From the C Suite with Janney’s Timothy Scheve: Patience really is a virtue

The young Timothy Scheve dreamed of being an architect, a profession that blended science with more creative passions. Trouble is, even after earning a college degree in the subject, he just wasn’t any good at it.
Plan B was business school, and that’s worked out great for Mr. Scheve, Janney Montgomery Scott’s chief executive and president since 2007.

Janney has been Mr. Scheve’s first time out as the top corporate executive, but he took many lessons away from his time as chief operating officer at Legg Mason, working under chairman Raymond A. “Chip” Mason. One of those lessons: Senior leaders can’t be friends with anyone.

He’s also worked with a professional coach to make sure he doesn’t come across too direct or overpowering, which, at six feet seven inches tall, can be a challenge.

Mr. Scheve, 57, does his best thinking during his hour-long morning runs around Philadelphia, where the regional brokerage is headquartered. Janney has about 740 advisers who manage a total of $67 billion in assets. They should all be warned: Don’t CC Mr. Scheve on an email if you expect him to read it.

Liz Skinner: How would you describe your leadership style?
Tim Scheve: It’s transparent and collaborative, and, for me, integrity is incredibly important. If you think about decision making, there are a lot of things that you can ignore and they’ll solve themselves. A lot of time with leadership, there’s a rush to action. Patience is a really important attribute; it’s one I learned from Chip Mason. Patience was one of his great attributes, which is sort of unique for an entrepreneur. In a meeting with my staff, I’ll always be the last to speak because if I come in and say I want the carpet to be blue, then for the most part I’ve ended the dialogue. I have learned that I have to hold back and let the dialogue develop.
LS: You have a very soothing, relaxed manner. Is that your natural way?
WATCHING OTHERS
TS: It’s something I’ve worked on watching others. When you are as big and tall as I am, you can be intimidating. I like to have meetings sitting down because I’m always going to be the tallest in the room. I like to be more soft-spoken and not as direct because I want to make sure people feel comfortable.
LS: Did you have any mentors who influenced how you lead today?
TS: I had three terrific mentors. When I first got out of graduate school I was in consulting for Price Waterhouse International in Washington, D.C., and there was a consultant named Ann Hopkins. One of her rules was that you learn a lot more by listening. She also was denied a partnership in the early 1980s even though she had won the most business for several years in a row. She sued them and it’s the only sexual discrimination case that went all the way to the Supreme Court. What it taught me is you have to treat people right and you have to be fair.
Then the first guy I worked for at Legg Mason was Jack Curley, the chief operating officer of Legg. He always had time for you and he listened and he cared. When Jack retired, I became COO and worked for Chip Mason. He was the most charming man you would ever meet and was friendly to everyone. But when you took a senior leadership role at Legg Mason he would come into your office and tell you that you could no longer be friends with anyone. He said you have to treat everyone the same, whether they are your best friend, the most important producer in the firm, or whether they are the person who empties the garbage.
LS: Before getting your bachelor’s and master’s degrees in business from Brown University, you earned a B.A. in architecture. What happened with that pursuit?
TS: I wanted to be an architect. Everyone in my family were engineers, physicists, very science oriented, so I decided I wanted to be an architect because it’s creative and yet still kind of science-like. I had never actually met an architect in my life. I went to Catholic University [which gave him a full scholarship] and I really liked all the people in the architecture program. But I realized I had absolutely no talent. The only thing I was good at was building science. Everything I designed looked like a shoe box, albeit very well built. Also, architects don’t do anything until the last minute, which is so not me. I came up with Plan B: Go to Brown University. Brown really likes people with different backgrounds, so they liked that I was an architect who really wanted to be a business guy.
LS: What kind of culture are you trying to foster at Janney Montgomery Scott?
FOCUS ON CLIENTS
TS: We focus on clients; they have to be the center of everything we do. If our client interest is second to none then integrity comes naturally. Integrity is so incredibly important in our business, and it’s really important for a midsized firm. Big firms can take lots of hits on their integrity, smaller firms really can’t. People want to work at Goldman Sachs, they want to work at Morgan Stanley, but we have to sell ourselves a little harder. It’s really about values, about how we treat each other. One of the great things about being a CEO is you get to choose the people you work with. I want to build a culture where no one feels like there are difficult personalities to contend with.
LS: What are some things you don’t tolerate?
TS: Dishonesty. The quickest way to end your career at Janney is to do something dishonest. Bad behavior is the second. Bad behavior to colleagues or to your clients. In this business, you have a lot of quirky personalities, you have a lot of Type A personalities who are not naturally team players.
LS: How much do you work as CEO?
TS: When you become a senior manager you are making a lifestyle choice. It’s no longer a career choice. You are constantly thinking about the business. You do a little bit of work on the weekend, your days are long, you work a bit in the evening, but it’s all kind of fun.
LS: Let’s talk about hiring. What qualities do you look for in a potential hire?
HIRING IS HARD
TS: Hiring is hard. They have to have the requisite skill set, or if they don’t, they have to have a unique skill set and a pattern of success. You also want to make sure they are resilient. We get knocked down a lot in life. I ask them about times when things didn’t go as planned for them and how they adjusted to that. You don’t want someone who has had unqualified success, because things are going to happen and you want to know how people will react to it. It’s also about how they treat people out of the office. How do they treat a waiter? When a homeless person comes up to them in the city, how do they react? It’s observing how they react and treat people.
LS: Was there a time when you had to be resilient?
TS: I started in this job in 2007 and then we had the financial crisis. That was a scary time. I knew we were fine and I knew our parent company [Penn Mutual Life Insurance Co.] was fine. But you’re watching and every Sunday night we were talking about what message were we going to put out to our people about what’s happening. That was about resiliency. When things are going really well as a leader you have to ask the tough questions and make people uncomfortable. You want to make sure you’re looking around the corner. When things are going really bad, you have to be the positive message. Not a Pollyannaish message, but strength and stability. It’s about focus and keeping people grounded on what they can control as opposed to worrying about what they can’t control.
LS: What kind of feedback have you received over the years about the way you manage?
TS: Before I took this role I hired a coach to help me with the transition because I had spent 24 years at Legg Mason. She helped me go through and figure out my de-railers. For one, she said I don’t celebrate, I move on. So I now focus on celebrating victories, communicating victories. It is an issue because I can be very direct, but I’m also soft-spoken. It’s making sure that people don’t perceive that I am a soft-spoken bully just because I am direct. It comes back to being the last to speak and letting people have their say.
LS: What advice would you give to a COO who hopes to become a CEO?
TS: It’s about understanding how you grow the business. The one thing you learn in CEO school is that your expenses are going to grow by 3% to 4% no matter how hard you try. Rents are going to go up, salaries are going to go up, benefit costs are going to go up. So you have to grow your revenue by a multiple of that. You have to be innovative in how you grow that multiple and you have to be comfortable doing acquisitions, hiring talent and taking risks and trying new things.
LS: Let’s talk about time management. Do you do anything unusual?
AGAINST LONG MEETINGS
TS: It annoys a lot of people, but I almost never read emails that I am cc’d on. It tends to mean someone wants to infer that I’m involved, but it also might be something that I don’t need to be involved in. Also, I don’t like long meetings. I’m very structured. I wake up and go running at 5:00 a.m. so I can be in here by 7:30 a.m. — and I do that everywhere that I am in the world. I go out a lot to entertain, but I tend not to stay late. By 9:00 p.m. I’m leaving, for one because nothing good ever happens after 9:00 p.m. anyway, and I don’t want to be part of it. It’s also carving out time to think; that’s where running helps. I run for an hour, so after you get the first mile or two down, you can start thinking about things and start clearing your head.

LS: How are you a different leader today than you were 15 or 20 years ago?
TS: I’m more relaxed, less needing to get into solving everything. Up until some point I could do almost anything myself. But at some point I realized that I have to depend on a lot of other people and my job really is to support those people.

LS: What’s your best career advice?
TS: Take every opportunity that’s thrust your way, even if you don’t think you’re qualified for it. The interesting thing is men tend to do that naturally, women don’t. Your boss wouldn’t be offering you this opportunity if your boss didn’t think you were qualified. Don’t say no to anything because early in your career, you really have nothing to lose.

The other piece of advice that I give to a lot of my friends now is make sure you stay relevant. Keep reading, and keep trying to do different things. It’s a challenge, but make sure you embrace change because it really is life giving.

Related Topics: Janney Montgomery Scott