My conversation with John LeBoutillier, who is the President & CEO of Unilever Canada, was very thought provoking. This interview has some really good tactical advice for people at all stages of their career.
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We talk about important leadership lessons, approaches to integrating yourself into a new organization after a career change, and his views on work-life balance. John got to the top by simply outworking everyone else, and he covers that story in-depth throughout this interview.
These are just a few of the highlights from our chat:
- He believes that he has an average intellect, but he compensates for this by outworking everyone else. He couldn’t talk until he was four years old and couldn’t read until he was in third grade. Growing up, people used to call him stupid and even his mom, at one point in time, thought he wasn’t smart enough to go to college. This created an internal drive to prove others wrong.
- John was hustling at a young age. He started mowing lawns and trimming hedges, then got into house painting in high school. John got so good at it that he was making $7,000 to $10,000 dollars in cash a summer. This was a lot of money back in the 80s. He stuck with that business every summer, which initially was a concern of his when graduating Harvard, as he was one of the few students who didn't have a "professional" internship. John eventually realized that this was an asset, as he was one of the few people who had experience managing a team and working with paying customers.
- He started his career off at Ogilvy which at the time was hiring some of the best talent in the industry. At the time, Ogilvy hired top talent from the best colleges. This was still the era where agencies were making 15% commissions which allowed them to develop top training programs to attract the best graduates.
- One of the most important lessons he learned in leadership was at Ogilvy. Early in his career, he messed up on a project, so his boss brought him to the client to explain the mistake. John thought that his boss was trying emphasize to him the mistake he made, but the real lesson was to show John that they always operate as a team and stand up for each other. In the meeting with the client, his boss explained the mistake as an overall Ogilvy error, never mentioning John as an excuse for what went wrong. It was clear that at Ogilvy, they never throw each other under the bus.
- One of the main drivers behind his professional success is the use of a career coach. He lucked out while at Kraft where his coach took him on while he was still a Director. Typically, his coach only worked with Presidents and CEOs. His coach is ruthless and rips him apart after every performance review he receives at work, all in the pursuit of making him a better leader.
- He enjoys turning around failing businesses, the ones that people tend to overlook and give up on. He did this with turning around Tang, Balance Bar and most recently Knorr.
- After 15 years, he moved to Unilever to accelerate his learning. He would get an opportunity to learn from a European-style company (Unilever's HQ is in the UK), and a chance to figure out how to integrate a new business, as Unilever was moving their Ice Cream business across the country from Green Bay, Wisconsin to New Jersey.
- When he moved over from Kraft to Unilever, he had to get use to a major culture change. Kraft was very aggressive and high adrenaline. Unilever was very collegial and people were very nice. He had to get over a period of disbelief because people were so nice. But as the saying goes, it’s not the organ that rejects the body, it’s the body that rejects the organ. It was important that he found a way to adapt.
- He moved to Canada because his boss told him that he would be of limited use at Unilever given that he had a lifetime of experience in just food; Unilever was primarily a personal care business. And so John was tasked with learning both parts of the business, while learning how to operate his own company.
- On advice he’d given to his 20 or 30 year old self, it would be that he could’ve gone away with only doing 70% of the things that he did. The things he would cut are worrying and having anxiety over stupid things that were out of his control such as “getting another promotion”. Instead he would just focus on the task at hand and trust the organization and people around him. The other things he would cut would be drilling down further than necessary on issues.