When a CEO Loses His Voice and Finds a Company (TPL Insights #327)
By Rob Andrews
There is a story circulating in leadership circles right now about Kevin Hancock, the seventh-generation chief executive of Hancock Lumber. A recent piece in Chief Executive by C.J. Prince walks through what happened to him during the 2010 housing collapse. Hancock developed a neurological condition called spasmodic dysphonia that took most of his speaking voice. Unable to give directives the way he always had, he started doing something different. When someone brought him a problem, he would take a breath and ask what they thought the company should do. Then he would agree and let them go execute.
The 160-year-old company went on to earn more profit between 2012 and 2020 than it had in the prior 163 years combined. Employee engagement settled into the high eighties on a measurement scale where the national average sits closer to thirty-five percent. The lumber business in Maine produced one of the cleanest case studies of organizational health I have read in years.
It is a powerful story. It is also not an anomaly.
Why Hancock's Story Is Not an Anomaly
What happened at Hancock Lumber is the same pattern Allen Austin has been documenting inside its organizational health practice for more than two decades, and the same pattern Sisodia, Sheth, and Wolfe identified in the Firms of Endearment research. The companies in that study, the ones that genuinely put their people at the center of how the enterprise operates, outperformed the S&P 500 by 1,026 percent to 122 percent over a fifteen-year measurement window. Same outcome. Different vocabulary.
The mechanism is not mysterious. When the people closest to the work are trusted, equipped, and asked, they make better operating decisions than the people farthest from it. The chief executive who insists on being the smartest voice in every room is functionally taxing his own enterprise. Every directive that should have been a question is a small forfeiture of the intelligence the company already paid to have on the payroll.
A Practitioner's Note from Forty Years on the Floor
I spent the first half of my career inside high-volume retail. Running a supermarket at twenty-one, then leading the largest operating division of a national convenience store operator, then serving as Senior Vice President of Operations for a top-forty supermarket chain. Razor-thin margins. Hourly workforces. Thousands of operating decisions made every day at the store level.
I can tell you from experience that no executive, however gifted, knows enough to make those decisions from a corporate office. The cashier knows what the customer just said at the register. The receiver knows what the truck actually brought in. The night manager knows which piece of equipment is about to fail. A culture that gives those people permission to act on what they know is a culture that compounds quietly, year over year, in margin and in retention. A culture that does not is one that leaks performance every shift and never quite understands why.
Hancock's story is not really about losing a voice. It is about the moment a leader realizes the voice was in the way.
What Total Performance Leadership Calls This
Total Performance Leadership begins from a premise that is hard for many executives to sit with on the first hearing. Companies and their leaders get whatever they consistently prioritize. If humans are not thriving inside an organization, that is not bad luck, not a difficult quarter, and not a market problem. It is an output of where the organization has placed its attention.
The nine principles of Total Performance Leadership are an attempt to make that premise operational. Purpose comes before strategy. People come before customers, and the customer experience is what falls out the other side of a workforce that is genuinely engaged in real work. Leadership is judged by what the people on the receiving end of it become, not by the org chart of the person delivering it.
Hancock puts the same point in fewer words. Companies that prioritize human thriving produce humans who thrive at work. That sentence is doing a great deal of quiet work. It is the difference between a wellness program bolted onto a transactional culture and an enterprise built around the human beings who run it.
Who Actually Gets to Lead in This Model
There is a second thread in the Chief Executive piece worth pulling on. Hancock makes the point that leadership in a human-centered organization cannot always go to the best technical performer. That is true, and it is the same conclusion we reached through more than a decade of building the VantagePoint High-Potential Leader Assessment.
The twelve attributes inside VantagePoint sit in four clusters. Foundation. Judgment and Adaptability. Interpersonal Influence. Risk. None of them are about technical mastery. Technical mastery is the price of admission to be considered for the work. It is not the work. An enterprise that promotes only its best technical doers is buying a ceiling and putting a label on it that says development plan.
The leaders who scale an organization are the ones who can hold a real conversation with another human being about something other than performance numbers. That is a higher bar than most companies are honest about. It is also the bar.
The Catalyst Most Chief Executives Will Never Have
Most chief executives will not lose a voice to a neurological condition. Which means the catalyst that pushed Hancock toward shared leadership has to come from somewhere else. In my experience, it usually comes from one of three places. A market shock that exposes how brittle a top-down culture really was. A senior departure that reveals how concentrated the institutional knowledge had become inside one or two people. Or, less often and most powerfully, a leader who chooses the work before anything in the operating environment forces it.
The data is sitting there for any executive willing to look. Engagement numbers. Retention curves. The gap between what frontline people would say in a confidential conversation and what gets reported in the operating review. The signal is rarely subtle. The willingness to act on it is what separates the companies that compound over decades from the ones that merely persist.
Hancock had to lose his voice to find his company. The good news for the rest of us is that the path he stumbled onto is now well lit. The only question is whether we walk it on our own terms or wait for something to make us.
Warmest,
Rob Andrews
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Affiliate Faculty, McCombs Center for Leadership, Ed.D. Candidate, 2025 Cohort
The University of Texas at Austin
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