CEO Skills and Building a Winning Executive Team | Brent Saunders

It's about the team around you, right? And the bigger the organization or the number of people you're managing, it's about the layers of great people.

Mhm.

Never. If you don't start with A players around you, and you make one compromise, it exponentially reverberates through the organization, right? And so, you really have to be careful about the team that's around you. So, for example, when I came to Bausch and Lomb, I guess it was 18 months ago or thereabouts, I looked at the team that was there, and really great people, but I also knew that my timeline was more accelerated than perhaps a traditional new CEO coming in. It was a turnaround. And I felt like we needed to move very quickly to get back into the business of eye care, right? We're an eye care company. I don't quote me on the number, I think I had 11 direct reports. I replaced nine of the people within the first 3 months.

And not necessarily because the other ones weren't good. I didn't have time to get to know them. I didn't have the year to figure out people you could trust. I needed guarantees that the next level were going to be A players. And then I needed to make sure that their teams under them were A players, and really spend a lot of time thinking about that, working on that, and putting that into place. And then continuing to really encourage people to think about hiring as the most important decisions you make as a leader or as a manager. I always say, if we're going to go buy a capital equipment, we need to go buy something. We have all sorts of forms and business cases and we're going to look at ROI. If we want to buy a business or product, we'll do exhaustive analysis. But we go hire somebody, it's just like, okay, we interviewed them, let's hire them. Doesn't make sense to me. That person is more important than any capital equipment we're going to buy or any small business or product we're going to buy. That person will stay for several years. Fully loaded costs are pretty high. And then they're going to hire seven or eight other people that are going to either infect us with energy or absorb our energy, right? Good point. And so, it's the fruit from a poisonous tree or the apple that makes everybody happy, right? It's one or the other. And so, I think PWC taught me the value of people. It's almost a religion to me, right? But you have to have great people. Don't compromise.

So, you know, I think for PWC taught me the value of people. It's almost a religion to me, right? That but you have to have great people. Don't compromise. I know this is hard to oversimplify, but like in 2020 hindsight, so few people become CEOs of public companies, let alone Fortune 500 companies. What would you say were those couple like trajectory-defining moments for you that allowed you to get to that level?