'Play Games Where You Actually Are Hard to Replace'

There’s a stat that really bothers Dave Kline.

More than 60 percent of managers — first time to C-suite — will fail within 18 months of stepping into a new position.  

“That just seems wrong,” said Kline, a former COO at Bridgewater Associates and managing director at Moody’s Analytics.

“We’ve built this world where we know teams accomplish more; yet, in business, it’s literally worse than a coin flip.” 

So, nearly three years ago, Kline founded MGMT Accelerator, a program intended to help leaders and managers develop better systems and strategies to increase their impact and effectiveness. 

The Daily Coach spoke to Kline recently about lessons from his two-plus decades business, the difference between feedback and coaching, and indications it might be time to leave a job.

This interview has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Dave, thanks a lot for doing this. Tell us a little about your childhood and some key lessons from it.

I grew up in upstate New York, about an hour outside of Rochester. My dad was a serial failed entrepreneur. You’d probably best describe it as side hustles before side hustles were a thing. He was trained as a registered nurse. He also sold supplements. We had a kiln in our basement and he’d make logoed mugs. He even had a carnival scheme at one point. He started a home health care agency, and that was really the one entrepreneurial success he had.

My mom was very much the opposite. She worked for about 50 years of her life typing other people’s words. She worked at Kodak as a word processor. She worked from home and was a medical transcriptionist.

It was a pretty emotionally volatile household. I was 11, maybe 12, when my parents got divorced. It was simultaneously a giant relief and also a large challenge. I really didn’t want to put my kids through something like that, so my wife and I went on about a 12-year vetting period before we got married.

You went to Bucknell, then to business school. What stands out to you most from your early years in corporate America? 

Two things. One is probably cliché, the other is a great lesson to learn early. The cliché is it very much comes down to the relationships you build with people. I was an engineer, a mediocre one at Bucknell, constantly on that 2.9/3.0 edge. I essentially got my consulting interview because I hosted a fraternity alumni gathering. It’s one of those where you never know what kindness and generosity you’re paying to the world and who will pay it back.

Two years later, I was leading a project and was going in to resign to the overall partner and was filled with dread because I was leaving them in a lurch. I resigned sort of waiting for the “Please stay. You’re indispensable. We can’t do this without you.” Instead, what I got was he picked up the phone, dialed a number, and my replacement was there 24 hours later. Consulting is built to be that way, but it was honestly a great lesson early in my career to know everybody is replaceable.

Later, as a leader, I never felt hostage to anybody. Other people will step up when you remove bad actors who, maybe are big contributors to your team, but are toxic to the culture. It was a huge gift to learn that early.

What that humbling at all for someone in his early 20s to see that they didn’t care all that much you were leaving?

I think, more so, the lesson I took from it was go play games where you actually are hard to replace. I don’t know if I mastered that from day one, but I look at what I’m doing now, and I think I’m doing something I’m outsized interested in and outsized good at.

A lot of people I’m competing with took a $200 course and are teaching people how to manage despite having never managed. I have some hard-earned wisdom and lessons that to me are much more differentiated. I was one of 5,000 consultants hired at PWC that year. In hindsight, of course I was easy to replace. The whole business was designed for replaceable cogs.

You were also at Bridgewater for nearly a decade. What led to your decision to leave and what, in general, do you think are indicators it might be time for someone to move on from an organization?

The very pragmatic reason was that there wasn’t a new experience to go pursue. I had been the COO of two of the three biggest departments. I never aspired to be a CEO and am not much of an investor. I was down to very few paths. Was I still growing? Was I still being challenged? My net answer was no.

I write about this a lot. If you pay attention, your company will give you the signals. I have tremendous empathy as a lot of companies have gone through rifts over the last year. Usually, when I talk to people after, they’ll say they were blindsided. But you talk through the hints and they’ll say, “Well, I guess I wasn’t totally blindsided.”

In general, I’d say watch for changes in behavior from senior management. If they were very transparent and all of a sudden become very quiet. If they were free spending and all of a sudden tighten the purse strings. Are you seeing shifts in the priorities? Breaks in standing operating procedure — quarterly reviews, annual performance evaluations — if suddenly these are getting delayed and pushed out, why is that? I’d also look at competitors. A lot of leaders like the cover of “Well, someone else did it, so we can too.”

You have some pretty interesting thoughts on the difference between giving feedback as a leader and coaching.

For me, at Bridgewater, I lived in one of the most intense and persistent feedback cultures in corporate America. For people who don’t know, we had a radical expectation of truth and transparency. Feedback was meant to be constant.  

When people tend to think of feedback, they think of it as a one-way transmission of “I have this thing I have to get off my chest, and I’m going to give you feedback to get it off.” I think if that’s why you’re giving feedback and your mindset, you’re not going to accomplish your goal.

The only real reason you should be giving feedback — which is closer to coaching — is that you want someone to perform better and that there’s the equivalent of game tape. I want to give you the signal and allow you to react to it and draw your own conclusions. If we align on the observation, can we partner together and ask, “What are we going to do about it?”

You’ve made countless hires over the course of your career. Did you have any unconventional questions you’d like to ask in interviews?

“Who will follow you here and why?” The reason I like that is if you ask people their biggest strength or weakness, they’re so prepared for it that you get a stock answer that they’ve polished.

When I ask, who will follow you here and why, there’s a little bit of “How am I perceived?” You create this detachment and stare at yourself in a third-party type of way. I get a more honest answer about what am I good at, where am I weaker? What’s my standing in my old organization?

If the answer is “Nobody,” then why is that? That becomes an interesting path to explore. If it’s a certain subset of people, that gives me a hint of what you’re like.

The other reason I like the question is I’m implying that I expect everybody to recruit. If I’m investing in you coming here, I’m expecting you to invest in the next great person coming here as well. That’s not for everybody.

But I believe the highest-performing organizations are constantly on the lookout for not the talent that’s available but the talent that they need.

In your experience, how do elite teams and leaders go about identifying their weaknesses or blind spots?  

I don’t think it’s all that different than what you probably encounter with sports. The best leaders I’ve seen invest in having a picture of what excellence looks like. If they don’t have it, they don’t settle for whatever mediocre picture they come up with. They figure out how to go get it and build it. They surround themselves with smart people, and good advisors, and mentors. Then, they come back and are ruthlessly pragmatic about where am I right now? Don’t patch it up. Don’t smooth the edges. What is my raw reality?

Usually, the vehicle is the system. What people do I need to put in the system? I think where people get stuck is they want to skip all those steps. They either don’t have a good vision of where they’re going, they dilute where they’re at, or they don’t have a system in the first place. 

Nick Saban has, by position on the field, 60 attributes. For the linemen, they think about the things they can’t train versus the things they can. They want to recruit for what they can’t train. One of those is ankle flection. It’s hard to change someone’s ankle flection. That’s a level of precision in visualizing a role where most leaders are like, “Oh, that’s the level I need to think of my chief marketing officer or my head of revenue at?”

Know where you’re going, know where you are, know that system to know your version of ankle flection.

What’s the toughest decision you’ve had to make in your career and how did you get through it?

I’d be shocked if anyone who had a long career in corporate America didn’t have an answer that ends with some sort of firing or rift. I think that decision and that conversation is the hardest thing any of us do. I’ve had to do it a bunch, unfortunately. 

How do you get through it? For me, it was two or three things. One of them is you try to be really thoughtful in the sense that you have a person who can’t perform in the system or the system needs to change to deal with your circumstance. If you’re exceptionally thoughtful, you’re not just caring for the person you let go of because it’s the right thing to do. You’re also caring for them because everybody left is going to see that and imagine themselves being in his/her position one day. Can I be caring and clear at the same time?

Most people will forgive one round (of layoffs). They don’t expect you to have perfect vision and perfect market mapping. The problem is with the second and the third one, it becomes less about the possibility and more about your inability to have dealt with it well. You want to be deliberate and decisive.

Q&A Resources

Dave Kline ―  MGMT Accelerator | Newsletter: MGMT Playbook | Twitter | LinkedIn 

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