Archive for August, 2011
5 Signs That Your HR Chief Is Trouble August 1 2011 11 responses
With a shout out to the folks at SmartBrief on Leadership for pointing it out, I recommend to you a deeply reported article in Fortune magazine about how and why Pfizer CEO Jeff Kindler was pushed out of his job last year. It’s an excellent, real life case study in the “Why Smart Leaders Fail,” genre.
Some of the usual culprits show up in the Kindler story. He micro managed, was indecisive, ignored voices of experience, acted like a prosecutor in meetings and lost his temper with executive staff and even board members.
In spite of all that, perhaps the biggest reason for Kindler’s downfall was that he trusted the wrong person. He hired his head of human resources, Mary McLeod, in 2007 just three years after she had been fired for cause at Charles Schwab. It only took her another three years to play a major role in helping to bring her new CEO down.
Here’s how she did it. They’re five signs that your HR chief is trouble and they’re not just unique to this particular situation at Pfizer:
Scott Eblin is an executive coach, speaker and author of 
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