The Impact of Leadership in M&A

I'm Kisam Patel and you're listening to M and A Science, where we talk with deal professionals and learn valuable lessons from their experience. This podcast focuses on stories, strategies, and what actually happened during M and A Deals.

Hi. Today I'm here with Dr. J. Keith Dunbar, who has over 20 years of talent management experience and 13 years of M and A experience delivering clients targeted leadership insights to enable deal success. He has done groundbreaking research on the role of the acquirer and target company leadership in M and A. This research shares insights and approaches on how to leverage individual and collective leadership strengths while mitigating leadership risks in M and A. Today we're going to talk about how to leverage leadership strengths in order to mitigate risk in M and A. Dr. Jake Keith, how are you doing today?

I'm doing great. Thanks for the opportunity to engage with you, Keson on the M and A Science podcast.

Hey, it's my pleasure. Maybe just to get us going, why don't you give us a brief on your background?

I'm a retired Naval Intelligence officer and while I did a lot of work on hard intelligence problems all over the world, what I found is the hardest problem is working on the people risk associated with mas. And so, you know, spent a lot of time working with companies both inside the federal government as well as private sector companies to help them understand their leadership capabilities. Because every organization inherently has a set of leadership strengths that they can leverage more efficiently and effectively and a set of leadership risk areas that they need to figure out how to mitigate somehow.

Can you tell me briefly about your role at JKD and how you play a part in leveraging leadership capabilities?

My role is managing partner here at JKD Talent Solutions. And what we do in leveraging leadership capabilities is helping companies to understand the leadership strengths that they have at the individual and the collective level, as well as those leadership risk areas that they have at the individual and collective level. By understanding explicitly, we're able to target very specific solutions to help them leverage those strengths more efficiently and effectively across a deal, as well as mitigate those risk areas. So at the end of the day, they can have great success at achieving their deal objectives.

Why has it taken so long for people to realize how much of an impact leadership has on M and A deals?

Yeah, that is a great question, one that I struggled with since I finished my doctorate research back in 2013. What I think has really impacted it is there is a ton of effort and writing, both on the academic and the consulting side that is kind of exclusively focused on the role of culture in M and A deals. And while it's a necessity that organizations need to focus on and help understand, I think leadership has been subsumed into the culture conversation. So any kind of cultural assessment will have some conversations or questions around what kind of risk management profile do they have, how do they communicate, collaborate. All of these things are leadership related. But because the culture piece is so large in deals, there's not a lot of attention paid to the focus of leadership and how important it is in a deal. And in fact, we believe that leadership is the foundational element that's going to determine whether your deal succeeds or is fallen on the, you know, the pile of failed deals that are out there in history.

Keith, in this past week, I've had three separate conversations about leadership. What's changing that more industry professionals are now seeing and emphasizing the importance of this.

What usually happens is when you bring a new product to market, they tell you it can take up to six to seven years for that to gain traction and start to become something that people are looking for. And what I have found is the same thing has applied to the leadership piece. So, you know, in a research project I did with a conference board in one of my roles with them as a distinguished principal research fellow, we did a research on what is preventing a more structured and focused approach on leadership in M and A deals. And what we found were through the survey and a series of interviews we did with Corp dev and HR M&A leaders that time pressures really affect a detailed focus on leadership and deals, because there's just the push to get all these things done as quickly as possible. Right. Another piece is the culture, which again, I think there's been an inordinate amount of time and energy focused there to the exclusion of the leadership piece, which we may talk about later. Another area is lack of knowledge of what leadership behaviors they actually need in their organization for the deal to succeed. And so, interesting enough, we've worked on another research project, but we've been asking people these questions about why they don't focus on leadership. And the interesting thing that came out of that is that they are all very clear on why leadership is important to deal success. However, they don't know where to start. That is, they don't know what leadership behaviors they need to succeed. And so they default to doing nothing about leadership and deals and just focus on culture and integration. Another area that we think impacts this focus is also leaders themselves. So leaders don't necessarily want to go through an assessment process. So you can understand those strengths and risk areas. This is exacerbated on the target company side because they believe that any of that information is going to be used to make decisions about who stays or who goes in the deal. But it's also the same issue on the acquirer side where they, you know, they've won, right? They've won the deal, they've acquired this company. Why would they look at themselves introspectively to help understand that as well? So you can bring these two organizations together successfully.

I want to get into some specific leadership roles, but before we get into that, can you tell me just generally what are these traits? Define strong leadership.

My research at Penn, using a data set of over 30,360 assessments, looked at what leadership skills are most important to improving the probability of deal success. And so out of that work we've created a series of what we call M and A leadership success profiles for both acquiring companies and target companies. Within that we can look at gender, managerial level, from frontline supervisors up to top management, corporate functions, different industry sectors, specific countries, geographic regions and cross border deals. And what we've found is that each of those profiles is different, which, you know, a lot of people will tell you the same thing about M and A deals, that no two deals are the same. And so what we find in those profiles is that certain leadership skills are really important for different parts of the organization. So the ability to lead, change and communicate effectively, come to the top as well as fostering teamwork, building plans, those kinds of things.

How would you strike a balance between looking for those traits versus their hands on experience on deals previously?

In some cases, if you think about integration teams that are put together in organizations to lead the integration, including probably both acquiring company employees as well as target company employees, we don't, we see trends where we don't put the best people in those roles. And so what happens is you put a group of people in these roles to help with the integration. And what typically happens is they don't really know how to lead change or build relationships or foster teamwork. And so the balance is helping organizations understand what are the most important leadership skills based on the profiles, but also helping them understand what leadership skills are important specific to their deal's rationale and deals objectives. So they get the right people with the right strengths in the right place at the right time to be effective at what they're trying to do in the integration.

It sounds like the goal needs to be very much clarified to help determine that type of leadership that needs to be in place?

Yes, because again, because each deal is different. Each, each deal will have a different rationale, a set of different deal objectives that the organization is focused on. What that really requires is to take a really entailed deep dive on those elements to help determine what leadership skills are most important to the deal specifically. And so we've developed a process that we call Critical M and A Leadership Factors analysis, where we take the deal rationale, the deal objectives, do some interviews, and what we're trying to understand is what type of deal is it? So is it a geographic expansion deal? Is it a product deal? Is it a R and D deal? What type of integration will be required? Will it just be its own company, separate from the big organization? Or will it be fully integrated? Or will it be a reverse transformation where the target company becomes more of a player in the acquired company? And then we start to really focus in on the individual piece. So which individuals in the organization based on these deal objectives, are going to be most critical to deal success? And if you go to the Disney Pixar deal, one of the deal objectives from that way back in 2006 was to bring Pixar's creative processes, technology and culture into the Disney animation group that was there to try to revitalize it. And what came out of that specific objective is we now know that the leader of Disney Animation, which ended up being John Lasseter from Pixar, and the chief creative officer of Disney Animation, which was Pixar's Ed Catmull, that those two leaders are going to be really important to deal success of meeting that objective. After that, we look at which teams, which business units, which corporate functions are most important to the deal objectives, so we can understand where their roles are going to be in making that successful. And then we start to dive in more clearly on the leadership skill piece. So we want to understand what leadership skills and behaviors are needed to achieve the deal objectives. So the one that I referenced with Pixar and the Disney deal, it's going to involve change management, leading change, building relationships, bringing these two leaders from Pixar over into Disney Animation to start to change that culture, it's going to require the ability to communicate effectively, moving into those roles. And so that way we start to understand what is going to be most important to deal success. And then we also look more focused on the cultural integration piece. So based on what integration is required, we do a deep dive on what leadership skills and behaviors are needed there as well. And then the outcome of this is we can then be very targeted in assessing the right groups of leaders to understand whether they have these identified leadership skills and behaviors as leadership strengths or risk areas that we need to address throughout the integration process. And from that we can build a set of key performance indicators focused on leadership to monitor. So it's usually about making connections. So if we see that technology is not being adopted quickly enough in Disney animation, we can start to look at some more focused HR metrics. How is engagement in that organization? Are we seeing a loss of talent from the organization because they've decided that they don't want to use Pixar's capabilities and they're leaving the organization? So that's what allows us to be really dialed in and focused on what it is that companies need from a leadership perspective.

What really struck out to me is when you mentioned that you drive a lot of this through prioritizing the value drivers of the deal. And it seems like it makes a lot of sense because that allows you to really hone in on what's going to be the most impactful things that need to get done and then you start developing your leadership strategy around that.

Yeah, exactly. Right.

So let me ask you this. Between C suite level management and middle management, who has a bigger impact on deal success and why?

I think inherently everyone thinks that top management is the most important, maybe some level of executive management, right? So even when I did my doctoral research at the University of Pennsylvania, I took a look at for both the acquired data and the target data I had, whether senior executives or middle management to include frontline supervisors were more important to deal success. And what I found was for the acquiring companies, senior executives had the most impact on deal success. And that's obvious, right, because they are the ones that are developing the strategy, executing the strategy and making the deal, helping the deal achieve its value based on those stated objectives. However, for the target company it was middle management. And you might think, well, that doesn't make a whole lot of sense. And there are two research pieces that I would point out that really tie this all together. One was a book by Jeffrey Krug on senior executives retention from the target company after a deal and what he found looking at seven different industry sectors over four decades that by the third year over half of the senior executives have left the organization. And so who is left to be able to continue to integrate in the deal? And that ties back to middle management. Also there's a piece of research out of Stanford where a doctor looked at the role of innovation and change, large scale innovation and change projects and what he found was 68% of those projects failed to meet their objectives, eerily similar to M and A deal failure rates. What he found out about the 32% that were successful in achieving whatever their objective was that middle management was the key factor in that. And so when we asked this question in the research report with the conference board, what we found was that many organizations focus a lot of time and energy on middle management to make their deals successful. So all of that is kind of validated my first perspective, that middle management is really important and they are the key to any change that you do in an organization, whether it's an acquisition or digital transformation or anything like that.

Keith now here's the thing. We all know once that deal gets announced, those middle managers of the target company are very resistant to change. So how would you advise getting alignment with those leadership positions and getting them to be less adverse to change? Because we all know that's a pretty progressive issue that happens.

I think what I have seen that has been successful and we interviewed one Fortune 500 company for the research report, the leadership Factoring mas with the conference board. And what they do is as soon as the deal is final, they bring the teams from the target company and the acquired company together and they start to build what the center for Creative Leadership calls direction, alignment and commitment. That direction piece is a commitment to the future direction of the new organization. The alignment is the clear understanding of how everyone's work will align to this new direction of the organization with these new capabilities that have come into it. And the third part is the commitment of the group to the collective goals of the organization and not their individual goals. And when you think about this from the perspective of middle managers, they're not typically involved in these level of discussions, but it's critically important that they become part of it because they have to get buy in to what is happening and how it's going to make the company and the organization more successful. And so Bain created this, the Elements of Value pyramid. And what we try to do is to take those different levels of value, whether it's functional, emotional or life changing, to help craft the right sets of messages to get people on board with what's happening through the integration. And one of those things in the emotional category is reduces anxiety. So anytime a deal is announced, as you well know, Kisan is the impact that it creates uncertainty in the organization, right? Am I going to have a job tomorrow? Am I not going to have a job tomorrow? Headhunters start calling all these people preying on that uncertainty and that anxiety that people face. And so it can really derail a deal before you even get started if you don't deal with it. And so trying to craft the right sets of messages, whether it's to reduce anxiety, communicate how this is going to save time, or create new connections, or integrate more effectively, is what we really need to do to get the middle management on board and bought into this. Another aspect that we been working is the whole idea of organizational network analysis. So we all know that there is the line and block diagram of the organization, of how the organization is structured, but the organizational network analysis diagram is really the map of how work gets done in an organization. And it becomes particularly useful in an M and A deal because you can identify who the key influencers are in the networks associated. And so while we may think that the CEO of this target company is the key influencer, there may be a whole series of key influencers that are deeper in the organization at that middle management and frontline supervisor level that are really going to be important to communicating and helping to get the deal objectives met during the integration process. So you want to identify those people as quickly as possible and bring them in to these discussions to help create that direction, alignment and commitment so they can go back to out and start sharing that knowledge and that word to help the organization come along much more quickly.

Of all these different angles to incentivize participation with the leadership, what do you see that actually works the best and leads to the greatest success?

Yeah, I think first and foremost you got to reduce anxiety as quickly as possible. And so with the processes that we put in place, the value proposition, the companies that take a more structured and focused approach to the leadership factor will see that they're able to make talent decisions much more quickly. And by making those talent decisions much more quickly about who's going to lead what part of the organization, where are people going to be in the organizational structure that they are positioning themselves much better to help alleviate that anxiety and identify that can talent that they need to retain immediately. So that's the one that we usually focus on first. And then once we're able to address that, then we go into the saving time, reducing risk, integration, making connections areas to solidify those messages that we're trying to communicate.

I want to get into the distinction between culture and leadership, because we talked about it earlier that leadership often gets embedded in culture, but the buzz is always around culture over leadership. So I'm curious to know what's important in the further clarification on the distinction.

When I was doing my research, I was drawn to this one academic who shared in an article that he published that the role of leadership in an M and A has been neglected or even denied. And that's the feeling that I get when I see all of this work on culture and writing on culture and the push to do cultural assessments. And so I go back to a leadership framework by Dr. Gary Yukil in his book Leadership in Organizations. And it talks about how leader behaviors and the influence processes between followers in the organization and the situational factors that affect that that relationship between those two groups leads to performance outcomes. But the box that feeds into leader behaviors is leadership traits and skills. The often ignored or even denied factor that Dr. Simkin brought up in the article that I just referenced. All those things around leadership behaviors, influence processes, follower attitudes and behaviors. That's the culture box in organization. So how situations play out and how people interact and influence and behave is really the piece that culture is trying to get to. But the reality is, what will come out of this effort to do cultural assessment and understand where there are differences between the cultures and alignment in the cultures is inherently going to be some type of detailed change management plan and communication plan. And we take the perspective that you absolutely have to do that. You need to understand those things. But the reality is if you don't understand within the acquire and the target company whether you have leaders that can lead, change, build relationships, foster teamwork, that your efforts at any kind of cultural integration are going to fail because you're playing on leadership risk at that point, because you haven't dealt with the factors that are going to be most important to your deal succeeding.

So you really believe that there needs to be a much stronger emphasis on leadership and it should be looked at separately from culture.

Yeah, I think the elements of the leadership piece need to be pulled out of the culture component. So you need to understand not only how two organizations communicate, but in this case you need to understand whether you have leaders that can communicate effectively across boundaries. If you think about how communications usually happen with a deal, it's this top down approach. So the message starts at the top and then it filters down to the next level and then down to the next level. By the time it gets to the employees of the organization, the message is potentially blurred because people, leaders are sometimes just not good at communicating. And so that's why you need to take a more focused approach on the leadership piece at the same time that you do the culture piece. Not saying that you should do one over the other, but you definitely need to do them together. And quite frankly, as I mentioned earlier, I think leadership is the foundational element that will determine whether the deal succeeds or not. So that's our stance and why we keep sharing our research and our approach to how to deal with this in successful deals.

You're right. M and A starts and ends with great leadership or needs great leadership. So I often see a major lack of collaboration. Keith me being a tech guy, I always emphasize that technology is there and teams aren't using collaborative tools and things of that sort of. But there's never going to be a culture of using those kind of collaborative tools unless it's led and that behavior changes. So I'm curious to know what is specific that you could use or identify leadership that's going to have a higher level or influence on collaboration and communication than otherwise.

Given the high impact of digital transformation, as we shift to this new type of era within business, we see a lot of focus on what some people will say are new leadership skills that people need to be successful in a digital transformation or a digital era. The reality is they're not new leadership skills that leaders should not already have. They're just being used differently and maybe there's more emphasis on a certain one. And so one of the areas that leaders need to really understand is how they can use technology. They can't be technology averse. They really have to be digital natives willing to dive into the technology and figure out how they integrate, motivate, get their team focused on the successful direction of the organization. So with that said, some of those critical leadership skills in a deal that you are going to want to stay focused on are again around the ability to foster teamwork, motivating others to join in the discussions, actually be a leader of those discussions. So not only pushing your team to use these technology tools, but you have to show them that you can use those technology tools as well. And so this becomes one of those key areas that M and A deals probably don't spend a lot of time focusing on, but could pay really huge dividends at the end.

I agree. That's one thing I've noticed is the teams I've seen operating at the highest level with the terms of collaboration are usually tech companies that are leveraging Chad and project management tools. Now one of the things you mentioned is transformation and I strongly correlate a change oriented type of leadership to go with transformation. Can you get into some specifics on what a difference or how you identify somebody that's suited to have that change oriented approach when leading transformation.

Yeah. So again, in this day and age we're able to discern a lot of things through assessments. So we spend a lot of time trying to find out whether an organization is change ready. There are assessments that will help you discern that. Again, the organizational network analysis is another good tool to help you understand how influencers are impacting the organization and bringing them in as change enablers to whatever your deal objectives are. And obviously in a lot of cases, most organizations we find haven't spent a lot of time on communicating what their change management process is. And so when we see lower levels of the ability to lead change in the acquire or the target company and, or the target company, we recommend that they spend some time going over a change management framework that they're using or if they are not using one, to adopt one. So people can understand, particularly leaders, where they fall into the change process, how they enable the change process, the actions that they should take to to enable the change process and probably most importantly to be able to see the signs that change is faltering and that they need to do something to re jump start that effort.

Well, you're gonna get rebuttal from the leader that tells you that surveys and assessments are BS and we got a plan and we just need to execute it.

Yeah, so that's the challenge with human capital and talent assessment surveys. Right. They still have this stigma of being viewed as soft. But in reality this day and age assessment data is very valuable to the organization and particularly in M&As. So we really encourage people to take a different look and a different approach to that survey data to really get leaders on board with understanding their organization. So you know, one of the assessments that I use quite often is the Hogan assessment. And in the Hogan assessment, if there's a team that we are focused on because we have identified them as critical to the deal objective success, we can create a hogan team report that will identify what team roles individuals want to play, potential team derailers that could prevent them from achieving what they're looking for and also team culture areas and values that they're looking to create amongst the group. And again by this better understanding, you know, I tell leaders it's all about being self aware. When you get leaders that are more self, aware, you get to a point where they're more likely to notice when they're doing something that is detrimental to the success of the deal. So you can get them positioned better to work as a team, as a group, all because of assessment data can.

You distinguish if this you're referring to a quantitative or more of a qualitative approach.

It is a quantitative approach with some assessments. So for Hogan, it's a self assessment. The individual answers where they fall on a number of different quantities across three different assessments that make up this leadership potential survey group. And what you get is a clear understanding of where the person is on each of these factors and the typical leadership traits or challenges that they will face based on how they score on that assessment.

Okay, so. So you have some different approaches that come in and kind of seeing how those results come out about it. Yes, people hesitate to fire people. And I see this as a problem, especially when you have leadership that isn't going in the right direction. There's still this inherent resistance to just fire that problem and find a better solution. What are your thoughts around that?

I have some clients that I do leadership development work for and what we talk to them about is having crucial conversations and those kinds of things around performance assessment. The reality is human beings are inherently conflict averse. So they don't want to go in and have that conversation with a leader that's not performing that they know they need to get rid of, but they are apprehensive about how that person is going to react. So are they going to start crying? Are they going to start yelling and screaming? So for that reason, people tolerate individuals that they know don't have any kind of useful capabilities that they need for deal success and they just continue to kind of move them around in the organization instead of making the right decision about cutting the cords. And we really see this play out in deals where you bring the wrong people into the integration management office that really shouldn't be there because they don't provide what it is that you need to be successful.

I believe when you identify these negative traits in leadership that the development stuff doesn't work. And it's a wasteful that you got to make that decision and cut your ties loose and kill the cancer and eliminate the problem. Other than that, the whole development, fix the problem, change. A person's behavior is very wishful and doesn't work out that the sooner you can remove the problem, the faster you can get to a better place and a better solution with a person that would fit the role better. And I'm not trying to put this in a whole negative light because there's some inherent positive because that person may have a little bit of a shock, but they're naturally going to gravitate towards a better role that fits them better. So I personally believe that there is way too much hesitancy to terminate those employments as soon as that early indicators happen. And I'm curious, in your approach, is it aligned or should we give them another chance and develop them somehow?

So when I do leadership development plans and coaching for clients, I tell them that they should work on not more than two or three behavior changes that they want to make over the whole year. And so companies have to make that value judgment or cost benefit assessment, whatever words you want to use to determine whether making that kind of investment in an individual is going to have the impact that they're looking for or is that going to be a wasted investment. And in a lot of cases for poor performers, there probably isn't a lot of investment in making them better leaders again. It's just more of passing them along the organization into different jobs because you can't use them in your organization anymore and you found somebody in another part of the organization willing to take them on.

That sounds like a great topic we can build on is why you should fire everyone.

Yeah.

Or some of them.

Yeah, correct.

Okay, let me switch it up a little bit. So I run into a lot of companies, Keith, that are creating their corp dev function from scratch, right. So they're new to this, maybe they've done occasional acquisitions and they've managed it through in house resources, but they're to that point where they need to formalize this and start building an actual line corporate development function. So I'm curious to know, how would you approach that in terms of building out that dream team? What are some of these leadership traits that you would look for and, and even getting into the background because I see times too many not to bash on some good friends out there, but we naturally gravitate towards hiring the bankers from the industry and throwing them in a corp dev role. And I personally think that's not the best approach when developing a corp dev function. So I'm really curious on your input and what is the best approach and what you would personally look for in building out that corp dev team from scratch.

So one of the questions that I could not answer in my original research was around which leadership skills are most important at what deal stage. And so in the leadership factor in M and A that we did with the conference board, we asked these questions, we asked people to look at five different deal stages. So we looked at strategy and target execution, due diligence, integration, planning, and then integration in the first six months and integration in seven to 24 months. And we asked them to Prioritize a set of 25 leadership skills across each of those five deal stages. And the top 10 leadership skills that came out of that for each of those deal phases were pretty interesting. So for the strategy and target evaluation we saw thinking strategically, using sound judgment, providing vision, knowing the business, financial acumen and focus on customer needs came to the top. But as you started to shift over to due diligence and integration planning, we started to see more people and personal leadership skills start to come out like communicate effectively, listen to others, inspire trust, team leadership, organizational savvy and build relationships. And so if I were an individual tasked with building a new corp dev function that hopefully includes some participation from the corporate functions, I would want to find people that have these leadership skills. And again, it's not a case where every person has to have all these skills. It's about finding people that have these skills as strengths and either making them part of the corp dev team or knowing where these people are so you can bring them in at the right time during the deal cycle that you're pursuing to leverage their strengths appropriately during the deal process.

So one thing I would personally look for is trying to get as much talent from within the business because I think far too often we go outside. So that's just one characteristic, maybe more experience related. And I personally am really intrigued when I come across corp dev teams that have somebody in leadership that comes from an engineering or operational background.

Right.

Because I think they just bring this different view and way of thinking about M and A and thinking about the components with understanding the business and where things are going to go. And they almost have that mindset of what the integration person because they're going to have similar skill set on the project program management level that they bring to the table. I think that's such a core critical piece in terms of a lot of the backend activities that happen that we talked about through diligence integration that often gets overlooked. And then on the very front end part, the source person is when we always default to the banker. Could be a banker, but it could be an external banker that the company's worked with. But maybe even a salesperson because at the end of the day it's a sales role. So I think those would be the two things that I would strike for which builds on some of the things that you talked not to contradict.

Yeah, well, like knows the business, right. So in case of what you just shared, people that come from technology or engineering or R and D, you want on the integration team. Right. Because those are probably the same kind of deals you're executing on. And so they need to know the business because they have to start formulating plans of how they are going to integrate certain portions of the business that they are acquiring into their processes and the organizations, whether the technology side, the R and D side, the engineering side, the op side. So that makes, I mean, what you shared makes perfect sense.

And then you got to layer it with your perspective on identifying those specific leadership traits that are actually going to carry forward so that they can embody and influence the rest of the team in the right direction.

Yeah, correct.

We work good together. That's another topic for us to pick up on.

Yeah.

I want to tail off with one question. What is the craziest thing you've seen in M and A?

The craziest thing I've seen in M and A. Well, that's a good question. I think maybe it's not the craziest thing, but it's the thing I consistently see is that companies don't spend the time to choose the best leader, whether that's from the target company or the acquiring company. And the perspective again is if you're the acquiring company, you won the acquisition. We're not necessarily going to get rid of our team will get rid of the people on the target company. But in a lot of cases for these deals, like transformational deals, for example, it is really about where is the talent that you need to achieve those deal objectives. And that talent could be over on the target company side more so than it is on the acquiring company side. So I'd say that continues to be the craziest thing that I see companies doing is they assume that their leaders are the best leaders and can do no wrong. And in reality, there may be someone over in the target company that can do it much better.

I need an example. I need you to tell me about the worst leader you've seen and what they did.

So the worst leader I saw, I actually reported to him in one deal. This actually happened in the federal government, of all places. So it was the first deal I ever really worked on back in 2006-2008. And I was responsible for integrating the learning capabilities of these 10 different organizations into the enterprise. Learning capabilities. And he treated them as a group of people that he led and that should do everything that he said, when in reality they reported to their commander and that's what their focus was. So his perspective was they were there to support him. And I took the perspective that we were there to support them because they were on the front lines doing what they needed to do. And, you know, those kinds of perspectives are what I believe will eat away at successful deals because people come in with the wrong attitude and the wrong perspective about what's happening in a deal. So I would definitely call him the worst leader that I saw in a deal.

Yeah. It seems like you had a conflict between the servient leader mindship versus the dictatorship.

Yeah, yeah, it was a challenge. So basically I had to ignore him a lot and make a lot of excuses.

Yeah, it's tough when he's the one you report to.

I know. Yeah. Yeah.

Hey, Keith, thank you so much for your time today. I enjoyed our conversation.

Yeah, thank you so much. It was great.

Keith, you know, before we finish off, maybe if you want to tell us a little bit about some of this research that you're working on, because I know you're working on some pretty interesting things that you got in the cooker and just to, you know, let people know or there's some little reasons they can. There's some reasons for them to follow with you.

Yeah. So we have really kind of cornered the research on what leadership skills impact the success and probability of success in deals. Like we mentioned earlier, the other area that we're working is we've partnered with Hogan Assessments. Hogan Assessments is really a personality assessment. What we found out is Hogan had never looked at their data, which is over 8 million different assessments, to kind of take a look and see are there certain personality factors that indicate an individual that is going to be more successful at a deal or less successful at a deal. So we hope to have that research concluded sometime in the second quarter this year and start to share those results about leadership skill and leadership personality and successful deals and understanding the connection between those.

Hey, awesome. Great to look forward to hearing and learning more about that.

Yeah, yeah, so are we.

Hey Keith, thanks again for your time today and look forward to continuing the conversation.

Yeah, sounds good. Thanks so much, Keson.

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