Devoted to Managers and those that seek to improve their management skills

The departure of Home Depot (HD) CEO Robert Nardelli, offers some opportunities to look at his management style and how it brought him to this place.

It's interesting to note that the job he performed was in reality well done. The purpose that Home Depot hired him for was largely realized. But Nardelli had a management style that evidently brought him to the position of leaving rather than change.

"We have mixed feelings about his tenure at Home Depot," Merrill Lynch analyst Danielle Fox said in a research note. "He accomplished much of what he was brought in to do but was divisive."

"The thing I've been worried about the most at Home Depot was that Bob Nardelli was such a driven CEO," said Raymond James analyst Budd Bugatch. "That's a good thing, in most cases, but sometimes you go overboard. Bob probably did. He was so driven that he essentially wore people out."

Let's look at the comments of these two analysts and its connection to management style. First of all, divisiveness. Evidently Nardelli had an autocratic style, one that is very difficult to get away with in the current business climate. This was one source of the divisive nature of Nardelli's tenure at the company.

I remember when Jack Welch talked about why he didn't choose Nardelli as his replacement, he mentioned that it was a gut feeling that he had, and that Immelt was his man to head General Electric (GE). He also mentioned how Nardelli would always be tremendously aggressive in pursuing him on what he could do and how he could do it better. It was one of the reasons that Nardelli went so far up in GE.

The problem is that he probably felt that this was how everyone should be in a company, which isn't realistic anymore. This is probably a major connection to his being labeled as divisive.

It's also connected to his being driven so much that he wore people out. I've heard of this across many different companies concerning specific leaders. For whatever reason, some people have this tremendous need to prove themselves that it can become self-destructive. That also seems the case here.

For example when Nardelli was overseeing an annual shareholder meeting, he wouldn't even review the performance of the company with shareholders, and put strict limits on the time alloted to shareholders questions, some of which he even refused to answer. This speaks to me of someone that takes themselves far too seriously.

He seemed to try too hard to prove himself right, and others, including Jack Welch wrong, for not elevating him to head of Ge. It seems that Welch's gut feeling through the years of interacting with Nardelli were right. Nardelli, through his actions and attitude, made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.

And this doesn't even include the enormous severance package worth over $200 million.