What is the recipe for establishing a fruitful relationship between a CEO and a board chair? Well, in the case of Meghan Juday and Steve Henn, the chair and CEO, respectively, of Ideal Industries, that recipe included a worldwide tour, a lot of quick phone calls and one poorly timed global pandemic.
Prior to her being named chair of Ideal Industries, Juday was part of the search committee for the new CEO. She had a list of criteria to determine which candidate would be the ideal person to lead the company.
“One of the big questions I had for myself as I was looking at all of the potential candidates we were interviewing was, does this person have a shared vision, or do we have enough aligned where I think we can work well together? As a person, do they have a good personality, or are they easy to talk to? You don’t want to be in that kind of relationship with somebody who is standoffish or serious all the time.”
Steve Henn was ultimately chosen as the person for the job. His first introduction to the company was a world tour visiting all of the locations of Ideal Industries to introduce him to employees. The tour ended up being not only an opportunity to familiarize him with the company’s culture or surely to see some wonderful sites, but also the foundation for a constructive working relationship.
“We spent a lot of time in airport lounges, buses and planes. We spent one trip flying to Australia and New Zealand,” says Juday. “We got a lot of work done that night.”
Upon their return from the global sojourn, a couple of momentous occasions took place, one personal to Juday and one extremely personal to many in the United States and around the globe: Juday was named chair of Ideal Industries and a mere two weeks later the COVID pandemic took hold. While the negative effects of the pandemic have been covered at length, one positive side effect of the crisis for Ideal Industries was that it forced the chair and CEO to work closely together to ensure the company’s survival during an extremely trying period.
“We were on the phone quite frequently in the beginning, just trying to deal with COVID. We were on task forces together and we would meet every week,” says Juday. “We would establish time and just catch up. What are the issues? What’s going on here? And that was really helpful.”
Those communications were not only frequent, but more importantly they were open and transparent, something that Henn believes is key to establishing a CEO/chair relationship that can stand the test of time.
“We have always tried to keep those communications wide open and all the information on the table. I feel fortunate that I’m in a position in my career that I have humility. There’s no ego or agenda,” says Henn. “It’s about running the business and making sure that the shareholders and that the teams and the businesses are going fine. It allowed us to keep an open dialogue across all aspects, which made the conversations and meetings we had with the board and the family much easier to accomplish.”
While Juday and Henn’s working relationship sounds very kumbaya for a couple of individuals who needed to navigate a worldwide pandemic with next to no prep time, that doesn’t mean there have been no issues in the boardroom. But to Juday, disagreements or lack of consensus in the boardroom do not indicate issues between the chair and the CEO; it simply means that the board has more work to do.
“If we ever get to a contested vote or we feel like we still have a lot more questions, we’re just not ready to make a decision,” says Juday, who states that “there’s not a long list of issues” for herself and Henn. “I feel like it’s just an opportunity to have more dialogue. To me, it just means we stay in it, we learn from it. It’s just self-awareness and understanding where the other person’s coming from, and then just making sure that we’re squirreling away those lessons learned as nuggets of knowledge for the future.”
It would be fair to say that the board/CEO relationship has been a smooth one for Henn and Juday, but we would be remiss if we did not mention one culture shock Henn received when making the transition from almost 30 years in the public space to a lead executive role at a private, family company: the CEO evaluation. His evaluation in the public company was, in his words, “about three minutes long.” His first independent review at Ideal? Try 49 pages long.
However, Henn says that while it may have been extended commentary, it was also “very good feedback.” As for Juday, she looks at the evaluation both in particular and in general as an important tool in determining the CEO’s effectiveness.
“If you have a CEO who is not doing well, there are probably bellwethers that are happening very early on in that person’s tenure, and you want to make sure that you are bringing all of your resources to the table to give the company and the CEO the best possible chance of righting the ship.”
Thankfully for both Ideal and this particular CEO/board relationship, Henn has proved to be very steady at the wheel.