Under Armour’s CEO mess goes far beyond gender
Founder Kevin Plank has now replaced three CEOs in less than two years. It is and isn't about the glass cliff.
Under Armour’s founder forced out his latest CEO this week.
I can write that with confidence, even though the sportswear company and its executives are carefully avoiding the word “fired.” Everyone involved has been silent on the specifics of why and how Stephanie Linnartz is abruptly leaving the CEO job she just started.
But the known facts are these: Kevin Plank founded Under Armour in 1996, and built it into a success that he couldn’t maintain. By 2020, his business was struggling and Plank’s public scandals made it prudent for him to stop being CEO, at least in name—starting a revolving door of chief executives that has now spit out three of them in less than two years.
Plank, you see, still owns 65% of Under Armour’s voting shares. When he stopped being CEO, he stayed very much in power. (As the grandiosity of his “executive chairman” title indicates.) So whether she jumped or was pushed, Linnartz wouldn’t be leaving if Plank wanted her to stay.
Her swift departure was still shocking. Under Armour hired Linnartz, a widely-respected executive who almost became CEO of Marriott International, to great fanfare a year ago. She soon laid out a three-year turnaround strategy to fix Under Armour’s slumping growth, its terrible share price, and its faded brand reputation as, I summarized in October, “something that teenage boys’ moms buy for them, on sale, at Kohl’s.”
Linnartz thought she knew what she was getting into. I sat down with her in August, for her first—and now only—in-depth profile as Under Armour’s CEO; and while she didn’t dwell on all the challenges she faced, she was willing to acknowledge them. “I believe in taking calculated risks,” she told me, in a quote that Fortune put into the digital headline of my article.
I still had doubts. Plank wouldn’t even pick up the phone to give me a 15-minute interview talking up this new CEO he had hired, the softest of softball topics. I didn’t want my doubts to be vindicated—and I still gasped on Wednesday, when I saw how quickly they had been—but re-reading it this week, my October article felt prescient:
Recent years have given us several examples of ambitious, experienced executives—often women—who take on a CEO job that involves working for a predecessor or founder, and trying to keep him happy while fixing some of the problems he created.
…Everyone has a boss to keep happy—even ridiculously well-compensated CEOs—and the vagaries of working for the guy you’re supposedly replacing aren’t always gendered. But it’s striking how many ambitious women, still, have to take such risks in order to get a shot at the top spot in corporate America, where women account for barely 10% of Fortune 500 CEOs. The career choices made by [former Walgreens CEO Roz] Brewer, [current X CEO Linda] Yaccarino, and potentially Linnartz also raise questions about how much executives still have to navigate the “glass cliff,” the data-backed phenomenon in which women have to accept riskier opportunities in order to advance.
Which brings me to the nuances of Lady Business. Linnartz’s gender isn’t the main headline here, but it’s also not not a factor. Because Plank’s decision to get rid of his latest CEO can reflect many things at once, including:
The repeat behavior of a founder who couldn’t fix the problems he created, but who also can’t bear to let anyone else really try.
The extra challenges faced by an incoming CEO who’s had a long and successful career, but who was new to both Under Armour and to the retail industry—meaning she inevitably would be seen as an outsider, and would have to work even harder to win over skeptics. Which feeds into:
The extra, extra challenges faced by any ambitious woman who wants to run something, but who gets offered so many fewer opportunities to do so—meaning that she often has to jump companies or industries or go to work for a notoriously controlling founder or otherwise take a riskier job to get ahead.
This last phenomenon is widely known as the “glass cliff,” and it’s very real: Women CEOs really do have shorter tenures than men, data shows, and they really do have to take worse jobs just to become CEOs in the first place.
Yet a lot of people (and not exclusively men) get upset when you point this out. As some of the comments I got on my social-media posts about Under Armour this week complained: Why do we have to make everything about gender, anyway?
I would argue that Under Armour’s ongoing CEO mess isn’t primarily about gender, actually. Before Linnartz, Plank appointed and then ousted CEO Patrik Frisk, a longtime Under Armour insider and a veteran retailer who also possesses a Y chromosome. Then Plank replaced Frisk with interim CEO Colin Browne, also a company man, who lost out on the “permanent” job to Linnartz. Now Plank is taking back the CEO job for himself, which should at least make things simpler for everyone who works for him.
But gender is unavoidable in any story about women leaders, even if we wish it weren’t. There are still so few women, and especially women of color, in positions of power. When the available opportunities are so scarce, every individual woman’s rise and fall inevitably takes on larger resonance.
And in addition to all of her business qualifications, Linnartz’s gender was an obvious part of Under Armour’s media strategy when she was hired. How could it not be? Even ignoring those old headlines about Plank’s company-funded trips to strip clubs, Under Armour has never been able to sell many clothes or shoes for women: Female-focused gear is less than 25% of its sales. A founder’s toxic-bro exploits might be just a PR nuisance, but his inability to sell stuff to half of the population is a serious business problem.
(Plank and Linnartz in happier times, just 10 months ago. From Plank’s Instagram.)
Linnartz will be just fine, financially: Her exit package promises a $10 million payout, as long as she signs a severance agreement that presumably includes an iron-clad non-disparagement clause. Hopefully her career will move on quickly, too. The stock market, at least, seems to be on her side: Under Armour’s shares plunged almost 15% this week, after it announced Linnartz’s departure, and multiple Wall Street analysts downgraded its stock.
Maybe Plank will turn it all around. Maybe what Under Armour really needs is the return of a founder whose “experience of not being a CEO has taught me more about what it truly means to be a CEO,” as he wrote to employees this week.
And maybe, someday, Plank can pull his company back from the many cliffs—including but certainly not limited to that glass one—that he pushed it onto in the first place.