“I come to you with not great news”. That was how Vishal Garg, chief executive of Better.com, a US mortgage company, opened a Zoom call earlier this month at which he abruptly told 900 staff that their employment by the US mortgage company was “terminated, effective immediately”.
It is hard to think of a worse example of leadership than Better’s. But Garg did other leaders a favour, by modelling a management style that the past two tumultuous years have consigned to the dustbin of corporate case studies. Would-be corporate leaders of 2022 should take the opposite course.
Twenty years ago, Garg might have got away with what he later admitted was a lack of “respect and appreciation”. The typical chief executive of the early 21st century concentrated on the manufacture of reliable products and the sale of dependable services. Their aim was to hit short-term financial targets in the interests of their companies’ owners. Leadership was about “managing badly performing robots”, Rita Gunther McGrath, a Columbia Business School professor told the recent Global Peter Drucker Forum on management. From this era of execution, via the era of knowledge management, McGrath suggests leaders have now entered “the era of empathy”.