couple of sales calls with the salespeople and see how they deal with the customer.
“It’s very simple to see what people really believe in the end,” he says. “It takes a little time sometimes to see it. But you can pretty quickly figure out what other people have the moral and ethical backbone that you demand that they have.”
