"Love is the ultimate goal. Every day the goal is to move closer to it."
After beginning his career as a paperboy, Phillip Kane went on to spend more than 25 years in some of the best-known automotive, industrial, consumer durables, distribution, and banking businesses in the world.
Currently, Phillip is CEO and Managing Partner of Grace Ocean, LLC a boutique advisory firm located in northeast Ohio serving clients ranging from Fortune 500 corporations to mid-market private-equity-backed firms. Phillip also acts as a Senior Advisor to Stout Risius Ross and Rothschild & Co, where he brings operational expertise to their investment banking businesses. Previously Phillip was the Chief Commercial Officer in Key Markets at Pirelli in Milan, Italy working in their commercial truck tire business.
Prior to Pirelli, Phillip spent 11 years working for the Goodyear Tire & Rubber Company. Before that, Phillip held executive roles with Genuine Parts Company (NAPA) and Snap-On, Inc. He is the author of the book, The Not So Subtle Art of Caring: Letters on Leadership from John Hunt Publishing, London. He is a contributor to such as Inc. Magazine and Tire Review writing on leadership issues and topics relevant to the trades.
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We’re happy that you could join us today! Please introduce yourself to our readers. What’s your story?
Phillip Kane: I am a businessman and now author/journalist. For 30 years, I swam against the prevailing tide of autocratic, desk-pounding micromanagement and proved that it’s possible to care for others and deliver results. Ultimately I wrote a book about it and built a business on teaching others the Not So Subtle Art of Caring which, at its core holds that leaders do not have to choose between winning and treating others well.
CEOs and leaders usually have different motives and aspirations when getting started. Let’s go straight to the beginning. What was your primary goal for starting your business? Was it wealth, respect, or to offer a service that would help improve lives?
Phillip Kane: It was precisely built on a desire to teach other leaders that the true path to winning is found in improving the lives of those they have the privilege to lead.
Tell us about 2 things that you like and two things that you dislike about your industry. Share what you’d like to see change and why.
Phillip Kane: I like:
- Seeing individuals and businesses achieve things they never thought were possible
- Seeing the emphasis, finally, occurring on the importance of employee mental health.
I dislike:
- The large portion of my industry that seeks to protect and perpetuate broken management styles and systems
- The general lack of curiosity that exists in larger firms
I’d like to see more leaders admit when they are wrong. Much of what prevents progress is an inability/unwillingness to own and address mistakes of all kinds.
Companies around the world are rapidly changing their work environment and organizational culture to facilitate diversity. How do you see your organizational culture changing in the next 3 years and how do you see yourself creating that change?
Phillip Kane: You see the world starting to reject diversity for diversity sake. I am a promoter of diversity of thought. What follows is all the diversity that others try to manufacture on the front end. But they have it backwards. Engineered diversity results in a mess of poor morale, sub optimized results, and huge talent outflow.
According to the Michigan State University “An organization’s culture is responsible for creating the kind of environment in which the business is managed, and has a major impact on its ultimate success or failure.” What kind of culture has your organization adopted and how has it impacted your business?
Phillip Kane: I build businesses built on cultures characterized by winning and mutual respect. Teams must understand that the goal in business is to win. Too many culture warriors miss this. But the focus on winning must also be paired with a maniacal requirement for respect – among associates, between our team and our suppliers, between us and our customers, etc, etc. When teams focus on respect and winning, 2 simple thoughts – not having to memorize a laundry list of cutesie values that spell the name of the company – they can achieve extraordinary things.
Richard Branson once famously stated “There’s no magic formula for great company culture. The key is just to treat your staff how you would like to be treated.” and Stephen R. Covey admonishes to “Always treat your employees exactly as you want them to treat your best customers. What’s your take on creating a great organizational culture?
Phillip Kane: As I just stated, it’s not any more complicated than establishing an environment of mutual respect, which is not any different than a golden rule culture, or to say treat others the way that you want to be treated. When associates respect each other, their suppliers, their customers, and their stakeholders with respect, they make decisions that maximize value for the entire ecosystem, enlarging the entire pie.
The overwhelming majority of more than 9,000 workers included in a recent Accenture survey on the future of work said they felt a hybrid work model would be optimal going forward, a major reason for that being the improved work-life balance that it offers. How do you promote work-life balance at your company?
Phillip Kane: We’ve focused our clients for some time on outputs, not inputs. Narcissists kick chairs and count cars in parking lots. True, caring leaders count results. They hold their teams accountable to deliver desired outputs without concern for when they work to produce them. They recognize that associates with better mental health are far more productive than associates who become burned out, stressed out, and wigged out because they work for a boss who self-validates by keeping people in a building for 75 hours a week.
How would you describe your company’s overall culture? Give us examples.
Phillip Kane: We promote winning and mutual respect. Put another way, we believe it is possible to win AND care for others.
The best example is this: if the organization achieves record earnings, record earnings are achieved in the households of individual associates.
It is believed that a company’s culture is rooted in a company’s values. What are your values and how do they affect daily life at the workplace?
Phillip Kane: I have a list of rules for human interaction, but they are a product of our values which you’ve already seen: winning and mutual respect.
They affect daily life in no more complicated a way as they are the guiding principles that shape the way that people think about what they do and interact with each other. It is an AND proposition. The two are not mutually exclusive. People focus on winning while respecting one another. People focus on respecting one another while winning. One does not happen without the other.
Share with us one of the most difficult decisions you had to make, this past year 2021, for your company that benefited your employees or customers. What made this decision so difficult and what were the positive impacts.
Phillip Kane: My business took a PPP loan in 2021. For me this was a tremendously difficult decision. While it was an easy decision from a payroll standpoint, it was very difficult from a human standpoint and even a personal pride standpoint. I wasn’t raised to accept what I saw as a hand-out. But the positive aspects of this event from an encouragement standpoint were and have been breathtaking.
And not from the standpoint that you might expect; not people simply encouraging me to take the money. Moreover, it was encouragement to press ahead. It was thankful encouragement for providing for others. It was the encouragement that now more than ever the things that I sell matter. It was encouragement to talk more about ourselves, not less. Then just like that, the Great Resignation hit and the entire world started to see the things we’ve been saying for decades. And all of a sudden that little PPP loan didn’t seem to matter so much anymore.
An organization’s management has a deep impact on its culture. What is your management style and how well has it worked so far?
Phillip Kane: I am a steward. Imagine a desk-pounding narcissist on one end of the spectrum and a full on just be nice to people and the results will follow servant leader on the other. I fall right in between. I believe in holding people accountable for results but protecting the dignity of every human being I have the privilege to lead. How has it worked out? I’ve created hundreds of millions of dollars in shareholder value for the firms that have employed me in the last 30 years while training now three generations of leaders that there’s a different, better way to lead.
Every organization suffers from internal conflicts, whether functional or dysfunctional. Our readers would love to know, how do you solve an internal conflict?
Phillip Kane: Normally, I declare it a local conflict and require those involved to work it out. Where it becomes seemingly unworkable, I assign the combatants to a high-value project as co-leaders with a tight deadline and sit back and watch as mortal enemies become effective collaborators. To me there is no such thing as healthy tension. That was coined by someone who continually tried and failed to build an actually healthy culture.
According to Culture AMP, Only 40% of women feel satisfied with the decision-making process at their organization (versus 70% of men), which leads to job dissatisfaction and poor employee retention. What is your organization doing to facilitate an inclusive and supportive environment for women?
Phillip Kane: These situations result because of a lack of respect. They happen because narcissistic (and definitionally also sexist) leaders fail to respect the input and contributions of everyone on their team. When everyone has a voice and everyone’s voice is respected, you don’t see these sort of AMP numbers.
What role do your company’s culture and values play in the recruitment process and how do you ensure that it is free from bias?
Phillip Kane: Hire the right best person for the role. As I said earlier. Anytime that an outcome influences the process whether it be a bias against or for a particular group, disaster will follow, I promise you that. The most important factor to team success is putting the right people in the right seats (without regard for any other factor).
We’re grateful for all that you have shared so far! We would also love to know if there was one thing that you could improve about your company’s culture, what would it be?
Phillip Kane: Love is the ultimate goal. Every day the goal is to move closer to it.
Business is all about overcoming obstacles and creating opportunities for growth. What do you see as the real challenge right now?
Phillip Kane: Right now, it’s inflation. Even as wages grow, they will outpace productivity which is going to lead to further inflation. Small businesses are struggling to maintain a motivated workforce when they are distracted by home economics and making ends meet.
This has been truly insightful and we thank you for your time. Our final question, however, might be a bit of a curveball. If you had a choice to either fly or be invisible, which would you choose and why?
Phillip Kane: Ha. Good one. I’d want to fly. I could be in more places more often. Being invisible has limited advantages. As leaders, we accomplish what we do by being present. Being invisible wouldn’t do much to help in that regard. So I’d want to fly to and fro to be with as many people as I can, making as many lives better as I could.
Jed Morley, VIP Contributor to ValiantCEO and the host of this interview would like to thank Phillip Kane for taking the time to do this interview and share his knowledge and experience with our readers.
If you would like to get in touch with Phillip Kane or his company, you can do it through his – Linkedin Page
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