About a year ago, I sat down over coffee with the CEO of an IT company. The CEO – we’ll call him Robert – shared with me that his organization had been the market leader in their industry for the past five years and had enjoyed consistent growth and profitability. Their success to that point, he believed, was based on their leadership and their employees’ sheer drive and relentless focus on key results.
Yet despite their past success, Robert confided that he had deep concerns about the company’s future. A competitor with a creative, new technology had recently overtaken them as the market leader, and he had just learned that they had lost one of their key customers to this competitor. To make matters worse, the organization’s most recent employee survey revealed that morale was low, people were burned out, communication was lacking and employees had lost faith in leadership.
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