What to Do When Personal Style Impedes Success

When a CMO or even CEO is done in, often it's simply by a lack of business acumen that eventually catches up with them. Others have fallen to great hubris, including individuals such as former Tyco CEO Dennis Kozlowski. And then there's a gray area between those two where still other leaders fail. Call it the realm of bad personal style: an arena where the players flout mores, if not always the law, and demonstrate gross interpersonal, if not always professional, incompetence. Lately, the ranks of those who have vanished into this career twilight zone include Julie Roehm, the fired Wal-Mart CMO; Steve Heyer, whose personal style gave him leave both from Coca-Cola and as CEO of Starwood Hotels; Harry Stonecipher, whose office amorism cost him his job as CEO of Boeing; David Edmondson, who had fudged his resume and, so, got booted as CEO of Radio Shack; and Robert Nardelli, whose imperious ways -- and compensation to match -- created a cloud of opprobrium that forced him out of Home Depot (before he recently landed as CEO of Chrysler). "The people most susceptible to this kind of failing are those in marketing and those who've been asked to come in and shake up the status quo," said Bob Eichinger, CEO of Lominger International, a unit of the executive-search firm Korn Ferry. "They're promoted into their jobs for their business smarts and they fail because of weaknesses in their people smarts." Jeffrey Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean for executive programs at the Yale School of Management whose latest book is "Firing Back: How Great Leaders Rebound After Career Disasters," said such blow-ups are hardly a surprise "in a highly fluid labor market where individual top-star executives have become brands in themselves. The benefits are real but so are the risks, to the companies and to those executives." How can you make sure you don't fall into the trap that has been exposed by "branded" executives who got too big for their own breeches? A good upbringing can help. Meantime, some pointers: