3 Leadership Issues to Navigate in 2025, with David Reimer, CEO of the ExCo Group

Mo Fathelbab:

Welcome to today's episode of People and Strategy. I'm your host, Mo Fathelbab, president of International Facilitators Organization. People and Strategy is a podcast from the SHRM Executive Network, the premier network of executives in the field of human resources. Each week we bring you in-depth conversations with the country's top HR executives and thought leaders. For today's conversation, I'm excited to be joined by David Reimer, CEO of The ExCo Group. Welcome, David.

David Reimer:

Thank you, Mo. Glad to be here.

Mo Fathelbab:

Glad to have you with us. So David, I want to start with your career story. Tell us how you got to this wonderful position of being CEO of The ExCo Group.

David Reimer:

Well, thank you again for asking too. I think first of all, this was not the obvious destination for a kid from Eastern Montana and small town and working as a ranch hand at 14. But I think over time, I've always been curious and I've always been interested in trying different things and I've had people take an interest in me and give me opportunities that I think hard work and luck and some sponsorship have been helpful.

I got here specifically, though, I spent about 13 years in a business that largely did consulting on M&A and integration and really focused on people issues. And in that got to see the difference in companies where the leader stood up and didn't just announce the deal, but kind of stuck with it through the hard work of getting integration done as opposed to handing it off to HR and leaving for another part of the world.

And I was so struck by that, first of all, the difference that the leader's presence could make, and secondly, that HR was doing all this incredibly hard work. And if they did a really good job, it was sort of like, "Great, here's the next project." And if they did a bad job, it was like, "How could you have screwed this up?" And yet I thought there's got to be a better way to highlight the impact of HR because getting it right is hard.

So anyway, that background led me to CEO of ExCo Group where we do mentoring with senior level executives and CEOs, but it also led me to volunteer with People and Strategy and eventually become the executive editor of The Journal for a number of years. And then also as a part of my daily life, Adam Bryant and I have an interview series with strategic CHROs on LinkedIn that's got about 75,000 subscribers.

We have a director series with public company board members that's got about 35,000. And it just, it's been this fascinating combination that goes back to that fundamental question. Leadership and getting it right is hard. The role of HR is invaluable and often overlooked. How could we help both of those pieces fit together most effectively?

Mo Fathelbab:

Okay. Well, I love this story and let's dive in. So there are three big leadership issues of 2025 that we're going to talk about. Navigating civil discourse in the workplace, redefining what good leadership looks like in 2025 and leading with self-awareness, not just high IQ or EQ, rather, for that matter. So let's dig in.

Let's talk about the navigating civil discourse in the workplace. And David, I want to start with what you've seen in terms of that discourse recently as compared to previously in prior years.

David Reimer:

Sure. Look, I think civil discourse has been challenging over the last few years as we've gone through COVID, as we've gone through George Floyd, as we've gone through October 7. And all of these things have brought the outside world inside companies in a way that wasn't always the case. We've just come through this election cycle where, again, very different points of view, seemingly different facts. We live in a social media world that can divide us up into smaller and smaller tribes of like-minded people. That gets really hard when you're a CEO or a CHRO running a large complex organization. And actually, you need people to unite around a set of facts and unite around a purpose and a vision and a mission.

And one of the things we're hearing from both CHROs and board directors is that navigating '25, it's going to be a challenge on everything from social issues as DEI comes under a different level of scrutiny, to can we agree on our capital allocation strategy in terms of where are we investing in new technologies or new energies, and where are we doubling down on the legacy business? If those become political questions rather than fact-based business questions, it's going to be messy.

Mo Fathelbab:

So thank you for that, David. Now, one of the things that I certainly want to dig into is what can leaders do to positively affect these civil discourse questions and how do you actually keep the division from happening to so many different subgroups as you just mentioned?

David Reimer:

Yeah. I think the single most important thing that a leader can do is actually role model the ability to say, "I don't know," and role model the ability to change his or her mind. Because again, if you think about broader civil discourse, it's often more about digging in your heels any more than it is about actually exchanging ideas.

And I talked to a CEO a few months ago who took the job shortly before the pandemic, and one of his observations was this job has always been, it's always been subject to change, but it's never been this fluid in my history of either being a CEO or my experience with other CEOs. And you have to be ready today to make a decision based on the facts at hand and understand that two weeks later, you may have to come out and say, "You know what? I was wrong and we need to revisit this and we need to maybe pivot and go a slightly different direction."

Mo Fathelbab:

It's interesting, I saw George Bush speak once and he in fact said those very words. He said, "Look, we made the best decision with the facts that we had at the time." The facts turned out to be a little wrong, but now what you're saying is this cycle happens much more quickly.

David Reimer:

Absolutely. It's a great call out. Because again, it could be... every day might be a little bit of exaggeration, but it's not much of an exaggeration. And companies need to know that it's okay to start out in one position and then pivot as long as you continue to make the best decision you can at the time.

Mo Fathelbab:

And what happens, David, when the CEO doesn't admit that they've ever made a mistake or that they don't know the answer to something?

David Reimer:

Yeah. It's really interesting because you start to get this detachment between them and the employee base on, I'm going to call it authenticity, but I think what people are really looking for is like, "Oh, we're not going to say the hard parts out loud. We're going to pretend that everything's okay. That means that when I go back to report on how I'm doing, if I've got things that aren't working, I might actually just tell you they are working and wait for somebody else to screw up and then I can blame whatever delays we've got or performance issues we've got on them screwing up." It creates this really weird ripple effect that we're not going to have the honest conversations.

Mo Fathelbab:

Absolutely. So speaking of civil discourse, what culture do we want to build so that we can have civil discourse?

David Reimer:

Yeah. It's a fascinating question because we've just come out of an era where everybody has talked a lot about psychological safety and the creation of psychological safety. If you talk to Amy Edmondson, she's so smart and thoughtful about that, and she will tell you, I've heard her say this to other audiences, like I feel like Dr. Frankenstein must have felt in the book when he was trying to create life and something beautiful, and he accidentally created a monster that wreaked havoc on the countryside, right?

Psychological safety has become one of those terms that to some degree gets weaponized. "I don't want [inaudible 00:08:31] feedback because your feedback makes me feel not psychologically safe." Well, psychological safety is supposed to be, "We're going to have the hard conversations so we can drive toward ultimate performance."

And I think that might look different in a company that's more traditionally hierarchical than it would in a startup that is super dynamic than it would in a relationship-oriented business. That's okay. There's not one single definition of what the culture should be, but you need to create a culture that in your context will allow leaders, frontline workers, peers, to have the hard conversations about what's going well, what's not going well, and how do we adapt?

Mo Fathelbab:

So what I'm hearing you say is if psychological safety gets in the way of hard conversations, then psychological safety isn't serving us?

David Reimer:

I would say that slightly differently. If psychological safety gets in the way of having hard conversations, you're doing it wrong.

Mo Fathelbab:

Because it is important to have the hard conversations?

David Reimer:

Yeah, yeah.

Mo Fathelbab:

Absolutely. So let's talk about 2025 and redefining what good leadership looks like in 2025. I think a lot of us still lean on the amazing book, Good to Great, and of course, things have changed a lot since then. Jim Collins, of course, being the author. So what has changed?

David Reimer:

Yeah. So it's a fascinating fast-evolving question right now because all of us... And I know you've talked about the macro environment in some of your other podcasts, but the reality is that we all grew up, everybody in this audience grew up with certain types of leadership that you could look to and say, "Okay, that's good leadership." It might be good leadership in a turnaround, it might be good leadership in a hyper growth startup, but we had some archetypes. And those who do psychometric profiling and work a lot with succession and development spent time categorizing a lot of those types so that you could take somebody who was a good turnaround CEO and just kind of move them from place to place where turnarounds needed to happen. Or you could take somebody who was a growth CEO, an innovation CEO, and again, move them around almost across sector and make that happen.

That was fine. There were successes and failures, but the reality is for '25, one of the things we're hearing from directors and CHROs is we actually need to take a big step back. Instead of thinking about benchmarks, thinking about how do we set the bar for our company and what good luck looks like for us given our strategy, our culture, our capital realities, our operational and supply chain limitations and strikes? How do we really hone in on us?

I'll say one other thing here, because I think that, Mo, we have historically gotten so reliant on those benchmarks that we've used them candidly as if they were scientific definitions of a CEO, and they're not, right? I don't think any company's ever hired a stupid CEO or a CEO who just didn't know how to interact with the market, but IQ and presence aren't the same things as character.

And our assessment and succession processes, generally speaking, aren't built to really go after the question of character. And so you end up with McDonald's situation a few years ago, BP's situation more recently. There are other companies that, again, these are good companies filled with smart people, but you promote somebody and then find out about this trail of behavior that's been there forever. It's not like it developed after you made them CEO. What conversations are we not having on the way to understanding both what good looks like for our context, but also what's the character that will steward this brand effectively through whatever the tenure will be of the next CEO?

Mo Fathelbab:

So I'm hearing two things, David. I'm hearing one is maybe it's much more nuanced than the previous archetypes that existed. And then the second thing I'm hearing is it's really uniquely tailored for that company's needs at the time.

David Reimer:

That's right, that's right. And I'll add to that. I think that this nuanced piece around how do you think about character and values should not be underestimated. I don't think boards have... I don't think anybody has a clean playbook for going after this, but I think the playbook that is evolving is interesting and vital.

I'll give you a quick example. Dambisa Moyo, who sits on the boards of Chevron and 3M and a few other places, we interviewed her for The Journal about succession a while ago, and she went after this question of character and ethics and she said, "One of the questions I want to put to CEO finalists is, 'What's the worst thing you've ever done to another human being?'" Right?

Now, first of all, I don't know that that's a legal question to ask, but secondly, it's a chilling question because it does get to this fundamental, "Who are you? We are navigating a future that is so uncertain and unknown. I actually can't know how you'll behave in all the likely circumstances ahead because I'm not sure what the likely circumstances are, really. If you've got a strong core set of values, I can trust that you will then use those to apply your strategic thinking and your investor ability and your operational excellence. You will apply that in a way that supports the ethics and quality of this brand." And that's a distinction that we haven't been used to making.

Mo Fathelbab:

So when we talk about what leadership looks like, what good leadership looks like, I'm hearing character, I'm hearing strong values. What else would you add to that list?

David Reimer:

I think, well, I'm going to go to the third kind of core plank that we're hearing come up a lot, which is we need to step back and really think about and look for what is this person's level of self-awareness? And there's a sub question in there, which is, and can you develop self-awareness? It's one thing to assess it, it's another thing to develop it.

But I've had a couple of interesting conversations more recently where people are trying to really poke at this. And again, by people, CHROs, directors who are involved in succession. And I think the notion is self-awareness isn't just how well do I know my own strengths or weaknesses and how do I compensate for those? Self-awareness has to actually kind of expand outward to the room and the company, which is how well am I thinking through what my strengths or weaknesses, how those affect the behaviors, the mindsets of those around me, and how am I leveraging that? How am I accounting for it?

Mo Fathelbab:

So how do you get to that, David? I've certainly seen examples of that in my world, but I want to hear your stories of how you get to that information for the leader.

David Reimer:

There's a couple of ways. Partly it's a question of... Look, I'll tell you the simplest way. There's a conversation we often have which we'll ask a leader to identify their top 10 values. And then once they've done that, we'll go out to 25 or 30 other people and say, "Hey, you've worked with Mo for a while over the last 10, 15 years, what do you think Mo's top 10 values are?" Just compare the lists. What's their top 10 list with your top 10 list?

They're both true, right? Your 10 values are your 10 values, but their perception of your top 10, also true. So what's that gap like? And then what do you want to do to address it? I think that's a piece. I think the other is looking for demonstrated examples. So not learning mindset as a competency, but demonstrated examples on the job of where this person came in one way thinking one set of things and leading in a certain style, but recognize, "Oh, this isn't working," and backed up and pivoted.

Those kinds of stories, not as a one-off, but as, "Oh, there's a pattern here over the course of someone's evolution as a leader," those become really important predictors of their ability to, in the future, continue to stay steady, at least in their core values, even when the world around them is shifting dramatically.

Mo Fathelbab:

So then we have this question, can somebody actually become self-aware or not? And I guess I'm going to twist it a little bit and say, "How could I possibly not become more self-aware if somebody on my team tells me, 'I perceive your value set to be X, Y, Z instead of A, B, C'"?

David Reimer:

Yeah. I think there's an inner piece that has to come from the individual, which is curiosity. And I would argue that most leaders have that in them. So it's a question of pulling it out. But there are people who actually aren't curious. They have the answers. And I'll tell you a quick story, if I can, about a leader who kind of came in one way and ended up pivoting. But came in and when she got started, she was in technology firm running a newly formed big business, knew what the feedback was, said, "Look, I have sharp elbows. I can be dismissive, but I'm going to tell you, I'm one of the few female leaders in an engineering male-dominated organization. If I didn't do that, I wouldn't get anything done. So on a scale of one to 10, I'm a two in terms of interest of change."

Well, the preceding conversation or the proceeding conversation ended up being, "Okay, do you control with this new group, do you directly control your sales force?" "Well, no, I actually have to work through the established sales force." "All right. Do you have your own engineering group to design product?" "Well, no, I have to work through the centralized product group." "Do we..." Right? There's a handful of these things.

And literally at the end of the day, she stepped back and thought and said, "Well, crap, I get it. I actually have to figure out a whole different way of interacting if I'm going to be able to be successful here." And again, she'd been a success. So I think that it's not... Don't look at somebody and just dismiss, "Well, I don't think Mo would be interested." You got to give the person the data. And as long as there's a spark of curiosity, great things are possible.

Mo Fathelbab:

I want to double down on the bit of curiosity there. Professor David Bradford from Stanford, the Graduate School of Business contrasts certainty with curiosity. And I think to me that certainty is about being right. And going back to what we started with in this conversation, if you have a need to be right, you're less likely to admit your mistakes or the things that you simply don't know.

David Reimer:

Yes. And it starts to go back to that notion of what are core values? Things like humility start to come into play to support that curiosity. Curiosity gets complemented by a number of different things. And again, that's a person... If the traditional leader that we grew up with the last 40 years was really good at reading a road map and being able to predict where we'll be at certain points in time, I think the CEO job of today is much more like being pushed out of a helicopter with a parachute and a compass in the fog and we say, "Okay, find true north."

And values become those compass points for you because you may head a certain direction and realize you've come up to a cliff wall and you've got to move and you've got to navigate. You got to keep moving true north. But it's not going to be about reading the road map and predicting.

So again, curiosity values. The one other thing I would say, Mo, is that the organization itself has to be willing to be curious itself, all right? There are a lot of places and places we grew up in, in some cases, for whom they say, "Well..." I won't make this about you. I'll make this about me. "David's 57 years old. Honestly, you're not going to teach an old dog new tricks. I think he is who he is," right?

Don't ask for growth mindset from your leaders if you don't have it as a company. It's one of the things that Satya has done so well at Microsoft, right? And he talks about this, Kathleen talks about this, everybody talks about this, but it's not just using the words, "We're going to become a..." It's not about that learning orientation. It's that actually gets woven into the fiber of the culture. And this becomes incredibly important, I think, if we're going to be adaptive along the way.

Mo Fathelbab:

Love it. Love it, David, thank you. So David, last question. What is one piece of advice that has shaped your work or your life?

David Reimer:

So I'm going to tell you a short story here, and I'm actually going to use a negative example rather than a positive example. I've had mostly phenomenal mentors and managers throughout my life, but the best lesson I ever learned from probably the toughest manager, maybe worst manager I ever worked for, I think about every day. And that is, this was somebody who kind of believed in public executions. And I was in an executive staff meeting and there was a GM who had come to the meeting with poor performance and just started getting grilled. And he wasn't ready fully for that discussion.

And at some point, this manager that we shared asked a question he just couldn't answer. And he said, "You know what? I don't know, but I will come back to you tomorrow." And this manager's answer was, "Who promised you tomorrow?" And I remember sitting there... I will tell you, Mo, I think about those words probably every day. I think about it in my life, I think about it at work. Now, I try to apply that to the positive. Let's not take for granted this 20-minute car ride taking my daughter to drop her off for high school, right? Let's value this moment and this time.

Let's not take for granted in the company that, "Hey, if we spend money here or spend money there, that's naturally going to automatically be returned to us later." Let's really try to think through scenarios. And it's this constant tension of staying in the moment, wanting to plan for a future, but not delaying for the future. So that's my answer.

Mo Fathelbab:

Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, David. And that's where we'll end it for this episode of People and Strategy. A huge thanks to David Reimer, CEO of The ExCo Group. You can follow the People and Strategy podcast wherever you get your podcasts. Also, podcast reviews have a real impact on podcast visibility. So if you enjoyed today's episode, leave a review to help others find the show. Finally, you could find all our episodes on our website at SHRM.org/podcasts. Thank you for listening, and have a great day.