Carol Bartz was brought in by Yahoo to save the company from itself. She had made a great success of AutoDesk in her previous assignment, and her tough, driving style seemed just what Yahoo needed to shake it out of its torpor.
Didn't work out, did it? One writer who follows this indutry, David Koretz, put out a great summation of the whole situation, in which he makes the critical point that the Yahoo Board of Directors didn't do their homework, and hired a candidate that didn't fit the needs of the job.
Koretz goes on to suggest there are four types of CEOs, which is just another way pop psychology spin on how to think about personality types.
I take a different lesson from this than Koretz did, however:
Yahoo hired a highly talented person, who somehow never meshed with the corporate culture or their mission. Whose fault is it that the "Great Hire" didn't work out? Let's go look for that executive in charge of HR.
Every company hires talented people, and if they fail it is from cultural mis-fitting rather than capability. No personal mindset is set in stone, however. We are all malleable when given the tools to better understand and work with those around us. Even Ms. Bartz, tough as nails as she seems to be, wanted to succeed at her job. Where was the training, coaching and mentoring to make sure that happened?
Once you make the hiring choice, you have to work hard to make it work. Carol Bartz may not have had advertising or content publishing experience when she showed up to work at Yahoo, but she had energy, a drive to succeed and a company full of brightly talented people who were all anxious that she (and they) succeed.
HR needed to step in actively to provide the interventionalists to shepard her entry into Yahoo, make sure that she understood the culture, understood where that culture may be failing, and took the steps she needed to engage with all those talented people and get them focused and energized to "bring Yahoo back to relevance?" She may have resisted at first, but good coaches know how to make themselves valued by even the toughest of tough-guy CEOs.
Bottom line: The senior HR person had to take on the role of channeling the undeniable talent of Ms. Bratz in the right direction to maximize her benefit to Yahoo. I do not mean forcing her to accept or adapt to the culture she inherited, but to serve as a guide to that culture so that she might make better decisions about how to revamp and energize it. That is a role that HR must play more actively in an era of short-tenured CEOs!
For an example of a company that got it right, check out my Bombardier article about their successful reengineering of a culture that needed an overhaul.
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