Successful leadership requires balancing strategic decision-making with authentic relationship-building, as demonstrated through one executive's journey from Marine Corps officer to CEO.

In this episode of From the Top, host Chad Hesters connects with Laurent "LT" Therivel, former CEO of UScellular, to explore his diverse career path spanning military service, consulting, telecommunications, and corporate leadership. Their conversation unveils valuable insights about career development, leadership philosophy, and maintaining work-life balance in demanding executive roles.

About the Guest(s):

Laurent "LT" Therivel is a seasoned executive leader and former CEO of UScellular, where he successfully led the company's strategic transition and eventual sale to T-Mobile. With a distinguished career spanning military service as a Marine Corps officer, strategic consulting at Bain & Company, and various leadership roles at AT&T including CEO of AT&T Mexico, LT brings unique insights into organizational transformation and strategic leadership. His career highlights include turning around AT&T Mexico's $3 billion operation from negative EBITDA to profitability and maintaining strong employee engagement during UScellular's transition period. In this episode, LT shares valuable perspectives on modern leadership challenges, balancing stakeholder interests, and maintaining work-life equilibrium while pursuing executive ambitions, making this conversation essential for C-suite leaders navigating complex organizational transformations and strategic decisions.

If you enjoyed this episode, make sure to subscribe, rate, and review it on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and YouTube Podcasts. Instructions on how to do this are here.

Episode Highlights:

Laurent Therivel shares the Marine Corps principle of "people lead first," emphasizing that effective leadership starts with establishing clear mission objectives and taking care of your team. Senior executives often struggle with balancing strategic direction while empowering their teams to execute. The key is to establish clear organizational intent and goals, then focus on removing obstacles rather than micromanaging execution. Leaders should provide the "commander's intent" - a clear vision of what success looks like - then step back and let their teams determine how to achieve it. This approach, demonstrated during Therivel's turnaround of AT&T Mexico, resulted in transforming a $300M EBITDA loss into profitability by empowering teams while maintaining strategic clarity.

Therivel recounts a pivotal failure early in his career where achieving business objectives without building consensus led to his dismissal as COO of a startup. This highlights a common challenge for results-driven executives who prioritize outcomes over organizational buy-in. Rather than imposing changes unilaterally, leaders must invest time sharing ideas, gathering input, and building support across the organization. The approach not only leads to better decisions through diverse perspectives but creates stronger engagement and implementation. This lesson proved crucial in Therivel's later roles, particularly during UScellular's two-and-a-half-year acquisition process, where strong cultural alignment maintained team engagement even after the deal announcement.

In today's environment, business leaders face unprecedented expectations beyond traditional corporate metrics, requiring a delicate balance of stakeholder interests. Leaders must now address social issues and ESG concerns while maintaining business performance, often without direct authority over these broader challenges. The key is adopting a balanced, transparent approach that considers all stakeholder perspectives when making and communicating decisions. For executives, this means clearly articulating how decisions impact shareholders, customers, and employees while maintaining strategic focus. The success of this approach was demonstrated at UScellular, where clear stakeholder communication maintained strong engagement through major organizational changes.

Therivel emphasizes the critical importance of proactive family communication in managing career progression, particularly regarding geographical mobility and work-life balance. Leaders often fail by treating family discussions as afterthoughts rather than strategic priorities requiring advance planning and clear parameters. Early alignment on career flexibility, including geographic moves and time commitments, allows executives to confidently pursue opportunities without creating family tension. The approach involves establishing clear timeframes and boundaries, exemplified by Therivel's agreement with his wife about mobility until their daughters reached high school. This strategic alignment enables leaders to make decisive career moves while maintaining strong family relationships.

"Find opportunities that can leverage your strengths, be candid about your weaknesses, and ideally find people that are amazing at it and can fill those gaps in for you." - Laurent Therivel

"People look to business leaders as not just, hey, I want a good place to work and deliver for the shareholders. There's expectations around ethical leadership, moral leadership, and being a great place to work." - Laurent Therivel

"If you have a strong culture and if you have a mission oriented culture and you reinforce that and people truly believe in what it is that they're doing, they'll see it through with you." - Laurent Therivel

"When you actively dislike you, it's a problem. And I was lucky in that I learned that lesson when I was in my thirties, and so I had time to recover." - Laurent Therivel

"The two key words in managing and operating a business today, one is complexity and the other one is balance." - Laurent Therivel

"When you decide to take a social stance or when you decide to lean in to a social issue, if you communicate and explain it to your team in a way that takes all of the stakeholders into account and explains the balancing act that you're trying to strike, people will give you the benefit of the doubt." - Laurent Therivel

"The more flexible you can be, the more chances you have in front of you, the more opportunities you have to advance your career." - Laurent Therivel

"Every other move was pretty deliberate, pretty structured, but, no, I did not have the twenty year plan or the thirty year plan that I've just crisply executed against." - Laurent Therivel

"You end up making better decisions than you would on your own because you have a whole bunch of people providing thoughts and providing guidance." - Laurent Therivel

"The communication has to happen so far in advance. What kind of life are we trying to build together? What are the trade offs?" - Laurent Therivel

LinkedIn Profiles:

Company Websites:

Notable Organizations Mentioned: