The Preparedness Playbook for Leadership in Difficult Times

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Jun 20, 2023, 11:00 ET

Oracle EVP Rob Tarkoff joins TMG CEO Stephen Miles to discuss the playbook for leading through difficult times with high levels of integrity and accountability

"There are leaders who just define what leadership is. They have tons of followers. They don't have to behave badly anywhere along the line, and they create massive value." – Stephen Miles

NEW YORK, June 20, 2023 /PRNewswire/ -- "Is there a playbook for the times we are in now? Is there a playbook for leaders who can define themselves with high integrity and high accountability, lead through the most difficult times, and not be high on the 'jerk' scale?"

These are questions that TMG CEO Stephen Miles and special guest Oracle EVP and General Manager, Fusion Cloud Customer Experience (CX) Rob Tarkoff, explore on this week's episode of C-Suite Intelligence – the official podcast of The Miles Group, coaches to the world's top performing executives.

In this first of a 2-part series, "The Preparedness Playbook for Leadership in Difficult Times – Part 1," Miles and Tarkoff discuss the qualities needed by leaders from the CEO to the front line. They also touch upon what happens when a leader's management style departs from best-in-class, becomes toxic, and begins to raise serious red flags.

Creating Massive Value

"There are leaders who just define what leadership is," says Miles. "They have tons of followers. They don't have to behave badly anywhere along the line, and they create massive value." Their attributes include:

Performance Leadership – "Investors, both public and private, were starting to see that cult of personality wasn't always going to drive lasting and durable value in a business," says Tarkoff. "It really required performance; attention to building great culture; attention to building great executives below you or around you; knowing how to do things like work laterally in large organizations and in smaller organizations; and figure out just how to be aligned with the times."

"Performance leadership is not flashy. It is very much about sticking to the things that make you well-informed, allow you to engage in rigorous discussion with your teams, and best prepare you to make decisions."
Rethinking basic assumptions about your business – Tarkoff advises leaders to get back to the "basics of curiosity, learning, being prepared." He adds "You always have to stay abreast of what's happening out there. What are the new innovations that are happening? And you must be willing to invest yourself in learning, even when you think you know everything about a domain."

Says Miles, "I think that is a really important variable to being a high performing leader. You don't crest on your knowledge at any point in time. You're always building the bank up with the next layer."
Triangulation – "When you're the CEO or the leader, there is a 'next best answer,'" says Miles. "You have to figure out what's the time scale and the level of triangulation required to get to 'next best.' And then you have to call it. Usually, failed decision making isn't based on what you know. It's based on what you didn't know."

"I think the trick is how you triangulate at the same time you're enabling, empowering people to feel like 'if I do my work and I'm thoughtful and I do the research, I can contribute,'" says Tarkoff.
High Content Friction; Low Behavioral Friction – "The holy grail of what we're talking about is to have content friction," says Miles. "Lots of people have ideas. But what we want to do is get that down to the best idea, which is editing. And editing is content friction."

"But here's what happens – somebody enters that room who is high on the jerk scale and they shut everything down that we just described because they bring behavioral friction to the content friction party. When we have high behavioral friction, the content's on the shelf. What we're trying to do is have high content friction and low behavioral friction. In order to do that, you have to curate."

Miles adds "You can be a great leader with great followership and deliver top right corner value and be a human being who people want to interface with."
Increase Frequency of Communications – "When things get difficult in the business and you have to do reductions, or you have to reduce headcount or change strategy, you have to increase frequency of communication and increase the amount that you really mine for behavioral issues," says Tarkoff.

"One of the things we saw with a lot of these caricature high 'J' models is when things were going really well, people forgave it. But when things weren't going well, they lost all the following and engagement of their employees. And then the boards were rapidly trying to replace them with a performance-oriented leader. But at that point the culture's already far damaged. There's a lot of scorched earth and a lot of people who've lost trust and lost faith in the board or in the leadership."

"The Preparedness Playbook for Leadership in Difficult Times – Part 1" is out now on Apple, Google, Spotify, TMG's website, or wherever you get your podcasts.

For more information, please contact executive producers Davia Temin or Trang Mar of Temin and Company at 212.588.8788 or [email protected].

About the C-Suite Intelligence podcast
CEOs running the world's top companies don't start out that way – they pull ahead of their peers with behaviors and practices that make them the "best of the best." Stephen Miles and the team at TMG coach some of the world's most successful executives, helping them continuously up their game even as business conditions grow more complex every day. Learn the secrets of the highest performers and use this intelligence to power your career. New episodes are released bi-weekly on Apple, Google, Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts.

About The Miles Group/TMG
TMG develops talent strategies for organizations, teams, and individuals – focusing on high-performance, world-class leadership. Through assessments and development, coaching, leadership transition planning, and organizational design, TMG helps clients cultivate exceptional talent from the C-suite to the next generation of leaders throughout the organization. Clients include many of the Fortune 100 as well as VC portfolio companies, firms in transition, and organizations around the globe and across industries. TMG has been featured in Harvard Business Review, The Wall Street Journal, Bloomberg, Forbes, Fortune, C-Suite, Entrepreneur, and Chief Executive. The firm is headquartered in New York City and operates globally. For more information, visit https://miles-group.com. Follow TMG on Twitter and LinkedIn, and Stephen Miles on Forbes.

About Rob Tarkoff
Rob Tarkoff leads Oracle's Customer Experience (CX) business responsible for the front-office application suite, including Sales, Service, Marketing, Content, and industry cloud offerings. His goal is to help companies succeed in providing their customers with the best experience across the front office. Rob spent the past 15 years focused on customer experience, developing products and businesses for both large and early-stage companies; he joined Oracle in 2018. Previously, as president and CEO of Lithium Technologies, Rob created the leading software in online communities, leading to the company's sale to Vista Equity Partners. Prior to that, he ran the Digital Enterprise business for Adobe, leading several key acquisitions. Rob holds a BA from Amherst College magna cum laude and a JD from Harvard Law School.

SOURCE The Miles Group/TMG