CEOs talk — leadership development

Canadian HR Reporter sat down with a number of prominent CEOs to talk about leadership development

Richard Peddie
President and CEO
Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment


Based in Toronto’s Air Canada Centre, MLSE employs about 350 people to run the business side of the Toronto Raptors and Toronto Maple Leafs.

They say universities are judged by the quality of their alumni. I think that can also be said about business,” says Richard Peddie, president and CEO of Maple Leaf Sports and Entertainment (MLSE).

“I am really proud of the fact that the young men and women who worked for me have gone on to do well.”

Leadership development has been a major focus for the company in the past few years. It’s also a personal priority for Peddie. Few organizations can boast of having enough quality leaders, but Peddie says MLSE has done pretty well. The company has a replacement available for about 80 per cent of all senior positions.

“I’m 57 years old now. I really believe that one of the legacies I can leave here is not only my own replacement but leaving Maple Leaf Sports with a wonderful leadership team,” he says.

MLSE achieved this through rigorous succession planning and extensive training and development. Ideally, the time and energy spent on leadership development will enable the company to produce its own senior leadership team, maybe even the CEO. But as Peddie realizes, the more the company spends on development, the more likely MLSE will be raided by other companies. But that’s okay, too, he says.

“Not all of (leadership hopefuls) will get to my job. That is impossible. But they are going to really benefit from being here, they are going to contribute terrifically while they are here.” He talks proudly of the members of his senior team at his earlier job at Pillsbury, who went on to become company presidents. He likes the idea that some of his team from MLSE will have similar success.

“We have two of the vice-presidents with the Florida Panthers, they were trained here. There is a senior guy down at the new Houston Arena that opened last week, he’s from here. They will go on to do really well. And they will say, ‘Boy that is quite a little factory up in Toronto that creates great sports and entertainment leaders.’ And I like that. That is a nice legacy.”

One of the important planks of the MLSE leadership development philosophy is cross-functional moves and stretch assignments.

“A great case in point is my chief marketing officer and senior vice-president of business, Tom Anselmi. He built the building (Air Canada Centre). He is an engineer by training. Four years ago I took the chance of saying he is smart, he is hard working, he is creative, and I put him into the chief marketing role. And he has learned all about brand management and media plans and has done an outstanding job. And we have done that a lot at the director level, the level below vice-president. We have a number of people who have done cross-functional moves here and I think it is really going to pay out for the organization. I think it is quite possible that our future vice-presidents will come from these people.”

Corporate engineering — MLSE’s term for succession planning — is done every six months. Before each session each of his nine vice-presidents submits an organizational chart showing if a replacement is in place at that moment, if there will be one in a year’s time, and three to four years down the road. Then strengths and development needs are identified and a plan created. The practice reaches down to the manager level.

Peddie’s strong interest in leadership development led him to teach a fourth-year business course on strategic leadership at Ontario’s University of Windsor, last year. That course is going to be used by MLSE to create an elite training course for 16 of the company’s high-potential future leaders, who come from director and manager ranks.

“We are actually going to take the course I put university students through, and we are going to come up with the next level of training. We are going to introduce an elite training level. There will be a class size of 16 and there will be people who, for a number of reasons, we think have great leadership potential. We are going to put them through a six-month training program. So there will be lots of hours of classroom.”

Putting those 16 people into the course will also pose a challenge MLSE has avoided in the past: Publicly identifying employees tapped for future promotions.

“No, I don’t like them knowing about it,” he says of the company’s usual practice of keeping things a secret. “Some of them might guess. If they get the top ranking on performance management — we don’t give a lot of exceptionals — so if they get it they know they are obviously highly regarded,” he says. “I would rather it didn’t even leak out because the ones (who are identified) sometimes feel kind of cocky and they cruise and others feel jaded about not being (identified).”

But by putting people in the course, everyone will know the company has special plans for the 16 students.

And what does MLSE look for in future leaders? Peddie says he draws heavily on the great leadership qualities identified by author Noel Tichy. It starts with a good match with the company’s values. When discussing leadership development, Peddie almost always returns to the importance of the company’s values.

After a good values fit, Peddie looks for energy. “Do they have the energy themselves, and the ability to energize others,” he says. “I look for ideas. Do they have creative ideas?”

And finally he wants his leaders to have “edge.” This is the ability to make tough decisions in a timely way. “I am a great believer in edge. And that doesn’t mean they are the world’s toughest bosses. The world moves quickly and they have got to be comfortable (going) through the analysis and be prepared to make that tough business decision,” he says. It was the checklist he used when choosing both a head coach for the Raptors and a general manager for the Maple Leafs this past summer.

“It was not unlike a Fortune 500 looking for a CEO,” he says. “The sports press really don’t like calling it a business but it is. We are a billion dollar company and the decisions we make involved millions of dollars ….and we have to run it like a business so we are as sophisticated as any of the packaged goods companies in Toronto.”

Tom Closson
President and CEO
University Health Network
Created in 1999, the UHN is comprised of three Toronto hospitals and employs 10,000 people.


Faced with an imminent shortage of leadership talent, Toronto’s University Health Network had no choice but to reduce spending on patient care to invest more in leadership development.

“This is probably the single most important thing we can be doing as an organization, which is to develop our leaders and help them provide the support that is necessary to our staff,” says Tom Closson, president and CEO.

“So we have made a conscious decision about investing in our staff and our managers. We have pulled money out of patient care and put it into that area.”

As a health-care provider was it a hard choice to make? “I don’t think it was a difficult decision. I think it was the right decision,” he says. “My view is we have to provide care to fewer patients.” A commitment to training and development requires a reduction in expectations and workload, he explains. If people are going to be pulled from their daily job to spend more time on training and development, it is unreasonable to expect co-workers to assume the workload of the person in training.

“Either you are going to put too much workload on the remaining staff, and we can’t do that because we will have people leave… or you provide care to fewer patients. And we have chosen to provide care to fewer patients,” he says.

“My view is we are one of, let’s say, 20 hospitals in the Greater Toronto Area. The government has to decide how to make sure everybody gets access to health care. That is not the hospital’s responsibility. We need to co-operate with the government and other providers to make sure the people get access to care, but a higher priority for us is to make sure we have an organization that functions effectively. Therefore we had to pull resources and isolate them specifically for the purpose of leadership development.”

The demographics of the UHN workforce make it clear the increased investment in leadership development is vital. “We have an aging workforce. The average age of our staff overall is about 46, 47. The average age of managers and senior executives would even be older than that. I would expect it is probably pushing 50. So we know that there is going to be a major loss of people over the next five to 10 years.”

The practical impact is a considerable increase in time, effort and money expended on leadership development.

Last year UHN launched a leadership development program, custom-designed with the help of University of Toronto’s Rotman School of Management.

Over one year, students spend about 14 days in class. Senior managers, including Closson, work as advisors for the students. Closson teaches a module on implementation of the vision for the organization. In the first year, 55 managers went through it and another 45 are currently enrolled. Students also complete a project which is intended to make real improvements to the UHN.

“We decide on a project that we would like to see done in the organization. A real project, one that has meaning for the organization.

“In my case, I proposed a project on what it is that creates empowered staff. How do staff feel empowered? And my group looked at different units where staff had high satisfaction — because we do satisfaction surveys here — and units where they have low satisfaction.

“They brought in a tool from the University of Western Ontario to try to figure out what it is that make staff feel empowered, and that has been very useful to me.” Closson met with the group to discuss how they were going to do the project. The results were presented at the end of the year to the entire senior management group.

“It is a little early to tell, but we think we are producing better managers from this initiative,” says Closson. “I have worked in a number of health-care organizations and I have never seen anything as formally developed as what we have done here.”

Jay Forbes
President and CEO Aliant Inc.
Headquartered in Saint John, N.B., with senior executives across the Atlantic provinces, Aliant provides communications services including local and long-distance telephone, wireless and Internet, to 2 million consumers and employs almost 10,000 people.


In the last 18 months, Atlantic Canadian communications firm Aliant has had to replace about 20 of its top 100 leaders. The leadership changes were necessary because the company was changing, says Jay Forbes, president and CEO.

“We have had a dramatic change in our strategic direction and as we looked at the leadership team and capabilities — the skill sets and the leadership attributes that we wanted to convey to the organization — we concluded that there needed to be a fairly substantial change in the ranks,” he says.

The good news was that the bench strength at the company was already so sound, Aliant only had to go outside the company for three of the new leaders. “Very often when you go fishing if you pull the first two fish out of the water that’s it. But here you could fish all day and never exhaust the supply.” Despite that good fortune, the executive team has been working hard to take a more disciplined approach to succession planning, he says.

One of the changes Forbes made soon after taking over as CEO in 2002 on was to define what leadership meant at Aliant.

“You can’t have an intelligent conversation about succession planning until you have a common understanding of the attributes you want your leaders to possess. What was funny was that in an organization this size we were never having a conversation about leadership because we were all speaking with a different tongue,” he says.

“When we talked about leadership it was one of those fuzzy words. We defined it, and we identified the key attributes that we would want to see resident in our leaders. We rearticulated the values of the organization and we started to have a common language and thus a progressive discussion on leadership.”

First and foremost leaders must be true to five values: collaboration, mutual respect, a passion for the customer, a bias for action and knowledge seeking.

“As we embarked on this journey of significant change, as people start to question the journey or the rationale for the journey, they would always have a touchstone so we need leaders that exuded those five values.”

Forbes is also determined all leaders have broad business acumen. “Our people are deeply knowledgeable in their core areas of expertise….but they don’t necessarily have a broad business acumen that lets them have as constructive a dialogue or as meaningful an impact on the organization as we would like them to have,” he says.

“We were looking for people who would bring other relevant industry experiences to the mix. We were looking for individuals who had strength in marketing as well as sales. And we were looking for individuals who were good coaches and could convey their expertise and knowledge and help grow the incredible talent we had in this organization.”

Aliant has partnered with with a training and development provider to design a customized development program for each of the top 100 leaders in the organization. But beyond that, business knowledge is one area the entire group could improve. Forbes is taking steps to that end.

A quarterly senior leadership forum is being used to remedy the problem. Every three months the entire senior team of 100 gathers in one central location. The morning is used to update the group on the quarter just finished and what to expect in the quarter ahead.

“But then we use the entire afternoon to facilitate knowledge acquisition. What we do is provide them with a book, two sessions ago it was Ram Charan’s What the CEO Wants You to Know. This last one it was Differentiate or Die by Jack Trout. It was all about positioning oneself in a competitive marketplace.”

Forbes starts the session with a high level review about key themes in the book and how they apply to Aliant. “But then we’ll spend the rest of the afternoon having director-level employees and subject matter experts talk about particular matters from the book and relate them directly to Aliant.”

Robert Rabinovitch
President and CEO
The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation

Canada’s public broadcaster since 1936 is now the country’s largest cultural institution, employing more than 3,000 people around the world.


For the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, to produce the quality programming it wants to, it needs to be training and developing leaders who excel at change management and are able to work together in ways they haven’t in the past, says Robert Rabinovitch, president and CEO.

The corporation, like most government agencies, is under pressure to do more with less. The right kind of leadership is essential to make that possible.

“One of the things you have to train them to do is to lead change,” he says. “Change management is an extremely difficult thing to do, especially within a crown corporation.” Nevertheless, it is essential for the survival of the institution, he adds.

“And when you talk about doing more with less, what you are really talking about is looking at and reviewing how you do your work to see if you can do it in a way which is more efficient and better. And the pressure of less resources is what gives you the motivation often to do that.”

At the CBC it has meant learning to work with people from across the corporation. “Historically (the CBC) has been a series of silos: radio, television, French, English.” But it can’t be that way anymore, Rabinovitch says.

“If you network at all levels, the sum of the parts is going to be greater than the whole. Otherwise what you do have is a series of separate companies within a corporate shell.”

In everything from news coverage to program development, co-operation across the organization has become a driving force at the CBC.

“Our journalists don’t see themselves working for just one network when working overseas now. They will report in English and in French and they will report on radio and on television. Patrick Brown works in French and English. Don Murray, French and English.”

“It’s up to their leaders to encourage them and tell them that is where the company wants to go and that it makes sense for them and it makes sense for us.”

It has also been crucial in program development, he says. “We are doing more and more programs that are designed to be shown both in French and in English, or programs that are done between radio and television. That comes straight from leadership, it doesn’t come instinctively from the producers.”

Co-operation of this nature allows the CBC to spread the cost of the programs across the organization and therefore reach a larger audience. “We don’t have a bottom line. Our bottom line is to break even,” he says. “It allows us to do quality programming we couldn’t do otherwise.

“A program like Trudeau could never have been done if it wasn’t going to be done for both networks. The cost was just too great. A program like The Last Chapter, which was also shot as Le Dernière Chapitre, is expensive, but if we can put it over two or three platforms then you have rationalization and it makes some sense. You need people working together and thinking in those terms and that comes from leadership.”

However, the unique mandate of the CBC, being both a cultural institution and a crown corporation, can also make finding those leaders tough, he says.

“You have to find people who are focused on running a business. And for a lot of people who are recruited to a cultural organization, that is not on their radar screen,” he says. “People come here for different reasons. Many of our people come because they are interested in the product development and the product, in our case, is broadcasting. It is the development of new programs, it is the cultural aspect of our business and people who are interested in culture are not necessarily the ones who are most interested in becoming good managers.”

To address that challenge, the CBC responded with a concerted effort to do more training and hopefully develop leaders from within. A leadership development program was launched in late 1997, and since then more than 400 people have been through the course. “That is about seven or eight per cent of all our staff.”

At first some of the people in the media arm of the organization reacted with cynicism, but now they see it as an essential prerequisite for upward mobility, he says.

“The biggest thing I’ve learned is that it takes time and reinforcement. You don’t just put a person in a course and say, ‘You are now a leader.’ You have got to reinforce it year in, year out. You have got to give people an opportunity to share experiences to work together. There is no magic bullet here.

“Some will rise some will fall but we are out there trying to find and train our own people.”

Craig Wallace
CEO
AOL Canada

A high-tech company which employs 150 people in Toronto and 300 in Moncton.


Craig Wallace, chief executive officer at AOL Canada, describes the organization as relatively flat. The people who report to him are second-line managers, who in turn supervise first-line managers.

“It’s my desire to keep as few levels between me and my ultimate customers as possible,” says Wallace. “But the trade-off there is you end up with more direct reports.”

With 11 people in the senior leadership team, the people who directly report to him, Wallace has to “spend a lot of time focusing on senior leadership, succession planning and first-line management succession planning.”

In a flat organization, the challenge becomes how to help individuals achieve their career ambitions while balancing these against the need of the organization, said Wallace. “The reality is there are only so many leadership jobs at a given time.

And being in the high-tech industry, AOL Canada finds its top talent constantly wooed by competitors. “Our leadership team gets calls on a monthly basis,” says Wallace.

The way to address these challenges is to keep leaders and potential leaders engaged, he says. “If you create an environment where people are excited about coming to work, feel connected and feel like they’re making a difference, that’s what defines the attrition rate.” Attrition has been less than five per cent in the last two years, Wallace adds.

To keep people engaged, Wallace uses a goal-aligning technological product, which sets out the organization’s business plan, articulates six or seven specific and measurable objectives.

“Those objectives then flow down through our organization very specifically so that of all 450 people in the organization, each individual has personal objectives that tie back through to the strategic plan. And I believe that process is what helps people understand the connectedness they have between what they do, day in day out, and where we’re trying to take the business.”

Wallace doesn’t let on to anyone that he or she is next in line for a promotion. “I don’t think it’s appropriate to be that specific with people, because there are no certainties in business. A lot can happen on any given day of the week.”

But once having identified people who are likely to progress, Wallace says, “we have discussions with them to ensure that we’re clear on what their career aspirations are, and that we have programs in place to help them achieve their objectives.”

Leaders at AOL Canada are expected to perform at a fast pace, but they’re also accountable for ensuring work-life balance. The company has to be “sensitive to people, in terms of business hours and personal and family needs, otherwise, it’s not a sustainable business model; we all understand that,” said Wallace.

“And there’s accountability to each other at the leadership level. If we see anyone spending an inordinate amount of time at work, we’ll call them on it. In many cases, I’ll just say to somebody, ‘You’re not coming in to work on Monday.’ I get a bit of a push back, but ultimately they agree, and they rejuvenate. And they do the same with their team.”

Summing up, Wallace said HR concerns are “at the core of all the strategy work we do, so succession planning and so forth are not an afterthought. I literally do not make a strategic move in the business without consulting with the vice-president of HR. He’s very much at the table, setting strategy with the rest of leadership team and ensuring we’ve got the right fit of leaders with the strategic initiatives we’re undertaking.”

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