REALITY ALWAYS WINS ~ Dennis J. Ellmaurer, Chair Emeritus at Vistage Worldwide, Inc. Encourages Executives to Work On Their Business Rather Than In Their Business.

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I’m going to attribute the concept to a colleague of mine, Joe Cotruzzola, who was a Vistage Chair for I think something like 31 years. His position was that success is the CEO’s first and worst problem. A CEO might be thinking that whatever the CEO is doing at the time, it’s working, let’s keep doing more of it. The problem is when the company grows a little bit then the CEO has to grow also. A CEO has to take the lead and let go of his or her old job. Maybe it was managing 30 people or so.  In the new job you’re going to be managing through four or five or six direct reports. That’s a different job.

So you’re really working to get results through others rather than getting it done yourself.

Joe’s position was that the best CEOs reinvent their jobs every time they reinvent the company. I think another way to say it: that your strengths become your weaknesses. That, unfortunately, is what can happen to successful CEOs.

What has inspired you to become a facilitator?

 That one is easy for me. When Bob Nourse decided to sell TEC Wisconsin, he sold it to two Wisconsin TEC Chairs: Jim Handy and Harry Dennis.  Harry eventually bought out Jim Handy.  He became the sole owner of TEC Wisconsin and western Michigan. I had known Harry for a long time. Through another company I was running at the time, I became a TEC member. I stayed in touch with Harry. In fact, Harry became an investor in one of my companies. When we sold that company, Harry asked if I would like to become a TEC Chair. And it was Harry’s inspiration that allowed me to get into this line of work. I really didn’t know what I was doing when I was starting. I’m sure that I was practicing malpractice.   But I stuck with it.  And it worked out well.

Harry Dennis gave me the opportunity of a lifetime.  He gave me the chance to make a positive difference, through business, which I love. I was able to meet a lot of smart people. I was able to learn from our resource specialists and from the group meetings in which I participated. And now in my capacity as a Chair Emeritus, I get to work more directly with other chairs to help them become better chairs, and to become the best chair they can be. So it’s a perfect opportunity for me to give something back to an organization that I spent years with and gave me a lot and accomplished a lot for me.

Overall, it was the inspiration of Harry Dennis, who loved the company and really understood what we did. And you know, he worked originally with the founder, which was pretty cool.

That is a great story. Thank you so much for sharing that with us. Now we know not everything is perfect, so can you share one of those little horror stories that you’ve learned from and how it’s impacted you in your practice today?

I had one group when I started. Harry asked me to take over another group that was being transitioned. The group that I took over was known as perhaps the most dysfunctional TEC group at the time – certainly in Wisconsin and maybe in the nation. It was a bunch of guys. This group would not allow any women in at that time.  This group of men were from relatively large companies in terms of the typical TEC or Vistage-size companies.

They had big egos and they didn’t want to work on real issues. They didn’t want to talk about real problems. They just wanted to socialize and that was not very helpful.

They actually fired me once. I quit twice. But what I eventually learned is I was trying to do too much of the work. I was trying to do the recruiting. I was trying to do the issue solving. I was trying to do things that were way beyond my ability or really what I should have been doing as a Vistage Chair. About that time, we were introduced to a TEC group model called Armed and Dangerous.  This was invented by TEC resource specialist, Don Schmincke.

And what it eventually taught me was that I needed to have the group do the work. The chair is there as a facilitator – not the one doing the work – so that really changed my whole chairing life. It took several years, but the dysfunctional group eventually got it. We had to change out most of the members along the way.  We recruited pretty well and eventually that group entirely took over being responsible for creating their own value. And that was a big difference maker for me. That was the biggest learning I had along the way. That was awesome.

Very awesome. Because I know a lot of young chairs come in and they want to do it all. I’ve spoken to many chairs when they first get out of training with Vistage, they’re looking to build their group and they do. They think they can do it all themselves. So that’s very good advice because they’re going to burn themselves out.

It also turns out that the members who are working in groups that are operating in this Armed and Dangerous fashion report the highest member satisfaction numbers. They’re creating the value. I’m not creating the value.  I line up a speaker or two, tee up an issue and make sure there are some doughnuts on the table, but they’re the ones who are really creating the value. Then they report the greatest value from their Vistage experience when they’re doing the work. It’s great.

Tera Jenkins

Project Manager with WBEC-West.