Can the 'alpha' CEO be tamed?

The alpha's natural habitat is the boardrooms and glass offices where these high-power, hard-charging executives run some of the nation's largest companies. Dell Inc. has its share of alpha executives, including Chairman Michael Dell and CEO Kevin Rollins.

Ludeman and Erlandson specialize in coaching alpha executives to improve their interactions with colleagues -- and the bottom line. Last month, they moved their company, Worth Ethic, to Austin, Texas, from Santa Barbara, Calif., to be closer to their clients in Round Rock and across the country.

"I used to feel like my job was ... to humanize the jerks of the world," Ludeman said. "Some of the people were really awful. Those kinds of people today don't often get to the tops of companies."

To get a feel for how that humanization works, consider the relationship between Dell and Rollins, who were not awful, Ludeman said. By 2002, Rollins had become firmly ensconced as Dell's right-hand man but felt he wasn't on equal footing with the founder of the company: Dell held veto power over his ideas, yet Rollins didn't have the same level of input into Dell's plans. Rollins wanted to change that.

"He'd talked to me for some time about how important that was to him," Ludeman said. "He said he felt that was too much to ask of someone who was (then) CEO and the founder of the company."

When Dell later asked Rollins how they could improve their relationship, Rollins didn't hesitate. Spurred in part by Ludeman's encouragement, Rollins suggested that both he and Dell should approve an idea before it goes forward.

Dell agreed.

"It was a pivotal moment," Ludeman said. "It made them come from being more independent into being much more together in how they thought about things."

Execs must swallow pride

That conversation set the course for the successful "two-in-a-box" strategy Dell and Rollins now use to run the company. It has become part of the Dell playbook, used to run individual units of the computer company around the world.

It also reflects the openness and trust that Worth Ethic tries to instill. Being direct and honest means very powerful, highly successful executives have to swallow their pride and admit they have faults -- a key component in Worth Ethic's program.

In 2001, Ludeman worked with Michael Dell on an assessment of Dell's leadership skills. The review took into account Dell's own observations as well as those around him -- his intense focus often made him remote to his colleagues, for example. After going through the results with him privately, Ludeman suggested Dell share them with his top executive team.

He did that, and later shared the results with all of the company's vice presidents, even videotaping the discussion.

"When you're a real strong leader, you usually think the whole thing about, 'Don't let them see me sweat,' " Ludeman said. "You don't tend to think, 'The thing I need to do is let people know when I need help, or that I'm struggling with something, or that I have these kinds of issues.' And yet as soon as you disclose those things about yourself, other people can connect with you better."

Confess to connect

Now these confessions are part of a regular program for all of Dell's top executives, who periodically discuss their strengths and weaknesses with some of their colleagues.

One key conversation focused on how the company would keep its senior management team once the tech industry rebounded and headhunters came calling. Rollins and Dell ultimately came up with an idea called the "Soul of Dell," which called for the creation of a better work environment and clear ethical standards. Part of the plan includes rating all managers on their relationships with their subordinates.

"Michael and Kevin have been very effective (in saying) that it's not OK to just compete with each other," Ludeman said. "They just don't tolerate it. That is unusual."

To help the company's executives work together better, Dell turned to Ludeman's expertise in 1995. She and Erlandson married in 2002. Both now work with Dell's managers.

At its core, their program is designed to get executives to become more aware of the physical and emotional states they fall into when they face stress. It can involve something as simple as a few deep breaths to "reset" one's mind and body, said Erlandson, formerly a vascular surgeon. But it extends to an understanding and recognition of the roles an individual resorts to in the face of stress.

It's those habitual roles -- the hero, the villain, the victim -- that can lead business managers away from addressing the true cause of a problem.

Dell employs several programs to improve the business and personal skills of executives, said Mike Summers, Dell's vice president for global learning and development. Worth Ethic is just one part of that, he said, but a part that mimics Dell's direct business style.

Dialogue leads to trust

"If there is an open dialogue around people -- recognizing what they're good at and what their opportunities for improvement are -- you have a personal level of trust that develops," Summers said. "That allows you to have very open discussions about the business itself."

Dell ranks among Work Ethic's largest clients, but Erlandson has done some work with administrators at the Austin Independent School District, too. The firm works with several other Fortune 500 companies, as well as a range of startup firms.

One client has two huge business units headed by two peers who "barely communicate with each other," Ludeman said. Almost all communication goes between members of their teams, and everyone manages around them. The CEO, meanwhile, spends his energy making nice between them.

Ludeman declined to name the company, other than to say it was larger than Dell.

"I think this particular company could massively increase their profits if they would force these two guys to work together," Ludeman says. "But they're very concerned ... that if they apply pressure to make them work together that one or both of them will leave."

More than numbers

The same often goes for other companies, said James Fredrickson, a management professor at the University of Texas' McCombs School of Business. The stereotypical hard-charging, numbers-crunching approach does not always lead to success. As one moves up the corporate ladder, he said, personal and conceptual skills can become more important than technical business skills.

Former General Electric Co. CEO Jack Welch, ranked by many as one of the most influential business leaders ever, has said he always wondered why top executives spend so much time with number crunchers. He said he always preferred the human resources people.

"He decided early on that he could make his biggest contribution on the people side," Fredrickson said.

Dell has pushed its human touch beyond its executive suite, said Roger Kay, president at Endpoint Technologies Inc. For example, profiles of Rollins mention his skills with a classical violin as well as his acumen with supply-chain logistics.

"They're beginning to portray him as the smooth, cold logistics expert," Kay said, "but also as a guy who likes to play violin, has a family -- in a human context."

Worth Ethic works in the opposite direction, taking more human aspects of management and putting them into hard data for results-oriented executives. The firm relies heavily on charts and figures to show where executives can improve.

"She was talking my language," said Ben Bentzin, a former marketing executive at Dell and now head of the Austin group organizing next May's World Congress on Information Technology.

That's especially important in an environment loaded with a talented group of managers. Business was booming in the late-1990s, Bentzin said, and it would have been easy for them to say they didn't need to deal with the touchy-feely stuff.

"There was strong support from Michael Dell, (former vice chairman) Mort Topfer and Kevin Rollins," Bentzin said. "They made it clear this was an area on which we were going to focus, because in the long term it was vital to the strength of the company."

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