Archive for the ‘General Things about Quintessential Leadership’ Category

Quintessential Leader Subject Books for Sale

Posted: January 14, 2013 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership
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If you like what you’re reading here, then check out our store at The Quintessential Leader where you can purchase, for a nominal fee, eBooks about the components of trust and trustworthiness, examples of communicating vision, how to build teams using performance planning, evaluations, and reviews, styles of control that exemplify unquintessential leadership, and unquintessential leadership pitfalls we all need to avoid.

These eBooks are worth far more in experience and the time taken to put them together than they are priced at. You, as a quintessential leader, can’t afford the cost of not having the information they contain.

You have a choice. Save a few dollars and fail to be a quintessential leader, or spend a few dollars and learn what are some of the things quintessential leaders look like – and don’t look like – and what some of the things quintessential leaders do and are – and don’t do and aren’t. This is an investment in yourself and your team.

I don’t have all the answers either. I am learning just like you. But as I learn, I share my knowledge and my experience. That’s how I become a more quintessential leader. I believe in paying forward. What do you do to become a more quintessential leader? How do you pay forward what you’ve learned and experienced?

Whether you buy my eBooks or not is not important. But what you do with what you learn and what your experience has taught, is teaching, and will teach you is.

Think about that. When it’s all said and said, that’s all we’re left with. It’s a legacy. What is your legacy going to look like?

Self-Aggrandizement – An Unquintessential Leadership Trait

Posted: January 6, 2013 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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Quintessential leaders never have to – nor in fact, would – promote their efforts, a piece of a larger picture and larger plan. They are interested in outcomes and their contributions, as leaders, are devoted to successful outcomes for their teams, business units, organizations, and society at large. That is where their focus, their attention, and their efforts are directed.

So, when you hear people continually promote themselves as leaders, constantly touting their sole accomplishments, pointing everything back to themselves, you are seeing someone who is not only not a quintessential leader, but who is not even in a leadership position, except in his or her own mind. Everything the person is about is self-aggrandizement. 

Although self-aggrandizers are abundant throughout society, they seem to be even most prolific in business, sports, donald trump self-aggrandizementand religion. Donald Trump in business comes to mind. Muhammad Ali in his heyday in boxing comes to mind. The world of religious organizations is so full of these types of muhammad ali cassius clay self-aggrandizementpeople that it is difficult to pinpoint a single example. And the so-called religious types are the easiest to recognize and unmask because they all claim to be some sort of “only” representative of God and yet none of them agrees with each other or God.

Self-aggrandizers have an exaggerated and unsubstantiated view of their accomplishments and their contributions. They are legends in their own minds. They are completely self-absorbed and everything they say and do is from a “the world revolves around me” perspective. The prominent words their vocabularies are I, my, and me.

Self-aggrandizers believe they are superior to the rest of the human race. They also believe that they are unfairly treated and under-recognized by everyone else, primarily because, in their delusional , self-important opinions, everyone else is too ignorant and too blind to see how great and awesome they really are.

So, instead of spending time actually accomplishing the results that quintessential leaders are known for, the self-aggrandizers spend all their time promoting themselves. We’ve all worked with people who are self-aggrandizers and they are a detriment and an obstacle to productivity and success because they are consumed with nothing but being seen and heard and constant attention-seeking. These people suck up all the energy of whatever environment they are in and frequently stall or stop any progress if they’re allowed to continue unchecked.

The roots of self-aggrandizement are strong delusion, an overinflated ego (pride, vanity, arrogance), and insecurity. When a person has to spend all his or her time telling everyone how special, great, wonderful, awesome, superior he or she is – when in reality, if a person really is any or some or all of those things, it is readily apparent to everyone as a pattern of behavior and as just who that person is all the time and usually the person doesn’t even see those qualities in themselves, but it is other people who point them out – that person is first trying to convince him or herself those things are true – insecurity – and second trying to convince everyone else they are true as well.

The strong delusion is a contextual issue. Everything said to or about the self-aggrandizer gets assimilated through the “I, my, me” filter that dominates his or her thinking, and comes out, at best, twisted completely out of or spun completely away from its original context, or, at worst, completely invented (a lie). Regardless of which way the self-aggrandizer comes to his or her conclusions, he or she is always right and everyone else is always wrong.

An overinflated ego will argue, fight, contest, and keep conflict going. The ironic thing is that most people will tire of the endless arguing, fighting, contesting, and conflict after a while because they realize, at some point, that there’s no reasoning with a self-aggrandizer and the continuation of the discussion is a waste of time, but because the self-aggrandizng person gets the last word, so to speak, this boosts his or her ego even more and further convinces him or her that he or she is right. It’s a vicious circle, not based on evidence or fact, but simply based on the self-aggrandizer’s ability to out talk and outlast everyone else.

Insecurity is the knock of reality on a self-aggrandizer’s door. But since self-aggrandizers live in a world of strong delusions and super-sized egos, they will never allow this reality to get any further than the door. They lock insecurity out with even more self-aggrandizement.

So, if you see or hear someone who is always making presumptuous and momentous claims about him or herself, their positions, their accomplishments and who and what they are, you should recognize that that person is a self-aggrandizer. He or she is not any kind of leader and not a quintessential leader.

We as quintessential leaders need to recognize self-aggrandizement and remove it from among our teams and remove ourselves as far from it as possible. It is one of the most toxic and destructive forces that we will face in life. Giving it any attention will only encourage it and make it worse. We don’t need that. Our teams, our business units, our organizations don’t need that.

How Anakin Skywalker Became Darth Vader – A Quintessential Leadership Analysis

Posted: December 17, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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Anakin Skywalker Before He Became Darth VaderRecently, I sat down and watched, for the second time, back-to-back, the last two movies of the Star Wars prequel trilogy – Episode II: Attack of the Clones and Episode III: Revenge of the Sith. I had not seen either movie in several years, but wanted to review them after a recent Star Wars marathon on Spike TV during the Thanksgiving weekend when I saw most of all the three Star Wars movies in the original trilogy.

As I watched these two movies, I was amazed to see a lot of quintessential leadership – the presence or lack of presence – issues emerge. I decided to do an analysis of how Anakin Skywalker became Darth Vader, because in looking at the transformation, we can learn some important lessons about quintessential leadership – what it is and what it isn’t and how the presence or absence of the components of trust and trustworthiness, which I’ve discussed in detail in this blog, determine whether even the most competent, gifted, and capable people are also quintessential leaders.

Luke SkywalkerOne of the first things I noticed this time is how much Anakin and Luke Skywalker were alike in temperament and thinking. Both men were extremely gifted, but both also overestimated their gifts and their abilities and it created a recklessness and pride in them that clouded their ability to think clearly, to be humble, and to exercise self-control.

Both Anakin and Luke Skywalker were inconsistent in performance. At times, they both did the right thing, and at other times, they both did the wrong thing. Emotionally, they were both out of control, and they both lived their lives based on their feelings, which is why they both had an inconsistent level of performance. In short, they were unreliable and unpredictable, which are traits of unquintessential leaders.

Additionally, both Anakin and Luke Skywalker shared the trait of impatience. This came in part from pride and their overestimation of themselves, but it also came from a lack of contentment with where they were and what they were doing and the ability to see each step as part of a big-picture process. They both wanted, for example, to be Jedi knights – and both pretended to be before they were – before they had met all the qualifications through training and experience to actually be a Jedi knight.

This is a common character flaw that we find in unquintessential leaders. They want to positions, the titles, but they are either unwilling or unable to patiently do the work and take the time to be qualified to have those positions and titles. When they find a way – as Anakin did – to take a shortcut to where they believe they should be and want to be, the results are always disastrous.

Luke, in spite of sharing many of the unquintessential character traits of his father, turned out to, when push came to shove, avoid the same path his father had chosen. But it occurred to me that even though he did the right thing in the end, he still had the character flaw that he shared with Anakin of questioning the fairness of things as it related to him and he never completely learned to control his emotions, so Luke, as a force for good, long-term, remains questionable in my mind. Doing one right thing one time doesn’t make a person’s character. Right character is developed through a lifetime of making the right choices every time, all the time.

Granted, none of us does this perfectly, but a quintessential leader has this at the front of his or her intent and purpose at all times. That’s the quality of integrity.

So let’s look briefly at the unquintessential leader traits that Anakin Skywalker had that led him to choose to become Darth Vader. Notice that I purposefully used the word choose, because that is a crucial element in this discussion: the totality of all the choices in life that each of us makes is an integral component of whether we are quintessential leaders or unquintessential leaders at our core. Granted, there are gifts, abilities, talents that contribute to this equation, but even there, we have the choice to develop them or ignore them, use them or not use them, and to decide how we’re going to use them, so choice is always involved at the fundamental level.

In Episode II: Attack of the Clones, we see Anakin Skywalker as a young adult and in an apprenticeship with Obi-Wan Kenobi to become a Jedi knight. One of the things that stands out about Anakin’s character, even here, is how forcefully he is led by his emotions. He’s a no-holds-barred kind of person when it comes to how he feels. His pursuit of love is untamed and relentless. His fears rule his days and nights. His anger is fierce and hot. His resentments about the things he believes aren’t fair seethe steadily just under the surface, occasionally spewing out in volcanic outbursts.

Yoda LeadershipInterestingly, both Yoda and Obi-Wan Kenobi – as they would years later with his son – are constantly warning Anakin about self-control in all areas of his life (choices), but especially with regard to his emotions. Anakin doesn’t realize that being led by his emotions is the destabilizing force in his life. 

Emotional thinking crowds out objective thinking and the ability to observe things are they are instead of things from – as Obi-Wan ironically tells Luke to explain not revealing Darth Vader as Luke’s father – from a “certain point of view.” Emotional thinking leads to inconsistency, which is an unquintessential leader trait.

The roots of Anakin’s discontent, which is fueled by his rampant and conflicting, at times, emotions are evident in this episode.

He doesn’t see, for example, Lord Palpatine clearly, and believes he is one of the good guys, while Lord Palpatine is slowly and deliberately using Anakin’s emotional thinking and lack of objectivity to surreptitously manipulate Anakin. 

Anakin believes that things the Jedi are or aren’t doing for him, with him, and to him are not fair and are holding him back. This belief is fully cemented in Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, and it becomes the underpinning of all the choices he makes from there on out. 

As a result of Anakin’s lack of self-control, not only with his emotions, but in the rest of his life, where we see the same vacillation between extremes that his emotions have start appearing, we see three other unquintessential traits appear: a lack of integrity, a lack of honesty, and a lack of authenticity.

Anakin becomes dishonest with everyone, including himself, in these two episodes. Anakin isn’t even truthful with his wife, even though his fear – uncontrolled emotion – of her dying in childbirth leads him to choose to become Darth Vadar, because Lord Palpatine offers Anakin the power to prevent her death. This dishonesty also points to Anakin’s self-absorption, self-centeredness, and selfishness.

No longer is he focused on the big picture of why he is there and what the mission of the Jedi is. It no longer is important to Anakin by the end, only what he wants and what he feels and what he needs. In a sense, even his wife and twin children go off Anakin’s radar because his choices will dramatically and negatively affect them.

Lord Palpatine aka The EmporerNear the end of Anakin’s road to choosing to become Darth Vadar, he straddles the line between being a Jedi apprentice and being Lord Palpatine’s apprentice. He is thoroughly inauthentic, double-minded, and we watch as he walks the tightrope of trying to be someone that he has already abandoned being in his mind and in his emotions. The Jedi sense that something’s wrong, as does Anakin’s wife, but Anakin has gotten so good at pretending to be something he’s not that no one realizes what is really wrong until it’s too late.

Anakin’s issue with integrity was always there, but he made choices in both episodes which eroded and destroyed his integrity completely. A simple – and yet not simple when we examine it – example is his marriage to Padmé Amidala. The Jedi code forbade close attachments because of the emotions those attachments engendered and which the Jedi realized could dilute a Jedi’s obligation to his primary duty and could make him a vulnerable target for the dark side of the force.

But Anakin made a choice to deliberately break the Jedi code and marry Padmé in secret, and then further chose to hide their marriage and lie about their marriage, and encouraged Padmé to do the same. I think this is the defining event that destroyed any integrity that Anakin had left.

So, by the end of the third episode, we have seen all the choices along the way that Anakin Skywalker made that led him to choose to become Darth Vader. He had tremendous gifts, great abilities, and a lot of potential. But he lacked the traits of a quintessential leader, so, in the end, all that Anakin possessed naturally didn’t matter. We see the the same lack of quintessential leadership traits in the machine-driven-Darth Vader in the first Star Wars trilogy: his outside has changed, he’s got more power, but the inside – what he lacked or destroyed by choice to begin with – remained remarkably the same.

The question I leave with you is what are all the choices that are we making today? Are they choices that will enhance our quintessential leadership potential and realization, or are they choices that are eroding our quintessential leadership potential and are cumulatively making us unquintessential leaders?

Every choice matters. Let’s make every choice count toward quintessential leadership. 

 

 

When Temperament Gets in the Way of Quintessential Leadership – Introverts, Listen Up!

Posted: December 5, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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I’ve been observing for the last four years an emerging and accurate identification of an obstacle that exists that has contributed to the ever-present gridlock between the current president of the United States, President Barack Obama, and the United States Congress (the U.S. Senate and the U.S. House of Representatives). However, one of the things that is missing from the conversation is the real what and why behind the obstacle and the solution to removing it. The people who’ve identified the symptom talk and write about it without understanding the cause and how to address that in an effective way.

Let me say up front that this is not a post about politics. Politics is a game of lies and spin and I have no time or use for all that, nor will I waste my time talking about it. This post, instead, is about how temperament can affect quintessential leadership negatively and this post also drills down to how an introverted leader needs to modify his or her behavior to ensure that teamwork is in play and goals are successfully achieved.

Joe Scarborough, of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” seems to consistently and accurately define the obstacle (i.e., the symptom of the problem) that stands between President Barack Obama and the United States Congress. Ironically, when Scarborough points to the symptom of the solution, without realizing it, he is talking about two extremes in temperament: strong introversion and strong extroversion.

The solution, realistically, lies somewhere in the middle, but the solution can be found in the comparison and contrast between the strongly-introverted person that President Obama is and the strongly-extroverted person that Scarborough points to again and again as the model for teamwork and getting things done.

Joe Scarborough describes the obstacle to getting things done legislatively as an unwillingness by President Obama to reach out to anybody in Congress, including members of his own Democrat party, and an unwillingness to sit down and talk face-to-face, either one-on-one or in a group, to either members of his own party or members of the Republican party. And every time Scarborough describes this obstacle, he brings up former President Bill Clinton to show the contrast of how someone, probably more successfully than any other American president, countered and removed all gridlock by doing just the opposite of what President Obama is doing.

And what Scarborough is pointing to when he contrasts these two men is temperament and how President Clinton used his strong extroversion to ensure that the country’s goals were achieved and how President Obama’s strong introversion is inhibiting his ability to do the same. An analysis of how temperament can get in the way of quintessential leadership, then, and what can be done to moderate and counter that is, therefore, the sole topic of discussion in this post.

Before addressing the temperaments of these two men and the things that separate them temperamentally in their leadership styles, a short discussion of temperaments and how they play into how each of us sees and relates to the world around us is critical. An invaluable – I personally think this book ought to be a “must read” for everyone who is a leadership position – resource for quintessential leaders to understand both extroversion and introversion and leadership is Susan Cain‘s “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking.”

Commonly-accepted proportions, based on extensive research, of extroverts to introverts in the human population show a 75%-extrovert to 25%-introvert ratio (one in every four people is an introvert).  Cain’s book, while showing that general temperament dominance can also be a function of culture, shows that all of us are genetically and neurologically predisposed to either extroversion or introversion. She also shows how extroversion as “normal” and preferred and introversion as “abnormal” and undesirable – as well as needing to be “fixed” or “changed” – developed into the mindset and culture of the Western world.

Another important part of this conversation is that, because of temperament, it is very difficult – and impossible for people with strong and extreme tendencies in this temperament – for extroverts to ever really understand introverts, while introverts – even though it makes no sense to them – have a quite good understanding of extroverts. Extroverts can’t understand any temperament that is not like theirs, so much of the “abnormal” kinds of labeling – loner, weird, unsociable, etc. – that is typically applied to introverts – who, by the way, are none of these – we see in general cultural views expressed by extroverts.

Please take some time to read Jonathan Rauch’s article, “Caring for Your Introvert,” published in The Atlantic in March 2003 because it does a good job of dispelling some of these incorrect ideas and shows why the labels don’t match up with the reality.

Introversion and extroversion can be measured by scientific instruments such as the Myers-Briggs test, which is often a prerequisite to acceptance into post-graduate programs at many U. S. universities and colleges, and the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator which identifies 16 temperament types.

And even though all people can be typed within these 16 temperament types, where each person falls on the spectrum of the various components that make up the temperament is what makes no two same-temperament people exactly alike. In other words, each of us is unique. An additional note, which Susan Cain makes sure to point out, is that even though a person is characterized by a temperament type, even strongly, not all the attributes of that type may actually apply or be present. Again, each of us is unique. And that’s the most important thing to remember when discussing generalities, which the topic of temperament types is.

Since I’m taking this topic on – and to show the truth embedded in the cautions in my last paragraph – I will share my temperament type (which, no matter how many times I’ve been tested and how much experience and time is accrued between the tests, the type and proportions remain the same) with you and tell you a little bit about why I am  in a position to bring temperament as the source of the obstacle that Joe Scarborough has identified. If you click on the graph below, you’ll see it in its original size, which will make it easier to read.

quintessentialldr Myers-Briggs Temperament Indicator Graph

As you can see, I’m an INTJ, so I’ve got an introvert temperament. You’ll also noticed that I fall into the strong/extreme range of introversion. This is important, because this is a temperament characteristic that President Obama and I share. While I don’t know the exact temperament type of President Obama, I suspect that he is also an INTJ, and his unique temperament type lies in where he falls along each of the measurement scales.

One of the paradoxes that I’ve read and seen noted about President Obama time and again is that of the seemingly two different people he is in front of big crowds versus in front of small groups or one-on-one. It really isn’t a paradox, because since I’ve noticed the same paradox in myself – and this is something I’ve had to learn how to change in the second setting – I know why he is more comfortable in front of a large, mostly anonymous crowd instead of in a small and well-known group and individual setting.

In front of a large, mostly anonymous group, President Obama is doing a presentation about something he believes, is a part of who he is, and he is an expert on. He’s written about, thought about, and is a subject-matter expert, from his perspective, about it. It’s not a conversation, which would require him to process information quickly and U.S. President Barack Obama speaks at the National Defense University in Washingtonverbalize eloquently just as quickly his response – which introverts simply cannot do (look at how poorly he did in the Q & A debates in this year’s election process). Therefore, there’s no pressure on him, and is relaxed and confident, and even almost passionate.

However, in the give-and-take of ad hoc verbal conversation and negotiation in face-to-face meetings with groups and individuals President Obama knows, he is so uncomfortable that he avoids it altogether. I read about what he’s done proposal-wise with the current fiscal cliff negotiations and that he’s incredulous about why it’s not done already. I don’t know the details of the proposal – nor is that important here. However, here’s what I’ve read and seen about what President Obama has done. He’s composed – that’s in writing – a document that says what he wants and sent it to Congress to get passed.

That’s how introverts are most comfortable communicating and he’d be delighted to have Congress put their proposal in writing, send it to him – introverts understand information much more easily when they read it than when they hear it -, give him some solitude to digest it, make written changes, if needed, then send the revised proposal back in writing. He’s probably the best emailing president we’ve ever had. 🙂

And that’s the problem. If we consider the 4:1 ratio of extroverts to introverts, then applied generally, 75% of Congress are extroverts and they are the majority that want a face-to-face sit-down with President Obama to hammer out an agreement (not to mention that, except for President Jimmy Carter, who was probably as strongly introverted as President Obama, this is how Washington has traditionally gotten things done at the end of the day).

And this is why former President Bill Clinton represents the key to the solution. President Clinton is clearly an extrovert on the strong-to-extreme end of the spectrum.  I suspect this “polar opposites” temperament difference between President Obama and him has been why there are constant suggestions that the two men don’t like eachPresident-Bill-Clinton other and their relationship has seemed frosty at best.

The fact is that President Clinton doesn’t understand President Obama, temperamentally, and President Obama, while he understands President Clinton temperamentally, can’t wrap his head around embracing it or doing it.

There’s another possible component that may explain the seeming distance between the presidents. As a strong-to-extreme extrovert, President Clinton most likely (and some of his personal behavior lends credibility to this) has no concept of personal space and physical (not visible, but discernible) boundaries – both of which are important and critical to introverts.

And I guarantee you that President Clinton has unknowingly invaded President Obama’s personal space and ignored his physical boundaries way too many times, and President Obama’s response, which is an introvert response, has been to literally and figuratively back up to create a safe distance – for him – between the two men. That’s the heart of the dynamic you can see going on between these two presidents, who probably don’t really dislike each other, but are in totally different universes temperamentally.

But Joe Scarborough, who is also a strong extrovert, is right in pointing to President Clinton as someone from whom President Obama needs to draw on his playbook to get anything accomplished. This means President Obama, who has been time and again characterized as “leading from behind,” which is what INTJ’s typically do, needs to get out of his comfort zone. The reality is that President Obama doesn’t see a need to do this and doesn’t think it’s going to accomplish anything. He knows that he will be at a disadvantage in the verbalization part of the process.

But, if President Obama doesn’t do these face-to-face small group and individual meetings with members of both parties – understanding that 75% of Congress needs to talk to him and be heard (listening is one of his strengths) and also understanding that it is okay to say “I want to think about what you’ve said and let’s meet again to discuss it” to offset his fear of being put on the spot – then he’s not going to be able to garner the support he needs to meet the country’s goals and objectives legislatively.

And that’s where quintessential leadership comes in. One of the defining characteristics of a quintessential leader is being able to understand what other people need and being able to find ways to accommodate those needs in a way that is win-win for everyone. It doesn’t mean being a chameleon, nor does it mean being insincere. It also doesn’t mean compromising principles, integrity, authenticity, or ethics. But it does mean moving, taking the necessary steps first to meet others halfway, and having the confidence in your understanding, discernment, and experience to ensure that the right and best possible outcome will be achieved.

Taking a Short Break for Family Visits and Vacation

Posted: June 28, 2012 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership
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The Quintessential Leader will be taking a short break – 10 days or so – for family visits and a family vacation during the 4th of July week. I am appreciative of your support and readership. Because without you and your input, a blog is just talking to myself. 🙂

When I return, I will continue the theme of  communicating vision with, what may be a surprise for you, but I hope that you’ll rejoin me after the break.

Thank you again for reading and I’ll see you in about 10 days! Happy 4th of July to my American readers.

The End Justifies the Means…Or Does It?

Posted: June 5, 2012 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Team Building & Development
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“Whosoever desires constant success must change his conduct with the times.” The Prince – Niccolo Machiavelli 

While the exact phrase “the end justifies the means” is never found in Machiavelli’s renowned 1532 work, The Prince, there is absolutely no doubt this is one of the distilled philosophies that you come away with after reading it. I remember reading it in high school and being bothered by it, but in rereading it a few years back, perhaps because this is just the way the world – individually and collectively – with very very few exceptions does things now, my sense of bother had deepened to disgust and a conscious rejection of all the tenets and principles in the book. Machiavelli, it seems, would have fit right into the 21st Century with his promotion of situational ethics and relative morality or total immorality in every aspect of life.

This post is about ethics and process. Ethics is defined as “a system of moral principles;” and “the rules of conduct recognized in respect to a particular class of human actions or a particular group;” and “that branch of philosophy dealing with values relating to human conduct, with respect to the rightness and wrongness of certain actions and to the goodness and badness of the motives and ends of such actions.” By “process,” I mean how and why we, individually and collectively, do things to achieve a desired outcome.

Let me say at the outset that ethics and process is a constant struggle, and many times we’ve absorbed so much of what’s going on around us – “that’s what everyone else is doing,” – and we live in an ADHD world that leaves us little free time – unless we make the conscious choice to create free time – to think through our processes – and we have adapted to a world philosophy that justifies being unethical to achieve goals (the mantra of this is “well, it’s not hurting anybody,” which we’ll discover is absolutely untrue, except the people getting hurt are not the ones we might think). Additionally, we’ve fallen into the trap of believing that the outcome of something is what is most important, not how we got there – that the end justifies the means.

It is my belief that how we got there is far more important and significant than the end result. If the process is wrong, flawed, faulty, deceitful, or in any other way dishonest, the end result is nullified. Because defects of character, a lack of integrity, and disregard for ethics characterizes the process. Some examples of this process-ethics problem on an individual level are things that as I read them I continually ask myself “is this something I’ve done, am doing, or would do?” I believe that being very aware of all my processes – and asking myself “is this right or is this wrong?” and “is it at its very core honest or dishonest?” – in life is critical to having right character and unimpeachable integrity, because, when it’s all said and done, those are the only things I will leave this life with. As Marc Antony so eloquently says in his eulogy of Julius Caesar, “The evil that men do lives after them; The good is oft interred with their bones:“

A story last week in The Atlantic about the housing bust had these two quotes from one of the investigators with Digital Risk, a company that exists solely to catch mortgage fraud. The first quote is a bit surprising: “pastors—dozens of them—who doctored bank statements, bought houses they couldn’t pay for, and then filed for bankruptcy. “’…The nice thing about pastors is that their church shares information when asked,’ Alpan says. ‘Pastors are always an easy [fraud] claim.'” The second quote seemed, to me, to sum up, in general, society’s, individually and collectively, default process: “‘It’s not just lawyers and pastors and CEOs who lie and scheme. It’s nurses and schoolteachers, too,’ he says. ‘Everybody’s guilty; no one’s up to any good.'”

How about the educators in Atlanta, GA who were involved in cheating on the state’s standardized testing, in which more federal funding – and teacher and administrator jobs – were at stake for low test scores? This is the epitome of a unethical and dishonest process being employed by individuals for a “good” – although in my opinion, keeping these educators in their jobs would not have been good for the students – goal. What kind of example did they set for the kids they were entrusted to educate? They taught them that cutting corners, cheating, and lying were acceptable if those behaviors achieved the end goal. Am I the only one who believes these kids took that lesson – and process – to heart and everything they do from here on out will be suspect, process-wise?

On an even more personal level, how many of us have fudged the deductions on our income taxes to either avoid paying or to pay less than what we legitimately owe in taxes? Many non-monetary charities – furniture, clothes, etc. – simply allow you to tell them the value of your donation and they sign it and give you the receipt. If we donated to one of these, were we honest about the value of our donation? Did we take other deductions that we weren’t allowed to or inflate the amount of other allowable deductions? That’s an unethical, deceitful, and dishonest process.

Our individual unethical and dishonest processes aggregate in the organizations we are members of professionally, socially, and religiously. Common and frequently-used examples  of how these processes look at the organizational level (and because I’ve been in technology – and often that includes being in the inner workings of organizations, especially as they have become inextricably linked over the course of time – since the beginning of my career, there isn’t much I haven’t seen and heard, but a lot I’ve had to say “no” to or, with time because my process, which is, to the best of my ability, to be honest and ethical no matter what, to simply not be asked even though the people who are asked and say “yes” end up talking to me about it and I tell them “don’t expect the people you’re doing this for to visit you in that federal penitentiary”) include:

  • Encouraging members of the organization to access the organization’s web site from as many unique IP addresses as they can on a regular basis to artificially drive up the traffic statistics and boost the organic search engine rankings
  • Encouraging members of the organization to post favorable online reviews of the organization’s products to create the illusion that lots of people want and like the products
  • Creating fictional web sites that purport to objectively compare your organization’s products with competing organizations’ products where your organization’s products are rated higher than all the others
  • Encouraging and/or having members of the organization to use social media contacts (who may or may not actually be interested in the organization or its products) to “like” the organizations’ social media pages to boost their search rankings

And technology is not the only area where we see the ever-increasing trend toward unethical, deceitful, and dishonest processes. There is rampant federal and state tax fraud. I know of one example where at least a year’s worth of financial documents was fabricated using PhotoShop to hide what had really been the true financial documentation of the organization. Even some charitable contributions have the dark shadow of unethical and dishonest processes behind them. A recent account was given by the chairman of an organization in which he detailed how he circumvented “the system” – which included evading costs and time doing it the honest and legal way would have required – to get a piece of medical equipment to a someone in a foreign country and it was all justified – Jeremiah 17:9 – because it was a “good deed.”  And this is just the tip of the iceberg.

It’s not hurting anybody, right? Wrong! There may not be identifiable victims of the fraud being perpetrated, but people who are counting on veracity are being defrauded. Additionally, the person/people executing the unethical, deceitful, and dishonest processes are definitely hurting themselves. Right character, good character, and integrity are much more easily destroyed than they are created. The first time we use an unethical, deceitful, and dishonest process, there is usually a pang of conscience that accompanies it – if indeed, we’ve developed any kind of conscience at all.

I’ve found that if I have to spend a lot of time debating on whether I should do something or not, process-wise, and there’s a knot in my stomach to accompany the indecision, then the wisest thing is stop and review my process for integrity, honesty, and ethical correctness. However, if we ignore the pang of conscience and do it the way we want to anyway, our character is damaged. The next time the wrong way to do something to achieve a goal presents itself, it will be easier to do, because the pang of conscience has been diminished. 

So why does it matter what the process is as long as the outcome is achieved? Because once this way of doing things comes into and is accepted in just one of our processes, it eventually spreads to all of our processes. We become what we think and act on: unethical, deceitful, and dishonest from the core outward. We become unreliable, untrustworthy, and unconscionable. We also become teachers, by our examples, that any means justifies the end, and we contribute to the declination of a society that we all resoundingly lament and criticize as being what we’ve become.

Take the time to examine your processes. The good that will come of that – including all the immediate gratification that you’ll have to forego to do things the right way – will be worth it now and in the long run.

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