CEO Coaches

摘要

There was a time when executives under David S. Pottruck felt less like professionals at the helm of a major brokerage than cowering children held hostage by a despotic father. Lording over the conference room, the now CO-CEO of Charles Schwab & Co. bulldozed other people's opinions and overruled their strategies. He reveled in teamwork―if he was the captain. Ideas were great, but only if they were his. Try challenging the former All-Ivy wrestling champ, and you could find yourself caught in a corporate full nelson―left with a lot of bruised feelings and a trampled ego. "I knew there was always a lot of glass being broken around me," says Pottruck, a 6-ft.-1-in., 240-lb. rock pile of a man whose voice still carries traces of his native New York. "But I thought I was a great leader. I didn't understand that there was a problem." That is, until his nadir a decade ago, when his then-boss, Chief Operating Officer Lawrence J. Stupski, took him into his office for an annual performance review. "'Man,'" Pottruck recalls Stupski saying, his normally even voice strained with anger, "'You are high-maintenance―and you are painful.'" The next part seared him even more: "'Your peers don't like working with you―and they don't trust you.'"