When Dr. Roy W. Menninger took over the presidency of the Menninger Foundation in 1967, he followed in the wake of not one but two olympian figures: his uncle, Dr. Karl Menninger, one of the pioneers in treatment of mental illness in America, and his father, Dr. William Menninger, a widely respected administrator and influential voice in the field. Like his forbears, Roy Menninger was a practicing psychiatrist. He had little experience at managing, and his first years as head of the famed Topeka, Kansas, clinic were typical of the uncertainties and fumblings of successors striving to establish their authority. In his case, however, the challenge was greatly compounded by the presence in Topeka of the man they called Dr. Karl, who had dominated the institution for so long.
Roy Menninger, who was president for 26 years—he was succeeded in 1993 by a younger brother, Walter—related the painful lessons of his first years as CEO at the annual conference of the Family Firm Institute, held last October in Scottsdale, Arizona. The address, adapted here, provides an unusually candid glimpse of the challenges in taking charge of an organization dominated by an entrepreneurial founder.
—The Editors.
My comments and observations today are based on my personal experience as CEO of the Menninger Foundation; I will use them to illuminate some issues related to succession in family businesses. The first issue is the well-known problem facing the successor to a founding father and surviving—that is, how do you manage to outlast him? The second issue describes some of the things that I had to learn—and unlearn—in making the transition from being a young and naive clinician, trained in psychiatry, to becoming a manager of a large organization. Third, I will comment on the kinds of help I received as a successor CEO that were or were not helpful.
The Menninger Foundation was founded in 1925 by my grandfather, an old family-style physician, in a farmhouse on the outskirts of Topeka. Though initially focused on the care and treatment of the severely mentally ill, over the years it has also developed a very substantial commitment to psychiatric research, professional education, and preventive psychiatry, which is the application of psychiatric thinking to social systems and organizations. The organization now runs an annual budget of about $65 million and employs a staff of over 1,000 in Topeka and three other locations.
My uncle, Karl Menninger,was the intellectual driving force behind the growth of the Menninger Foundation. In the '30s, his books, The Human Mind, Man Against Himself, Love Against Hate, brought home to the American public some early understandings of psychiatry and the mind, and helped establish our institution's reputation not only in the Middle West but across the country.
Dr. Karl, who died in 1989 just short of his 97th birthday, was one of those dramatic, compelling, and charismatic persons able to stimulate all those around him to study and to learn. Our residency program, the largest in the country during the '50s, reflected the excitement and enthusiasm that the teaching of this incredible man could generate. But for all his talent as a thinker and a teacher, Dr. Karl, like many great founders, could also be demanding, unreasonable, tyrannical, and destructive.
By 1965, his arbitrariness as chief of staff had become intolerable to the senior professionals, and several came to my father, Dr. William Menninger, with a virtual ultimatum regarding Dr. Karl: "Either he gives up his power, or we go." At the time, Dr. Will, as he was affectionally known, was nominally president, but he functioned not as the CEO but as the "outside man" of the pair. In that capacity, my father had developed a reputation that in some respects dwarfed that of his brother. My father was loved by everybody for his amiability, his kindness, his gentleness—in marked contrast to the much more ambivalent feelings people had about Dr. Karl. As you can imagine, these sharp differences in the public perceptions of each made for some interesting dynamics between the brothers.
As a result of the pressure from the staff and from his brother, my uncle was forced to shorten his tenure. My father now succeeded Dr. Karl in fact. Unhappily, his term suddenly ended six months later when he was discovered to have lung cancer. He died less than a year later.
Within the span of about 16 or 17 months, the Menninger Foundation thus went from having two incredibly powerful, charismatic leaders, with dramatically different styles, to none. At that point, the board of trustees hired Heidrich & Struggles, the executive search firm, to seek out a successor.
Ultimately, they came to me. When asked if I would take the job, I said, "Yes, of course." I was young, idealistic, and naive at the time, imbued with a sense of family commitment, family responsibility, and the importance of family persistency. To call this a kind of quasi-religious feeling may be overstating it, but, for me, there was something mystical about it.
I was soon initiated into a very interesting set of experiences. During my father's terminal illness, I had served as chairman of an operating committee composed of all the department directors. At this time of crisis, we were all committed to the survival of the organization and willing to work hard together. But when I called them together the day after my election as the new president, nobody came.
I don't mean they didn't show up, because they did. But did they speak? Not if they could avoid it. Did they have any contributions or comments to make? Not if they could avoid it. What I was beginning to discover, the hard way, was what a difference a shift in the power balance makes in relationships that were previously collegial and equal. My election had raised me to a new level, and my former colleagues, no longer equal, were now weighing the risks of being too open and forthright with the new boss.
In my head, I honestly thought that I was the same guy. I even still thought of myself as a Boy Scout in short pants! It was hard to see my former colleagues as anything but equals. In fact, two of them were senior administrators whom I still thought of as my superiors. I was disquieted by the new demeanor of these senior people. They did not exactly come hat in hand or pull on their forelocks. But they did address me as "Sir," and they did not speak first.
I finally said to them, "What is all this deference jazz? You guys know what this organization is about, you've been running it for years. Sure, I'm president, but that doesn't mean anything." And they said, "That's all you know...."
Yes, they were right. Then, that was all I did know. I had a great deal to learn. The very first thing was to learn how to manage an institution that had been dominated for so long by two compelling, charismatic figures. It was an organization that had left the leading to those two leaders; it not only had no experience with participatory management, but it had no effective second-level leadership. In effect, we had what I have called a "dependency culture," an organizational climate in which feelings of helplessness, uncertainty, a degree of fear and apprehension, passivity, and a great deal of caution were everywhere. In this sticky goo of a dependency culture, there was a strong disincentive to taking any initiative at all; people had learned from experience that if they were brave enough to utter an unpopular idea, they might get their heads shot off.
An anecdote from my early years at the clinic may help explain what I mean. As a young staff member, I had to present a case summary of a patient to Dr. Karl. I spent hours rewriting the case, ending up with 10 meticulously prepared pages which addressed a number of what I thought were the essential issues about this patient's symptoms and treatment. But I didn't get past the second paragraph on page one before Dr. Karl, a fanatic about language, erupted over a word that he thought I had misused. He spent the next 20 minutes haranguing the group about how some poor, dumb student—me—could conceivably use one word when some other word was clearly, obviously, certainly, most emphatically better or more precise. Being his nephew certainly didn't help. He was an early apostle of nondiscriminatory criticism.
I was annihilated in the experience. There was no further progress in the discussion of the patient. It was a classic example of why most of the clinic's staff had learned it was wise not to speak first or, if you could avoid it, not to speak at all.
In this dependency culture, it was perhaps not surprising that the first reaction to my election was ambivalence. The large reservoir of unexpressed resentment that had been kept under wraps for so long inevitably began to emerge. Of course, now that Dr. Karl's arbitrary governance was a thing of the past, there were also feelings of relief and a new sense of freedom. Still, the senior staff's reactions to me were very mixed. I sensed a certain amount of envy and jealousy. Some were convinced I had been appointed solely because of the family connection. But whatever the reasons that led the trustees to offer me the job, I was not chosen for my name alone, nor was I selected by the family. The basis for the envy and jealousy was a little misplaced, but it was no less real.
In a sense, I confronted a no-win situation. On the one hand, there was the palpable fear that I would continue the autocratic style of my uncle. On the other, there was an apprehension that I would fail to be the knight on a white horse who would ride in and save the organization. In short, there were really two fears—equal and opposite: One was that I would be another Dr. Karl, and the other was that I would not be.
The second reaction to these events was widespread depression. It was clear that many staff members were deeply attached to the former leaders, and suffered a profound sense of loss with their departure and death. Not surprisingly, I shared those feelings. As a psychiatrist I had often treated people grieving from important losses in their family. For all of my intellectual knowledge,though, I was unprepared for the anger I felt with my father. How, I thought, could he die at a time like this and leave me with no direction, no guidance, no support, no encouragement, no manual to follow, no helpers...nothing? It took me a long time before I could go back to his grave and grieve his loss in a normal way.
A third reaction to these events was even more bizarre. It took me a while to figure it out. A number of people in the organization came to me to collect overdue bills. I am speaking metaphorically, of course. They had put up with endless hassling for years, and now they felt entitled to some reward for having endured, for not having left the organization. In fact, a number of people did leave the foundation at this point, no doubt partly because I did not—or could not—pay them what they felt they were owed.
Though some left, many did not. In the manner of solicitous therapists, some staff members came to me offering to help me cope with the personal anxieties of my new position. I think they actually wanted to be helpful. But they offered comfort when what the organization needed was the leadership, direction, and initiative that they were neither ready nor able to provide. And, furthermore, what I didn't initially understand was the fine print at the bottom of their offers. In return for their solicitude and support, I came to realize, they were seeking special favors. There was a rising tide of fawning yea-sayers, to a point where I began to think that anyone who offered something was really asking for something else. All too soon I foundmyself becoming cynical about the motivations of others.
The paranoia and scapegoating that were prominent in the organizational culture was soon turned against me—though by a quite devious route. I had always been known as a "nice guy," so it was difficult to attack me openly. For this reason, the anger, fear, and suspicion went underground. An unpleasant atmosphere of backbiting, name-calling, and petty, unjustified criticism of one's previously close colleagues became flagrant. When intense competitive struggles broke out between departments over such things as staffing and budget allocations, the blame was—to use the jargon of our profession—displaced upwardly: It was all my—"their"—fault.
I created another problem for myself because I didn't like MBAs very much—I disliked their numbers-oriented approach. So I found myself trying to be a manager while stubbornly refusing to learn how it ought to be done. What's more, my training as a psychotherapist had given me special training in the art of facilitating growth and change in individuals. In the therapeutic context, the relationship between physician and patient is clearly defined. Although there is a covert power differential, a good therapist does not exercise it directly; instead, he or she learns to listen, to support, to interpret, and to avoid offering advice—and absolutely not to tell the patient what to do. The therapeutic task is enabling the patient to decide for him- or herself.
Quite understandably, I started out as president by being a good psychotherapist: I listened, I supported, I encouraged. I certainly didn't act the autocrat, or even tell anybody what to do. It's not hard to imagine the kind of chaos that ensued from that style of managing, which was so different from that of my predecessors and so far from the clear direction that the organization needed.
I would listen very tolerantly and supportively to an individual who had lots of anxieties and concerns and depressions. I had little to say about how he was totally fouling up in the job. Did I focus on the task? No, I listened and, in effect, treated him as a patient. I listened to everybody. In fact, at one point I was dealing with three separate groups: the normal management group that was supposed to be managing; a group of fearful staff members who had created a protective organization that met late into the evening; and those who were not part of either group and wanted to see me individually.
On some days, I met successively with each of these three large groups.These meetings did engage me deeply in the task of defining and working on the various personal concerns that were often the major focus of many complaints (and may indeed have proven to be therapeutic for some individuals). But they failed to address the need for more systematic attention to the growth and development of the organization.
And, further, I followed an entrepreneurial founder who was truly unable to believe that anyone else could manage the organization as well as he had. After I became president, my uncle was convinced I would fall flat on my face within a few months and the trustees would come back and ask him to resume his former position of leadership. He talked openly about that prospect, convinced that it would happen.
When it did not, his anger became even more apparent. He became more public in his condemnation not just of the organization and the trustees, but also of me. Tragically, he thought of himself as coterminous with the organization, since, for most of our history, there was little difference between the two.
When we did talk—which came to be less and less frequently—he would actually ask, "Whose foundation is this now?" I didn't understand the question. I said, "You know, it's a 501(C)(3) corporation; it is publicly held. It is not really a family firm." Only after the fifth iteration did I realize what he meant—that "It's no longer mine."
Initially, I went to him in search of help, saying, "I wish you would think with me about this, or talk with me about that." He would refuse to offer any advice or counsel, and then complain bitterly afterward about having been ignored. At one point, I asked him whether he had any guidance to offer on the future of the foundation. "Future?" he roared back. "I have no future!"
I was very much aware that I was a classic example of a successor in a family firm, preoccupied with such questions as: Can I really make it on my own? What will it take to show that I am just as competent, just as capable, as my predecessors? I was too intimidated by their success to attempt to equal Dr. Karl or Dr. Will in any of the ways that they had distinguished themselves. That was foolish, because I believe I could have made my mark in some of those same areas. But somehow I felt that was forbidden, as if I would be treading on sacred soil.
I suffered from loneliness at the top. To whom could I talk? Where could I turn for help? The first and most obvious source of help was those staff members who had been close clinical colleagues of mine before my election to the presidency. I quickly discovered that because things had so changed, I could no longer expect to get support from the people who were now reporting to me. I came to realize that it is unfair to ask one's subordinates to share one's personal anxieties. As long as a manager's concerns are task-focused—targeted on an organizational problem or issue—it is entirely legitimate to share them with subordinates. But a boss who seeks support within the organization for those after-midnight worries, anxieties, and concerns can impair important functional relationships. When a boss lays personal concerns on senior people, they wonder: "My God, if he is worried about that and can't manage it, what does it mean for the rest of us?" Or, "If he can't handle that, why is he president?"
Secondly, I thought about using consultants as father-confessors, and perhaps as a source of what to do and how to do it. There seemed to be a great many around, all willing to come consult—for a generous fee. I found consultants occasionally helpful—but the operative word is "occasionally." Too often, they were ready to chop up the organization, to shorten or lengthen or rearrange it, in order to fit what they knew how to do, what they were prepared to offer. Commonly, the consultant would offer the solution even before hearing the problem. But at a more fundamental level, they seemed to want to assert their view of the dilemmas and solutions rather than recognizing my need for the catalytic help to engineer changes that I knew were needed.
To put it a bit differently, consultants seemed to have a highly rational view of what the problem was, and a linear view of the steps necessary to address it. What they usually did not fully appreciate were the important psychological undercurrents. For example, in my ambivalence, I was requesting their help for change, even as I resisted it. It was hard for them to understand a peculiar contradiction: I wanted to make things better miraculously—without changing anything.
My third source of support—and one of the most important—was the board of trustees itself. Among this rather large group of nearly 100 were the 25 members of the executive committee. All of them were deeply involved in the organization in terms of keeping tabs on management as well as giving considerable financial support. They had chosen me to be president, and so were deeply committed to my success—a very important detail because at any time during my tenure they might have blown me out of the water.
All were older than I. Most were CEOs or managers of substantial companies. A few were experienced professionals from different disciplines. None were family members or psychiatrists. They provided me with the kind of knowledge and perspective from the world of commerce and industry that enabled me—and the organization—to begin to make the sorts of changes that were necessary. A few even provided the good, supportive, and loving father for me that I so desperately felt I needed.
They gave advice without strings attached. But I soon realized that such a relationship, however vital and important, has its limits. That they were being somewhat fatherly did not mean that I could do what I sometimes wished: to fall in a heap, or break down and cry, or climb into the lap of this good person and say, "Take care of me. I am tired of taking care of this bloomin', stupid organization!" Short of that ubiquitous but unrealizable fantasy of rest and respite, however, they did provide an invaluable "Dutch uncle" version of a paternal figure: advice, counsel, and blunt talk when it was called for.
The fourth source of support and health came in an unexpected form—our extensive utilization of a specialized, participative learning experience for the staff. In the long run, the group relations conferences sponsored by the A.K. Rice Institute, then in Washington, D.C. [now in Jupiter, Florida], helped the most to change our organization. Beginning in the late '60s and continuing until the mid-'70s, groups of five or six staff members were sent to remote locations in the country to spend a week with 50 to 60 strangers, participating in a living laboratory designed to focus attention on the phenomenology of small groups—the heart of most working environments.
Although intentionally artificial, these conferences effectively recreate a social-political scene painfully similar to that of the organizations from which the participants come. Through their interactions, the participants learn how individual and group behaviors reinforce each other for good or ill. As a consequence, our staff members returned with some understanding of how to utilize groups and committees with greater sophistication and much greater effectiveness—and brought a dramatic reduction in the paralyzing dependency culture that had been our collective nemesis.
One thing they came back with was a much better understanding of the leader's role. They learned that the leader does more than convene the group. He or she legitimates the process by establishing the agenda and defining the task; by maintaining the boundaries; by sustaining the focus of the group's attention; by providing the incentives for good performance and the penalties for failure, as well as by a variety of managerial-type functions that successful leaders must know and practice. But it also became clear to them how dark forces in every group conspire against the leader's agenda and the group's achievement of the task at hand.
Just as important, the people who went to conferences (ultimately nearly 150 staff members were involved) began to realize that they had all the authority that they needed to accomplish the tasks for which they were responsible. They didn't need to wait for someone to give them what they already had, but had been unable—or unwilling—to recognize. From my standpoint, one of the most significant consequences of this realization—and the organizational improvements that it brought—was that it helped the Menninger Foundation to survive a difficult transition, and me to survive as CEO.
In the last two or three years of my uncle's life, he and I had virtually stopped talking. My brother, who has succeeded me as CEO, could talk to him with greater ease than I, and so became the channel for organizational communications. One week before Dr. Karl died, I went to his hospital bedside where we talked for the first time in many months. We talked about a book, just published, that was critical of him and the founding family. I was upset by it, but he was heartbroken by it.
Somehow, sharing this pain brought us together. Paradoxically, the pain permitted the rapprochement we both wanted. It moved me to reflect on the complicated nature of our relationship, and to realize that his feelings about me weren't always as hostile and competitive as I had thought.
A poignant example was hearing him occasionally, but quite unexpectedly, addressing me by my father's name. It was more than a slip of the tongue: In these brief moments, he was confusing me with his brother. In another revealing outburst, he once said he was very angry that I was not his son. In a strange way, neither easy to recognize or understand, I think he loved me. I know that what I felt, more than anger or hate, was an enormous sense of disappointment, of loss, of loneliness, because he was a man who could have made a big difference to me and thus to the organization during my years as president. Instead, we were split and painfully isolated from each other.
It was sad that our reconnecting had to await a moment so late in the lives of us both, but it is important to note that it happened. It reestablished a connection of vital importance. Unfortunately, we never achieved a genuine collegiality, and that will forever be a cause of great sadness to me. Nonetheless, I think that virtually every family, and certainly every family sharing a business relationship, must strive to close the loop and bridge the generational gulf between the founder and the successor, to make the family whole again. The ultimate survival of the enterprise may depend on it.
I can't fully convey to you this odd reality, this perception of having feelings of anger and resentment toward those who preceded you side by side with the strong sense of honor and awe and admiration that they continue to inspire. How can one feel such profoundly contradictory feelings about one's predecessors?
The answer is easy: I don't know. But I do know that is how it is, and that this existential paradox is at the heart of successful transitions from one generation of leadership to the next.