If you want your second-in-command to make decisions independently, you have to let him or her do it. Of course, you can be sure there will be some choices you wouldn't have made -- and possibly won't like. Owners are forever agonizing over what to do about that. "In your heart, it's so hard to say, 'Here's a problem; now go and solve it,' " admits John Bourget, CEO of Beta One Inc., a market-research company in Farmington, Conn. If you want the relationship to work, you have to learn to understand how the other person thinks and support that person's decisions.
If you feel the urge to check in all the time, you have a problem. Get rid of the car phone. Or maybe you need to rethink what you really want.
Money isn't the point. Sooner or later, practically every second-in-command we spoke with realized that what mattered most in a relationship with the boss wasn't so much how the two parties defined their roles; it wasn't how they communicated; it wasn't even money. It was trust -- difficult to define, as many of them noted, but not hard to recognize. Saying you trust your number two, as nearly all CEOs do, is easy. But talk is cheap. Ask John Vinton, who, until he quit, worked as second-in-command at R. W. Frookies Inc., a cookie company in Englewood Cliffs, N.J.
"Owners don't realize it," says Vinton, "but they could say, 'By the way, I'm going to cut your paycheck by 10%, but I want you to run the company for me.' That would make number twos happier than if they said, 'I'll give you more, but I'll run the company.' When push comes to shove and somebody says, 'Go do that, do it your way, and I'm behind you,' that's what really turns people on. The absence of that drove me away."
THE VIEW FROM #2: LORI WRIGHT
Wright rose through the ranks to her number two position, operations manager at Buckingham Computer Services Inc., a fast-growing high-tech company in Midland, Mich. Buckingham's founder has been finding it extremely difficult to delegate many of his responsibilities.
"I sat in a managers' meeting, and the founder said, 'Now, I want you to keep me informed on things that I want to be informed about.' What do you want to be informed about? 'Things that are important to me.' So we're playing guessing games here. I thought, OK, we'll try to figure out what you think is important. Then something will come up that we think isn't important enough to relay to him, and he'll come in and say, 'Why didn't you tell me that?' Or he'll walk down to my office, sit down, and strike up a conversation. A half hour of my time goes by, and nothing gets accomplished. Or we'll discuss something, come to a verbal agreement, and I'll go do it. Later he'll say, 'Why did you do that?' Well, we talked about it. 'No, we didn't.' Since it wasn't a formal discussion, there was miscommunication."
A FAILURE TO COMMUNICATE?
62% of number twos say their bosses communicate by "catching up" as catch can, but there are no formal ways of communicating
23% say their biggest problem with their number ones is communication
16% say their bosses never or only sometimes listen to them
THE VIEW FROM #2: CHICO LAGER
For two years, until January 1991, Lager was the CEO of Ben & Jerry's, the $77-million Waterbury, Vt., ice cream manufacturer. Since Jerry Greenfield had not played an active management role for several years, Lager shared operational duties with Ben Cohen and struggled to keep their respective leadership roles in balance.
"If you don't develop a relationship with the founder in which people perceive you as making decisions, as being a force to be reckoned with in the company, you'll have no credibility with the people who work for you. You go into meetings, and you're paralyzed -- you get all this input, and instead of making a decision, you say, 'I'd better see what Ben thinks.' You can't operate that way. Or I'd go on record talking down this or that idea, but Ben would want to do it. Then I'd have no credibility when I had to go around saying, 'Hey, guess what, we're going to do this, and it's a great idea.' It became a very negative dynamic within our organization."
WHO'S IN CHARGE HERE?
64% of number twos said they aspire to be a number one
46% of number twos who thought just one person should be in charge said they should be the one
29% of number twos thought employees perceived them as running the company
25% said they do run the company
THE VIEW FROM #2: P. J.MAYES
Mayes has played a variety of number two roles with four different companies, including the western U.S. distributor for Raleigh Industries, a large British bicycle retailer, and Sundance Spas, a manufacturer of portable spas. Her areas of responsibility have ranged from finance to customer service to human resources. Currently, she is controller at Distribution Video and Audio, in Clearwater, Fla.
"The greatest weakness of all the entrepreneurs I've worked with is managing people. When they got to the point where their companies were so large that they could no longer deal one-to-one with everyone, they had to have supervisors and managers -- at that point, they were in trouble with their management skills. That was usually the reason they looked for a number two in the first place. Maybe they didn't put value on having people skills, or they didn't pay attention to it, or it was difficult for them -- I don't know which, or why, but I found it to be a constant problem."
TIME FOR DALE CARNEGIE?
42% of number twos said their bosses needed to work on their personalities or their people skills; only 13% of number twos said their own people skills needed work
27% of number twos said their biggest problem with their number ones was differences in personality and style
26% said their biggest area of disagreement with their bosses concerned dealing with employees
