Clearly, one of Coleman's own priorities is to avoid the kind of "nit-picking and infighting" she endured at Apple, where she started in 1981. Stepp offers all the team members "a candid and straightforward opportunity for learning" by helping them understand different communication styles. "I'm very theatrical," says Coleman. "The others have embraced that. They would be upset if I came in and talked in a monotone." Upset, but not crushed. To get Coleman's attention, Howell says, he's learned to pound on a table or raise his voice a decibel. "Debi has learned to listen to me," he says. Howell also has become all too aware that when he talks he tends to take shortcuts, forgetting that the group needs to hear more of his thinking. "I've learned by working with Kay that I need to bring the team along on the journey," he says. "It was a revelation, rather like a club upside the head."
Stepp's bluntest weapon is her ability to be "very present" and "listen totally." To make sure she understands correctly, she'll repeat what someone has said, asking, Is this what you're saying? Trying to bring people around, she'll sometimes prompt them by using greater detail: In my earlier conversation with you, she'll say, you mentioned this event. She'll explore alternatives, trade-offs, underlying assumptions.
Stephen M. R. Covey, the son of the best-selling self-help author, is executive vice-president of Franklin Covey Co., one of the four companies at which Stepp serves on the board. (See "The Making of a Business Coach," below.) He claims that his "whole thought process has been improved" by Stepp. When presenting his first budget, in January 1995, he recalls, "I had jumped into what we were going to do and why. She asked some great questions about the assumptions we made." He goes on, "She's not trying to do the job of management. She's trying to help by making management aware of the choices being made."
Stepp takes pains to keep her distance. If the Merix group is brainstorming, she'll start her own contributions with, "In my personal experience..." or, "I have observed...." While conveying empathy, she's careful to guard her standing as a detached outsider with no hidden agenda. That enables her to point out problems that are "immediately available for solving," as she says.
Stepp's questioning pushes the management team to serve Coleman in the same way. "Kay helps us remember that we are officers of the company," says Howell, noting the natural tendency of managers to view problems solely through the lens of their own function, be it finance or marketing. "We really try to understand as if we were the CEO, so that the information is less distorted when it gets to Debi. Then she has less work to do to understand and interpret it and take action." Stepp describes her sole agenda in a similar way: "To share the best information I have in a way that helps Debi improve her effectiveness."
Improving that effectiveness means organizing more than just Coleman's thoughts. Stepp also tries to encourage CEOs to seize simplicity where they can: to carry a planning notebook with a running checklist in front, keeping the notes of their meetings in one spot. Stepp sends out those notes on three-holed paper. "It's easier for people to learn when you remove the obstacles," she says. Wherever possible. "I'm not likely to become prim and proper," warns Coleman, who favors jeans and is genetically predisposed to misplacing airline tickets.
What CEOs need, above all, is a firm sense that they're in control. At PGE, Stepp saw how easy it was to assign blame for the company's problems: to regulators maybe, or customers. That led to "battening down the hatches and becoming more self-referencing," and ignoring the marketplace even more. At PGE, Stepp says, "the plans I put in place really spoke to the need to be prepared for competition, because it was coming. But I couldn't get everyone to see deregulation as the future."
Stepp wasn't clairvoyant. She was simply willing to act on what she regarded as "the writing on the wall" rather than let time limit the utility's choices. Back in 1985, when she was vice-president of marketing and customer operations, Stepp had taken her management team through a yearlong program with a then-unknown consultant named Stephen R. Covey. The future author of The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People met with them one day a month, teaching and discussing readings. One book had a "profound effect" on Stepp: Man's Search for Meaning, by Victor Frankl, a Viennese psychiatrist who was imprisoned in a Nazi death camp. Frankl's message, as Stepp saw it, was that even in the most dire circumstances, a person stripped of everything could still choose how to react. "If we feel that we are victims," says Stepp, "then it's usually because we comply with the role."
By reminding CEOs that they're always making choices--even when they don't realize it--Stepp helps them recapture a sense of control that often gets obscured by day-to-day crises. It's the powerful clarity Stepp felt when she exited PGE, where streamlining had put a new CEO in charge, limiting her advancement. Having identified her own values--the work itself mattered more than the status or the paycheck--she chose the unknown instead. "I knew I didn't define myself in terms of being president of a utility," she says. "So I didn't feel I was losing any of myself to leave it."
