The New CEO

CHAPTER 8Leading Your Top Team

“Lay out the ground rules early. If you don't, you're playing a game where no-one knows the rules.”

—Marc Bitzer, CEO of Whirlpool

Carol Tomé hadn't been searching for a new job when she stepped down as CFO at Home Depot after 18 years in the role. But when the CEO position became vacant at the global shipping company UPS, it had felt like a “straightforward choice”—not least because she'd sat on its board since 2003.

“I knew that UPS was an amazing organization with a powerful brand, a culture and values perfectly aligned with my own, operations in more than 220 countries and territories, and roughly half a million talented employees whom I hoped to inspire around a shared purpose,” she wrote in the Harvard Business Review. “Because the company's stock had been flat for six years, there was also an opportunity to create value for shareholders. And, frankly, my husband was keen to get me out of the house and working again.”¹

Yet the decision turned out to be a little less straightforward than planned, with Carol accepting the role in March 2020, just at the point when Covid-19 reached the shores of Europe, Africa, North America, and South America, and was on the cusp of becoming a global pandemic.

When I met Carol three years later, she had successfully steadied the ship and steered it through to the other side. “It was a crazy time for everybody,” she recalled. “It was chaos. People were running down the halls. And I was like, ‘What is this?’” ...