Name: This CEO is Championing a New Kind of Leadership
Uploaded: 2018-04-24
Duration: 4 min 51 s
Description: Insight Enterprises CEO Ken Lamneck learned about the 'servant leadership' model from his time in the U.S. Army.

[ MUSIC ] Ken, there aren't too many CEOs who can say that they graduated from West Point and served many years in the Army, but you did. What would you say was the most important leadership lesson you learned from your years in the military? It's really about servant leadership, things such as I wouldn't expect the people that I lead to do anything that I'm not prepared to do. We talk about the fact that leadership's a contact sport. You don't manage, you don't lead from behind a desk, through email. You're out in front. You're talking to the people. You're really assessing all the different aspects of that. A lot of people have different sort of connotations of what the military's about, but Really the most successful. It's really about, you know, that servant leadership model. I understand that you sent every one of your senior level executives from Insight Enterprises to West Point to learn about leadership. These leadership training sessions. What do you want them to learn? If you're dealing with people that have been in real life situations They're Colonels, they're Generals, really very very commanding, demanding situations. So they get to see real world examples that are very different in situations where they don't have all of the information, they're in critical situations. That they've gotta make decisions very much on the fly, and make sure that they're leading with their people. I'm sure you hear this all the time, but a lot of people think of the military about autocratic leadership, command and control. Which is very different than consensus building leadership, which is more common at most companies. What do you say to that? There certainly is command and control in the military, but That's sort of the movie version of it. When you really get down to it, the essence really is, is it's about people, and it's about caring for people. And really driving them and making them successful. So can you exist in the military with that sort of command and autocratic style? Yeah, but you're not gonna go very far. It's really about treating the people like you would if they were your children. Really caring for them and really developing them all along the way. You talk about you have very open meetings where everybody can say what they want to say at in site enterprises. You call them messy meetings. Correct. So, I guess that is different then what you expect in the military. And I do. I want everyone to have a different point of view. So when we are have these, everybody, I want people in the meeting To be able to disagree, we want them to express exactly what they feel. As I say, there's no sort of hierarchy in our meetings. We want to hear the best ideas. When we do come to consensus and agree, we all follow that. And you've got to treat that, even if you were on the other side of that, you've gotta treat it like it was your own decision. You have said that the most important job of a leader, is hiring the right people, and I understand that you personally interview Anyone looking for a job on the junior or senior level, which is very unusual for a CEO, very time consuming too. Why is this important to you? It's so important because it's setting the tone. I think Steve Jobs said it best, A people higher A pepole, and B people higher C people. And if you aren't involved in building that leadership structure to make sure you are keeping the standards are as high as possible, you can quickly turn around in a very short period of time, you can have an organization that is operating below an A or B level. And that's very dangerous for a company. So, what's a question you ask in an interview? But based on the answer determines whether or not you hire someone. What I look for in an interview, I'm looking for really, a few things. I'm looking for people who are hungry, humble, and smart. So, what I mean by hungry is people that really wanna improve themselves, people that Want to develop, want to learn, they want to really succeed. Want to look for people who are humble. I'm looking for people who are team players. And then when I'm looking for smart, I'm not looking for what their GPA score was and what's their IQ necessarily. I'm looking for more the emotional intelligence. And do they have a curiosity to learn? Because this industry's changing so quickly, there's so much going on, that they've gotta have a curiosity to continue to learn. So I look for those. Ken, we've been talking about leadership, about giving leadership advice, but on the other side, what's the best leadership advice that you ever received during your military Part of your career, and how it shaped you as a leader. I was 24 years old, I was stationed in Germany, and the unit commander was relieved of their command, or fired, in today's finacular. I was positioned to take over this unit, and it was sort of like, woah, this is huge. I'm not ready for this kind of experience, and I had to take it over. The Colonol that I was going to report to, basically I sat down with him and how do we really prepare for this? This is happening. He says you've already prepared yourself for this. You've already done all the schooling, all the work, you know how to lead people. Just rely on that. It's already there. Just believe in yourself, and just lead the people like you'd wanna be led. And I've really believed that to today, right, is treat people like you like to be treated. [ BLANK_AUDIO ]

This CEO is Championing a New Kind of Leadership

Leadership

Insight Enterprises CEO Ken Lamneck learned about the "servant leadership" model from his time in the U.S. Army.