Q&A . . . With Philip Sarnecki

PUBLISHED APRIL 2025

Q: More than halfway through the Baby Boomer retirement transition, do you see any changes in the way the newest generation of leaders is approaching their work and your approach to their development in general?

A: I’ve spent 20-plus years running businesses as the guy actively operating them, but I have also had plenty of help—a CFO, chief growth officer, president of the wealth company—but as we’ve grown, my role over time has changed pretty dramatically. In a sense, it’s gone from being a head coach to becoming an athletic director. AD. I’ve got my C-suite of people, but really, over the past six or seven years, I haven’t really “run” anything day-to-day. It’s been an interesting transition.  

Q: How has that transition affected your overall strategy and tactical approach to development?

A: I guess I’m kind of an old soul, a traditionalist. I don’t know that leadership development at its heart has changed a whole lot in the past 30 years in the business world; it’s how it gets delivered that has changed. There’s a lot more tech today, and younger executives are generally more collaborative. They’re also very tech-savvy, which is both good and not-so-good. Sometimes, to use a specific example, I’ll see people in, not an argument but certainly a lively discussion, taking place through email or another device, and I just want to say, “Will one of you please pick up the phone and have a conversation, or just walk down to the other office? This is not an email thing.” There are just certain issues that need to be addressed in person.

Q: So the mechanisms for delivering the development messaging are changing; what about trainee receptivity to guidance?

A: Oh, yes, it has. I’m not the only one seeing that. When I was getting started in business, one of my mentors was a fellow who had played in the NFL. He was a great leader, but he was very direct. Very direct. Call it old school, and you’d better have thick skin with him, but you knew it wasn’t personal.  I would say today that people are not as comfortable, generally speaking, with that kind of approach with such direct feedback. One of my favorite sayings is that confrontation need not be hostile. Think about the difference between direct and hostile. That’s what separates the great leaders from the bad or mediocre: the ability to handle conflict and challenging situations with the idea that this doesn’t have to be hostile. At the same time, we find, mostly with a lot of younger leaders, they’ll beat around the bush in those situations, they’ll struggle to give feedback in difficult conversations.

Q: How do you train to address that?

A: I’m a big believer that with leadership, it’s way more important to be respected than to be liked. It’s great if you’re liked, but it’s critical that you’re respected. I think a lot of people I deal with in the younger generation, there’s a sense of wanting to be buddy-buddy and liked. And that’s the conversation I have with them. I can tell you I’ve had a lot of situations through the years where I’d offer feedback that sometimes ticked people off, but in the end, they respected me for doing what I did. They didn’t like it in the moment, but ultimately, they respected the decisions that were being made. 

Q: Are you seeing any generational changes with the values—skill sets, work ethic, willingness to collaborate, communications acumen—in the youngest cohort of leadership candidates?

A: They are certainly a lot more casual. I say that as a guy who wore a suit and tie for 20 years. But seriously, there are some positives to that for sure, and collaboration is a very positive trend. Some of the tech and the communication around it is good, it’s efficient.

Q: Sounds like there’s a “but …” in there somewhere.

A: Well, it’s just that sometimes communication today can actually make building relationships more difficult. As a new guy in the business world—I started my first business when I was 19—we had no choice but to develop relationships face to face; we had no email, no Internet, no cell phones. We built relationships one-on-one or in small groups; we learned to communicate in those ways. Those are certainly some of the challenges we face today.

Q: Others, of note?

A: I’ll say there’s probably not a willingness to forgo a lot of the extracurriculars. In the world I grew up in, when I started out, I wasn’t playing in golf leagues or basketball every Wednesday night; I was working. I worked a lot of Saturdays or half-Saturdays, and Sunday was pretty much my only off day. Getting people to stick around after 5 p.m. or 6 is something now few and far between.

Q: So, are these the kinds of things that people today say they need to help them be better employees when they’re back on the clock?

A: Yes, it’s definitely a reordering of priorities, and probably, some of that is good. They’re not as willing, perhaps, to sacrifice certain things, and part of that is OK, part of it is healthy. At the same time, you have to understand where that’s going to limit you, too. Not sacrificing family time is probably good, but some of the golf or other things—if I needed to make sacrifices in my career, I was willing to make those.

Q: Back to your own approach to development—it has to be different for someone with fingers in so many pies, organizationally. How does being spread thinner change things for you?

A: Well, it’s about trust, 100 percent. I think great leadership starts—it doesn’t finish but starts—with finding and attracting the right leaders, to begin with. I can’t take somebody who isn’t a leader, who has no self-awareness or work ethic, who won’t lead by example, and turn them into an effective leader. I can’t take those and have them become leaders just because I’m some sort of magical leader myself—you have to start with those qualities. When you’re finding and attracting the right people, in a lot of ways, they will develop themselves, they will invest in that. What I have with me today are, first, high-quality leaders who are able to assess talent. They lead by example. They have that self-awareness and emotional intelligence. That’s a place where I see tons of people who could have become successful leaders, but without those two qualities, they fail or struggle. They don’t recognize the impact they have on other people.

Q: Regarding the diversity of companies in your sphere—does that present development challenges as well?

A: Well, we have over 1,000 employees across all companies; some of those are small spinoffs as a technical matter, LLCs that are part of LLCs, but 11 companies is how I define it. I spend the vast majority of my time with the C-suite people running those companies. At that level, you have to be willing to let people fail because that’s how they grow, how they develop. You have to be able to delegate, not abdicate. Hold them accountable for results; don’t manage the process; manage the results. That doesn’t mean you just hand them the keys and say, “Go get ’em.” That’s abdication. If you can get talented people to lead and surround them with other talent, give them the gift of high expectations, then you just have to help people along the way. It’s an art. Knowing when not to pull in the reins. I’m certainly not always right, but my experience has been that the more you are developing your leaders and working with them, the better decisions you make. Sometimes, I get to spend three days with somebody side by side; sometimes, I let them just do their thing. Knowing when to do either is key.

Q: Does that structure create any pitfalls? For example, trying to develop an emerging leader without mixing signals with the person they report to?

A: That’s exactly right. If I have an issue with someone who works under my chief compliance or growth officer, or the president of the wealth management office, in the old days, it was me going directly to that person, but now it’s working through that leader. They may have questions and may want me with them for conversations with their reports, but other times, I’m helping them walk through various scenarios and talk about how things need to play out, what you say, and how you say it. Or just role-play it. Other times, it’s just “here’s the issue” and leave it with them.

Q: For companies well below Fortune 500 scale, do you find value in cross-functional training for leadership teams?

A: We certainly try to do as much as possible. But our businesses run from a movie production company to wealth management to quick-lubes to our benefits company, so it’s a varied mix. Because of that, cross-training doesn’t always work. But we do have a number of people—my CFO, our chief information officer, and our chief investment officer, a former investment banker—who work across all the businesses, so they help the people who run those companies.

Q: In terms of company culture and continuity, how does a top executive assess the balance needed between in-house development and the numbers/rates of leadership figures that should be brought in from outside?

A: All of our companies have over $100 million in revenues, so smaller ones may look at us and think we’re really big, but to a Fortune 500, they’d say we’re not big at all. I think it’s both an art and a science to nurture that culture. You need to do both well. When we bring someone in, we have multipurpose assessments and use outside coaches. One thing we do with leadership is a 360-degree review to help self-awareness. We want people to give anonymous feedback on how they experience leadership figures, and how you word that is very important. How have you experienced a particular leader in the past year, what were the positives and what were the opportunities, the deltas, where the experience did not go as well. How you phrase that matters, because there is no one right or wrong answer. But those can be hard, though. I’ve had 360s done on me, and while they are not necessarily painful, they do provide a phenomenal growth opportunity.

Q: Any particular challenges that emerging leaders today face that veteran executives might not have had to confront during their own rise to the C-suite?

A: Some of the challenges will always be the same, such as the human challenge. What was it Seinfeld says: Life would be easy if not for the people. That was the same 100 years ago, 30 years ago, and will be the same 30 years from now. There will be new issues around tech and AI as that continues to advance. Then, during COVID, the workplace changed dramatically, with more remote work at a lot of companies. That has dramatically reversed itself in the past 18 to 24 months, but companies are realizing that if you work in isolation, you lose the collaboration, new ideas, the human touch, and connection that’s so critically important to business success. That’s why we never, ever had people working from home on a mass scale. Occasionally a Friday, perhaps, but we always felt it was important to have people in the office. It’s hard to be a leader when there’s no one present.