When a CEO Loses His Voice and Finds a Company (TPL Insights #328)
By Rob Andrews
Don Gates ran a produce department in Los Angeles for ten straight years.
Ten years. Same aisle. Same crates of lettuce. Nobody moved him. Produce guys don't get succession plans. They get produce.
He didn't have a college degree. He wasn't smooth in a room. He wasn't the guy who lit up when a district manager walked through. He was just quietly the best produce manager in the division, year after year, and the system looked right past him.
Here's what finally got Don out of produce. Not a talent review. Not a succession plan. One person. His produce merchandiser noticed what everyone else had missed and put his name forward to run a store.
That's the whole mechanism. One person paying attention. Not a framework. Not a twelve-point rubric. One person.
Once somebody gave him a shot, Don turned around store after store, took over three of them, then two districts, still in L.A. In 1970, Safeway pulled him out of California and sent him to Houston as retail operations manager for the entire division. That same year, sixteen years old, I joined Safeway in Houston and ended up working for him. By 1976 I was a store manager in Don Gates' division. Eight years under that man taught me more about leadership than anything I've picked up since, including in a doctoral program, and I say that as a man currently paying tuition to relearn it.
Once he got to Houston, Don built the division from three stores to ninety, which gave Safeway 25 percent of the Houston grocery market, a number no single chain in that city has matched since. He went on to run five divisions as division president over roughly twenty years. He set company records for same-store sales, return on investment, and operating profit. He developed and exported more senior leaders than anyone in Safeway's history.
And he almost didn't make it. Not because he lacked the ability. Because the organization wasn't built to see people like him. The system was fine at rewarding results once someone finally noticed you were producing them. It was terrible at noticing.
Eleven Ways to Miss Your Best People
I've spent thirty years running an executive search, coaching, and culture-shaping firm, and more recently I've been buried in doctoral research at UT Austin trying to figure out why this keeps happening. Short answer, it's not one big villain lurking in HR. It's eleven smaller ones, working quietly in the background of every promotion decision your company makes. Affinity bias, confirmation bias, disability bias, gender bias, racial bias, age bias, the halo effect, cultural bias, visual bias, status quo bias, and visibility bias. Eleven ways a company full of decent, well-meaning people can still manage to overlook its best ones. Bias, it turns out, does not require a villain. It just requires a Tuesday.
Two of them do the most damage. Visibility bias, meaning if I don't see you doing something impressive in a meeting, I assume you're not capable of it. And status quo bias, meaning the next leader I promote tends to look a lot like the last one. Put those two together and you get what I call the twin gravity wells. They pull every promotion decision back toward the same type of person, over and over, no matter how many values statements are laminated in the lobby.
The Wrong People Keep Getting Promoted
Here's the part that should bother a CEO more than it usually does. The people your system is best at spotting are often the wrong ones to promote. Most selection processes reward exactly what confident, self-promoting, image-managing people are good at. Interview well, speak up first, work the room. Those traits correlate with narcissism more than they correlate with leadership ability, which is an awkward thing to discover about your own promotion committee. I've watched this movie before. Bob Nardelli ran Home Depot into a culture problem before the board finally moved him out in 2007. Al Dunlap did something similar at Sunbeam. Lee Iacocca, brilliant early on, eventually ran into the same pattern at Chrysler. Charisma gets a person through the interview. It does not run the company afterward. Nobody has ever fixed a supply chain with a firm handshake.
Meanwhile the quiet ones stay in produce.
I saw this up close again in 1988, running the largest division for National Convenience Stores. We had a look back then. Hermes ties, custom shirts, expensive suits, the whole costume, like the dress code had been written by a Dallas car dealership. Two men on my team didn't fit it. Both introverts. Invisible to the normal promotion process because they weren't performing leadership the way the culture expected leadership to look. I promoted them anyway. One became our SVP of Stores. The other became the most successful division president in the company's 36-year history.
Same story as Don Gates. Different decade. Different produce aisles. Same blind spot, wearing a nicer suit.
The Numbers Behind It
The numbers on this are not small. My own research, drawn from more than 5,100 failed executive placements going back to 1994, tells a consistent story. Only about 3 percent of organizations have an effective way to identify high-potential leaders. Roughly 90 percent of executives admit they've personally watched a quiet, capable leader get passed over. About 70 percent say self-promotion, not performance, is what actually drives who gets promoted. Gallup's 2026 State of the Global Workplace report puts a price tag on what follows. Disengagement is now costing the world economy $10 trillion a year in lost productivity, roughly 9 percent of global GDP. That is not a rounding error. That is a number with "trillion" attached to it, sitting in plain sight, the same way Don Gates was.
For my doctoral work I've been interviewing senior leaders across industries, looking for the rare organization that actually solves this instead of just talking about it in a values deck. In a longitudinal study where I've now spoken to well over 150 senior executives, only seven have described an organization that reliably identifies high-potential people who don't fit the conventional picture of a leader, the ones who would otherwise get passed over. Seven. Out of a hundred and fifty. Save yourself the arithmetic. That is not a good number.
My study is seven months from finished, but the seven who qualify are starting to sound like they went to the same church. Every one of them is unusually clear about purpose, mission, vision, values, and desired behaviors. One calls these critical success factors. Another calls them behaviors for success. Different vocabulary, same instinct. And every one of them built an environment where anyone in the company who aspired to lead actually got a shot at proving it, not just the ones who were good at getting noticed. Full findings are still months out. Consider this the trailer, not the movie.
Go Find Your Produce Department
Here's my ask, and it's not complicated. Go find your produce department. Every company has one. Somewhere in your organization right now is a person who has been excellent, consistently, quietly, for years, and nobody has noticed because they don't perform leadership the way your culture expects it to be performed. They didn't get the stretch assignment. They didn't get invited into the room where visibility happens. They just did the work, week after week, and waited.
Don Gates got lucky. One person happened to pay attention.
Your company should not be running its succession plan on luck.
Rob Andrews
Chairman & Chief Executive Officer
Celebrating 30 years of Executive Search, Executive Coaching & Culture Shaping Excellence
Direct: 713.489.9724/ Mobile: 713.301.6130
1800 St. James Place, Suite 510, Houston, TX, 77056
Rob Andrews founded Allen Austin in 1996 and is a former top performing operator with P&L responsibility for 516 locations, $2.4 billion in revenue, and 10,600 employees. He serves as Affiliate Faculty in Leadership and Ethics at the McCombs School of Business at UT Austin and is completing an Executive Ed.D. in the College of Education. Over the past 30 years, he has developed five proprietary frameworks, including FORESIGHT (his retained search process), Total Performance Leadership, VantagePoint (a 12-attribute high-potential assessment), Vanguard Leadership Dynamics, and the Next Gen Organizational Health Index. He is the author of two books, High Performance Human Capital Leadership and Organizational Health: The Ultimate Competitive Advantage. He has advised boards and C-suites across multiple industries throughout his career.
