Archive for the ‘Myths and Misconceptions About Management’ Category

CPR and Quintessential Leadership 3-5-13

Posted: March 5, 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, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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No doubt by now everyone has read and/or heard about Colleen, the nurse who Brookdale Senior Livingrefused to do CPR on an 87-year-old woman who collapsed in the dining room of Glenwood Gardens, a Brookdale Senior Living facility located in Bakersfield, CA. The elderly woman later died at a local hospital.

The partial transcript of the 911 call is almost unbelievable, especially in the nurse’sGlenwood Gardens - Brookdale Senior Living - Bakersfield, California refusal, with her boss concurring with her refusal, to let the dispatcher talk someone – anyone – else through doing CPR – saying it was against company policy – to aid the elderly woman, who was barely breathing.

After reading this story, I contacted a friend of mine who is the director of nursing at the Brookdale Senior Living facility where my mom lived until she came home to live with me until her death. I asked if this was really company policy. She confirmed that it was.

Even though my mom had a DNR, so this would not have applied to her, I told my nurse friend that I didn’t remember anyone telling us that during the admissions process, since that would be something that should be clearly stated at the outset for people considering a Brookdale Senior Living facility as a choice for themselves or a family member.

She said she had brought that up to the admissions person there who basically said that telling people wasn’t required because it was explicitly stated in the mountain of paperwork that was signed and given at the time of admission. I admitted I hadn’t read every word of mine because my sister and I asked all the important questions we needed answers to during the admissions process, but that I didn’t think that was a responsible answer, because that, for a lot of people, would be a deciding factor in determining living arrangements.

I then asked my nurse friend what she would have done. She said she didn’t care what the legal issues were because this was a moral and ethical issue and she would have broken the company policy and put her employment in jeopardy to do the CPR. She made an interesting statement about how she would not be able to live with her conscience if she could help someone and didn’t. She also reminded me that in nursing school, she took The Florence Nightingale Pledge, which is similar to the Hippocratic Oath that doctors take, which includes the intent of doing no harm to those in their care. 

So what does this have to do with quintessential leadership or the lack of quintessential leadership? Everything.

We’ll start with the nurse because it’s the easier of the two to clearly see a lack of quintessential leadership. As a nurse, she took the same pledge my friend did. The welfare of that 87-year-old lady – even if any efforts at CPR didn’t, in the end, save her life – should have been her only concern. The dispatcher gave her an opportunity to let somebody else do CPR and the nurse refused everything. She lost – or maybe never had – the vision of what being a nurse means. At the very least, her nursing license should be immediately and permanently voided in all 50 states.

Brookdale Senior Living is also being operated and run by unquintessential leadership. That this policy is in place at all, in assisted living facilities, is not only absurd, but reprehensible and irresponsible. But the company’s unquintessential leadership goes far beyond this one incident.

It is important to take a big-picture look at this company – and all others like it – to see what their priorities are (I know a lot about Brookdale Senior Living, which is why I am singling them out, but it would be naive to say they are the only senior community company that has these policies and operating models). While seniors and their families are encouraged to believe that these companies care about them and put “our residents first,” that is, in fact, not the truth. What these companies care about most is profit (the monthly charges, for the bare minimum of services, start around $5000 in the south, so it makes sense that it’s much higher in other parts of the country) and no legal liability. If the residents happen to fall in the mix pleasantly, that’s okay, but if they don’t, then the company comes first.

The lack of honesty and the greed and self-interests of the companies are all unquintessial leadership traits. So, buyer beware, which quintessential leaders don’t have to worry about, applies to anyone considering one of these facilities.

Brookdale Senior Living lacks quintessential leadership in many areas beyond this, based on my experience with them and subsequent first-hand knowledge that I have had of their activities. They have policies in place that don’t protect the residents, the interests of the residents, and the families of the residents. And the puzzling part of this is that some of these policies leave them wide open for lawsuits, if someone wanted to pursue them.

In my mom’s case, while she was living there – and this precipitated (among other things affecting her health that I had discussed and been promised over and over would be done and never were), after Mama emphatically told me she wanted to live with me and didn’t want to go back there, Mama coming home to live with me until her death in August of last year – she had a very bad fall in the middle of the night.

(I don’t know what happened in Mama’s brain during the month between her diagnosis with vascular dementia and the hospitalization in a geriatric psychiatric facility after a couple of the most bizarre weeks of her life and my twin sister’s and my lives, but the first thing I noticed on my first visit with her there was that she was suddenly turning around counter-clockwise. Because of that, she would lose her balance. That became her way of turning her body, and as the diseases – Lewy Body dementia was also present – worsened and her balance in general got worse, she was more prone to falling.)

The problem – and quintessential leadership failure – was that I didn’t hear about the fall until 8:30 the next morning when I called Mama to tell her I was on my way (I was there every day, often for hours at a time, just to keep an eye on things and make sure she was okay) and she told me she’d fallen and her ankle was hurting badly. I was livid as she told me that a CNA had come in and found her on the floor, asked her if she was okay, and when Mama said she was, lifted her up and put her back in bed.

The unquintessential leadership in this scenario abounds. The first is asking someone, who, by the way, had a serious hearing loss and did not have her hearing aids on, with dementias and Alzheimer’s Disease to accurately assess her condition. The second was not calling EMS to take her to the emergency room to check for broken bones (fortunately, she didn’t break anything, but she had a serious ankle sprain), then call me to tell me to go to the ER. The third was the CNA moving her without confirmation that nothing was broken.

I got calmed down enough to go in and talk with the director of nursing, because I had explicitly said early on that if anything happened to Mama, I wanted to know immediately, no matter what time of the day or night it was. It was in the record and it wasn’t done. I got a lot of excuses about why the CNA didn’t call – also unquintessential leadership – but finally the director of nursing agreed that she should have and told me she’d get mobile x-rays done just to make sure Mama was okay.

I ended up spending almost two weeks pretty much living there with Mama to ensure she was healing and safe (I understood that it was assisted living, so I couldn’t expect someone other than me to be there 24/7).

About a week after that, I went in early one morning – several people had been in and out of the room and Mama had gone to breakfast, so a lot of people had an opportunity to observe her – and I immediately noticed she was having a really hard time breathing. The fact that no one else saw it or said anything to me about it was unquintessential leadership. I got her to the doctor and the determination was either pneumonia or the beginnings of congestive heart failure.

The doctor treated it as pneumonia since the chest x-ray seemed to indicate that, but it was in fact congestive heart failure, which landed Mama in the hospital a week after that (she’d been staying with me that week and I grew more concerned as I saw her breathing getting more and more labored). It was after that hospitalization that Mama came to live with me for good.

I didn’t blame all of Mama’s issues with high blood pressure and congestive heart failure on the Brookdale Senior Living facility. It wasn’t all their fault. However, the lack of quintessential leadership at the facility definitely contributed to Mama’s condition.

Her doctor had ordered a very strict diet to try to deal with blood pressure and weight and I had talked to everyone there for about a year trying to ensure that the diet was followed.

Everybody from the top down gave me lip-service that they would follow the doctor’s orders, but no one followed up and no one ensured it was done. I saw time and again, with my own eyes, that it wasn’t being done. Each time I brought it to the attention of those in leadership positions there, I heard blame and then the same old promises, which were never kept.

That was unquintessential leadership on so many levels.

But the most unquintessential leadership story that I heard about this particular facility was recounted to me (and I will not recount the details here to protect the person, who is a good friend, who told me in excruciating details one of the most horrific stories I think I’ve ever heard in my life) months later and it is damning evidence that Brookdale Senior Living is under unquintessential leadership from the very top down.

This story involved a serious medical emergency with a resident – whom Mama and I both knew and who was vivacious, healthy, and said to me every time she saw me, “I just love your little mama” – brought on by a criminal act by another resident, that occurred on a Sunday morning. The registered nurse was asked to call 911, but instead of calling 911, the RN started trying to call the executive director and the director of nursing. Finally, because the RN wouldn’t call 911, one of the staff members did.

The resident with the serious medical emergency was transported to the hospital, where she died a week later. The staff member told 911 what had happened, but immediately the RN started disputing her story. The executive director finally came in and the cover-up of what actually happened began in earnest. The staff member was put on notice because she’d “broken the chain of command,” which she had not, but the RN, who was at the top of the chain of command, didn’t do what she should have done, which was to have called 911, and then called facility leadership to let them know what happened.

The family was lied to about what happened and the circumstances under which it happened. No action was taken against the resident who committed the criminal act, which jeopardized every other resident still there. And eventually the staff member who did the right thing was fired for insubordination.

You might wonder why and what all this has to do with us as quintessential leaders. The answer is “everything!” This is both a strong caution for those of us who are now the quintessential leaders who are entrusted with our aging parents’ care and for those of us who are striving to be quintessential leaders in every aspect of our lives.

This is what unquintessential leadership looks like in action, with specifics that have broad application throughout our professional, personal, and spiritual lives. As quintessential leaders, we have the responsibility to ensure we are not following in the footsteps of the examples given above. Please be sure to read an excellent companion blog article to this one entitled “Quintessential Selfishness.”

That requires us to have the commitment, the determination, and the courage to do the right thing all the time, no matter what the personal cost is to us. It requires us to have an immovable and unshakable moral and ethical foundation that is the basis of everything we are, we do, we say, and we think. It requires all the components of Building Trust and Being Trustworthy to be an active and living part of our very beings all the time.

It’s prudent to look in the mirror quite frequently and make sure we are the quintessential leaders we say we are and are striving to become better at. Too often, we can all get lazy or complacent and believe, as Paul Simon so eloquently wrote, “that we’re gliding down the highway when, in fact, we’re slip slidin’ away.” 

Quintessential Leadership Analysis of Groupthink and What it Says About Trust

Posted: February 28, 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, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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Today’s post has been on my mind quite some time, as I’ve spent a lot of time observing, processing, analyzing how prevalent groupthink has become and how the majority of people, it seems, have adapted that as the norm, and, in the process, just checked their brains at the door.

It’s important to remember that the brain is part of the body and it must be exercised just as the rest of the body is exercised to stay sharp, to stay aware, and to be discerning.

It doesn’t mean that every thought we have is right. But how do you know for yourself what right and wrong thinking is, if you’re not thinking at all? It doesn’t mean that every conclusion we draw from thinking is feasible, doable, or practical. But, again, how do you know for yourself whether conclusions – yours or others – are feasible, doable, or practical if you’re not in the habit of thinking in objective terms about costs and benefits, pros and cons, and outcomes?

We are becoming a society that is content to let others do our thinking for us. And there are a lot of individuals and organizations that want to do our thinking for us. It seems that most of us prefer to just go with the flow and agree to whatever all the things we’re attached to in our lives tell us are right, good, and true. And that’s a very, very dangerous place to be.

As quintessential leaders, we must be on constant guard against groupthink and what it conveys about trust and trustworthiness. My book, Building Trust and Being Trustworthy, is an in-depth discussion of the components that make up building trust and being trustworthy. Get your copy today!

There is not a human being on this planet who can afford not to know and understand this subject. Too many people don’t. That is, in part, why we are seeing the dominance of  groupthink – enforced and accepted – and we are seeing a steep and rapid degradation in moral and ethical standards everywhere we turn.

As a refresher for those who may not have read George Orwell’s 1984 – a book that I also believe should be required reading for everyone on the planet – let me briefly define the idea behind groupthink.

Groupthink, generally, refers to a collective of people all thinking the exact same thing, with no deviation. The underlying desire and professed aim is harmony and unity, so to avoid possible disruption of that, individuals are discouraged and sometimes threatened from objective analysis and truth and proof tests of the accepted thinking.

Loyalty to the group is emphasized over everything else, including truth, and any questioning of the group thinking is seen as disloyal. Therefore, all creativity, all objective analysis, and all truth and proof testing is squashed and, if it occurs, the individual is deemed dangerous and untrustworthy.

The problem with groupthink is that when bad ideas, old ideas that didn’t work the first time around, wrong ideas, unworkable ideas, not-very-smart ideas, and untrue ideas come in, since no dissension, no checks and balances, no questioning is allowed, they become part and parcel of the working body of information within the group.

And bad groupthink becomes badthink and the derailing of the entire group has begun.

Individuals in this environment, such as Orwell’s Winston Smith, know that their mental – and these are rarely, if ever verbalized, and when they are, they are verbalized very, very carefully (if you watch The Tudors, think of how Thomas More handled a groupthink he was not a part of – I would definitely take the same road he took until I was left no choice, as he was not, and then I’d lay it out as concisely and concretely as it has been written and rewritten in my thinking ) – reality checks, proving, testing for truths are very dangerous and that elimination – whether literally with their lives or symbolically by being cast out and banned from the group – is inevitable. There is no other outcome at some point. It’s an accepted fact.

Why is groupthink such a powerful card that some people in leadership positions want to play? Why do they play it? What does it say about trust and trustworthiness? What does it say about respect?

Groupthink is imposed because of fear. Fear of losing power, fear of losing stature, and fear of being proven wrong. It is imposed as a means of complete control. It says to those its imposed upon that they are not trusted and they are not trustworthy. It also says they have no value and, therefore, are not worthy of any respect.

However, you’ll never hear those reasons stated out loud. Instead, you’ll hear words like “loyalty,” “unity,” “collaboration,” and statements about “being on the same page.” There is always a certain amount of coercion and guilt that accompanies these words and statements that play on the emotions of a species – that’s us humans – who have a strong desire for connection and attachment to other humans. And the possible deprivation of that is why groupthink is so powerful for a lot of people and why society accepts it, in general, hook, line, and sinker.

There are way too many examples of groupthink and its repercussions in our society that is literally saturated with it now to discuss them all here.

Marissa Mayer - CEO - Yahoo!But the story about Marissa Mayer’s banning of telecommuting at Yahoo! this week encapsulates groupthink in such as way that it put the icing on the cake of my thinking about this subject for me. I’ll give a few examples of why.

One of the banes of groupthink is the reintroduction of archaic and unfeasible ideas from the past repackaged and remarketed as “new and fresh” thinking. It really shows outdated and stale or no thinking, and it shows the absence of quintessential leadership.

I’ve read widely on this decision by Mayers and have been thinking about it a lot with my own professional background in technology. It makes no sense for a lot of reasons.

Yahoo!’s business, as are all high-tech companies, is encompassed by mobile computing – having the technology to do whatever you need to whenever it needs to be done. Its benefit is specifically what she is banning in this memo.

The everybody-has-to-be-in-the-same-physical-location-or-nothing-will-get-done is not only an archaic idea, but it also has been proven untrue.

Telecommuting workers, on the whole – if you’re lazy telecommuting, you’ll be lazy at an office – are more productive and contribute a higher yield of results to companies because they’re not in an office, going to meetings all day, answering inane phone calls and emails all day, listening to their coworkers talk – and much of that talk is not about work – all day.

Meetings can still take place, face-to-face, with current and emerging technology, so nothing’s lost if someone needs that face time. To say otherwise is dishonest. I say that because I’ve heard this as the kingpin argument too many times and it’s simply untrue.

But the meetings tend to be focused and shorter and not the colossal wastes of time that most meetings in the office are when all the disorganized thinkers who also have a penchant and need to talk out every single random thought in their heads take over and kill productivity for hours at a time.

Telecommuting also represents a huge reduction in overhead for companies and for employees. For companies, it means less equipment, less office space, and less office consumables, which represents a significant cost savings and a better bottom line. Employees save money and time – that they can spend working – by not having to drive, often, long distances to an office. Employees are also eligible for tax benefits by having and maintaining a home office. It’s a win-win situation.

Mayer’s contention that Yahoo!’s employees will be more collaborative, more innovative and more productive by all being in the same physical location is badthink.

The reality is that if employees aren’t productive, collaborative when the need arises, and innovative as telecommuters, then they will not be productive, collaborative, or innovative anywhere else. That’s a skill set issue, not a location issue.

But what Mayer misses in this edict is the lack of quintessential leadership that has been in Yahoo! for years. If those in leadership positions don’t communicate vision, don’t develop and communicate strategies and goals, then all the employees basically end up doing their own thing, whether they are working from home or working at the office.

Instead of Mayer taking ownership for her responsibility as CEO – and admitting the lack of quintessential leadership in the past – she is essentially blaming Yahoo!’s problems on the employees. That is badthink and that is unquintessential leadership.

Another aspect of groupthink in the Yahoo! example comes from Mayer’s “one-size-fits-all” perspective. That is not only a foolish perspective, but it is an unquintessential leader perspective. Mayer is clearly an extrovert. She thinks like an extrovert. She acts like an extrovert. And she expects everyone in Yahoo! to think and act like an extrovert.

Mayer gets her energy from interaction with other people. She took only two weeks of maternity leave when her son was born last year and got back into the office, where she was surrounded by a lot of people. And that’s fine, because that’s what extroverts do.

However, with her faulty groupthink – which is believing all her employees will be energized by all the people around them 10-12 hours a day – she doesn’t realize that an inordinately high percentage of people in technology are introverts. Introverts get drained quickly of resources by a steady and continuous stream of people interaction and it reduces their productivity, innovation, and collaboration.

So here’s an example of the result of badthink. The introverts who are forced to come into the office now will not be roaming the halls, sharing lunches with their colleagues, or all the other random “here’s-a-spark” encounters that Mayer envisions happening when everyone’s onsite. Instead, the introverts will hole up in their cubes, earbuds and iPods engaged, and work alone. If they venture out for food, drink, and bathroom breaks, they will choose times when they are least likely to be hung up, and the food and drinks will come back to the cube with them.

And they’ll be somewhat less productive, somewhat less inclined to spend extra time working on projects, and very unhappy. What will most likely happen at Yahoo! because of this new rule is that they will lose some of their best employees, who will go to other high-tech firms who recognize the value of telecommuting.

Mayer will be left, then, with the same telecommuters who didn’t work when they were at home, but now they’re in the office not working, and she’ll also be left with a lot of disgruntled employees, who would normally be good workers, with morale issues because even if they haven’t telecommuted, they always knew it was an option if something unexpected came up, and now they’ve basically been told “come to the office or else.”

Groupthink is something that we as quintessential leaders must be aware of, must resist, and must ensure is not how we lead our teams. It’s a subtle enemy. It’s a dangerous enemy. It’s a destructive enemy. 

Unquintessential Leadership News for Week Ending 2-22-13

Posted: February 22, 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, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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There have been a lot of examples of unquintessential leadership in this week’s news, and I will highlight the ones that have caught my attention – some you may be aware of and others you may not be – and give a brief summary of each of them with links so you can review the stories yourselves and glean the lessons from each of them that we, as quintessential leaders, must always be diligent to look for and learn from.

Lance ArmstrongThe first story is the news, which, frankly, is no surprise to me, that Lance Armstrong has refused to meet with the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) and testify under oath about his use of illegal substances during his career as a professional cyclist. In light of this development – which was a necessary step in his path to be able compete athletically in any sport and any hopes of redemption from his fall from grace – it seems to bear out that all that he said in his interview with Oprah Winfrey last month was nothing more than lies accompanied by crocodile tears. Purely unquintessential leadership on every level with this man.

Another unquintessential leadership story that caught my Alex (A-Rod) Rodriguez - New York Yankeesinterest this week was about Alex Rodriguez, third baseman for my favorite baseball team, the New York Yankees. Joe Posnanski does a very good job of showing the unquintessential leadership traits that have led to his demise, not only as a baseball player, but as a role model for young kids playing the game of baseball. Mr. Posnanski lists several things that contributed to where A-Rod finds himself now, but from a quintessential leader point of view, three character traits – pride, cheating, and dishonesty – are at the core of what makes Alex Rodriguez an unquintessential leader.

Another unquintessential leadership news story from this week was the revelation that the FBI – anyone who knows the real history of the FBI from its inception and anything at all about the tactics of its first director, J. Edgar Hoover, should really not be surprised by this latest story – has a lot of employees using government-issued equipment to engage in sexting. Not only is this behavior immoral, but it’s also illegal under federal law, which the FBI is the enforcing agency of.

The next instance of unquintessential leadership to get a lot of press this week has global implications, as well as terrorist implications. Government systems and corporate systems were the target – from China and Pakistan to the U.S. and from the U.S. to Iran (that we know of). This high-profile story also introduced the general public to a new term – spear phishing – which is already well-known in the cyber security field. In general terms, the unquintessential leadership behavior is hacking or trying to hack computers and networks.

Hacking – one famous hacking group is Anonymous – involves several unquintessential leadership traits: the deliberate breaking into and breaching, if possible, of computers and networks; distributing malicious or harmful software to either steal information or destroy information or incapacitate the computer or network; and, a lot of pride and arrogance in taking credit for the breach.

President Barack ObamaThe last unquintessential leadership news story I’ll cover for this week is the looming sequestration if President Obama and the US Congress don’t reach a budget agreement.

While both sides bear responsibility for the lack of an agreement, President Obama, as Commander-in-Chief, has shown an unquintessential leadership trait side of his introverted temperament – he’s an INTJ –  which I also am, so I understand what’s happened and why, but the unquintessential leadership aspect of his decision is a faulty cost-benefit analysis.

When INTJ’s have done everything in their power to try to resolve, negotiate, change, and conclude an impasse or breach, whether with an individual or a group of individuals, and nothing happens, as their energy levels get depleted and they get tired of hitting their heads against a brick wall, so to speak, they do a cost (how much am I putting into this?)-benefit (what is the best I can expect as a result?) analysis, and if the cost outweighs the benefit, they stop, close the door, and walk away for good.

Once that door is closed, it can’t be reopened, because the INTJ has moved on to things he or she can resolve, negotiate, change and conclude, and the last effort is no longer a part of their lives, literally. It’s over. Period.

That’s a part of the temperament and it drives all the other people in our lives crazy because it’s the only temperament that does this and none of the other temperaments understand it. Trust me, I’ve heard it enough to know it doesn’t make sense to anyone who’s not an INTJ.

That appears to be the point that President Obama has reached with the U.S. Congress.

The problem here with the lack of an agreement and the possible automatic sequester is that whatever the cost is to President Obama personally, it does not outweigh the benefits of continuing the resolution process, the negotiating, the change,  and successful conclusion needed to get past the breaches and impasses that exist. One of the traits of quintessential leadership is understanding that the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the one, and as the leader of the United States, President Obama needs to remember – and keep at it, now matter how it affects him personally, because this is the job that he has – the needs of the American people outweigh any personal needs that he has.

President Obama doesn’t get the luxury of being an ordinary INTJ where the stakes aren’t all that high if he walks away for good. At least not until 2017.

Quintessential Leadership Analysis of Henry VIII – Pt. 2 – 1525 to 1536

Posted: February 21, 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, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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This post will do a quintessential leadership analysis of Henry VIII during the years between 1525, when Anne Boleyn came on the scene and Catherine of Aragon became an inconvenience, and 1536, when Anne Boleyn was executed.

It’s important to note at this point that although Catherine of Aragon produced only one child – Mary I – during their marriage (she had several miscarriages, as did Henry VIII’s Catherine of Aragonother wives, which now seem to have been scientifically linked to Henry VIII himself, who may have had a rare blood type known as Kell positive), up until 1525, she and Henry VIII seemed to have had an amiable marriage, in spite of Henry’s philandering.

Anne Boleyn, who often carries the lion’s share of the blame for what happened to Catherine and in England during the next 11 years, was in fact only a single factor – although perhaps the tipping one –Anne Boleyn in what led to the tumult and upheaval within the royal family, the country, and the church during that time.

Several factors had an impact on why Henry VIII suddenly reversed himself on the legality of his marriage to Catherine in 1525 after they’d been married for 16 years (their marriage would not be annulled by the Church of England until 1533, but Catherine of Aragon never accepted the decision and maintained that she was Henry’s wife and the queen until her death from natural causes in 1536).

The French monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, Thomas Wolsey, and Henry’s and Wolsey’s enemies at court were major players in where English international relations were in 1525 and how they were quickly thrown up in the air and changed dramatically within a year.

By 1520, France and the Hapsburg dynasty were becoming the powers to be reckoned with in Western Europe. In 1520, eager for a Franco-Anglo alliance, Thomas Wolsey arranged a meeting between Francis I, the king of France and Henry VIII at Field of the Cloth of Gold in the Netherlands in 1520.

Henry and Francis were very much alike in their educations, interests, and athleticism. They were also both extremely competitive. In addition to the political purposes of this meeting, tournaments had been arranged to show off the skills and abilities of the two young kings with the agreement that they would not compete against each other.

Henry broke the agreement – an act of unquintessential leadership that he became well known for – by challenging Francis to a wrestling match in which Henry emerged as the loser.

As a result, no alliance came out of the two-week meeting and relations with France were definitely worsening.

Not long after the Field of the Cloth meeting, the ever-scheming Wolsey, whose greatest aspiration was to be a pope, decided to throw England’s lot in with Charles V, who was at the time the king of the Hapsburg dynasty.

(After defeating Pope Clement VII in Rome in 1527, Charles and Pope Clement became allies. In 1530 Pope Clement VII crowned Charles as the Holy Roman Emperor, so Charles’ ties to the Roman Catholic Church were not only strong and close, but unbreakable, and he could exert a lot of influence over papal decisions.)

Charles V was also the nephew of Catherine of Aragon and his allegiance to his aunt was unquestioning.

In the 1520 meeting that Wolsey arranged between Charles V and Henry VIII, they agreed to form an alliance against France, with Charles providing the land power and Henry providing the sea power. In addition, Mary I was betrothed in marriage to Charles V, which strengthened the bond of the alliance.

Charles led a very successful campaign against France, capturing Francis I in the first battle in 1525. This was also the year that Anne Boleyn came to court.

The same year Henry named his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, as heir to the throne, and gave him the titles and lands that would ensure his succession. The move infuriated Catherine, who believed Mary should be the heir to the throne, and perhaps initiated the bitterness that consumed her, understandably, the rest of her life.

Even though Henry had a male heir in place, he still wanted a legitimate male heir to succeed him. This driving desire brought out other unquintessential leadership traits in Henry that would be present the rest of his reign: changing the rules when they didn’t suit him, bullying, and trying to force everything to go the way he wanted it to and if it failed, blaming anyone and everyone involved and eliminating them by arrest on false charges and execution. The bloody period of Henry VIII’s reign was about to begin.

Anne Boleyn had already caught Henry’s eye. However, she refused to become his mistress and indirectly told him the only way Henry could have her was if Anne was his wife. Eager for a legitimate male heir and convinced, probably accurately, that Catherine would never be able to give him a male heir, Henry sought a way to dissolve his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Citing “new ecclesiastical understanding” based on Leviticus 18:16, Henry met with Wolsey and told him that God had cursed the marriage and he wanted Wolsey to go to Pope Clement and have it annulled. Henry used the issue of not knowing whether the marriage between Arthur and Catherine had been consummated (it is unlikely it was and Catherine maintained that it had not been, in which case the scripture wouldn’t apply), but passionately said that piety and obedience to God left him no choice but to end the marriage.

Wolsey was a shrewd politician and understood the position Henry was putting himself and Wolsey in politically and religiously and tried to talk Henry out of divorcing Catherine. Henry, showing another unquintessential leadership trait, refused to listen and demanded that Wolsey obtain the annulment. 

Pope Clement VII, at first, simply ignored Wolsey’s request. At the time, he and Charles V were enemies, and he knew that granting the annulment would have serious consequences for Rome. Henry kept pushing Wolsey and Catherine began a campaign of her own to save the marriage by sending surreptitious messages to Charles asking him to intervene.

When Charles heard that Henry wanted to divorce his aunt, while he did not intervene then with the pope, he immediately ended his engagement to Mary and took a wife. When Henry found out, he ended his alliance with Charles and entered into an alliance with France against him.

Meanwhile, Wolsey was between a rock and a hard place. Pope Clement, who had by now been captured in Charles’ defeat of Rome, had given him the authority to have a convocation of the cardinals in England to get the facts together, but had denied them any authority to make a binding decision. 

The struggle between the pope and Wolsey and Henry, who by 1528 had declared, in another unquintessential leadership stance, the sole and supreme religious and political law in England. While Henry didn’t directly, at this point, say the church in Rome didn’t have any authority over him, he certainly implied it. Henry began to take his case to the citizens of England, hoping to gain mass support from his subjects. 

He had two big obstacles. One was the sheer power the Catholic church had over aspects of the average Englishman’s life. The church was the center of English life. The second was Catherine’s popularity among the people, and the sense they had that she was getting a raw deal from Henry.

Obstacles like these never deterred Henry. As an unquintessential leader, he just bulldozed over everything that stood in his way, doing whatever he wanted to get the outcome he wanted. He certainly lived by the motto that “the end justifies the means.”

Wolsey continued to unsuccessfully try to obtain the annulment. Finally, Henry got fed up with his failure to do so – and because Anne Boleyn didn’t like and didn’t trust, for good reason, Wolsey and urged Henry to get rid of him – and had him arrested in November 1530 on charges of treason. Wolsey died of apparently natural causes – but who knows? – on his way to his trial on those charges later that month. Had he not, there is absolutely no doubt he would have been convicted and executed.

By 1531, Henry had moved further toward openly questioning the authority and the power of the pope and the Catholic church. He sent all the evidence for the divorce and the ensuing cardinal convocations with papal restrictions to the leading theological scholars at all the major universities in Europe to ask for their opinions. They were all in agreement that Pope Clement had exceeded the limits of his power and authority.

He also had English theologians developing reforms to the church in England, which included non-papal and non-Roman authority but only English authority – with the ruler as the head of the church – and he took the legal arguments to Parliament to adjudicate in December of 1531. Parliament also agreed that the pope had abused his power.

Pope Clement obviously was not happy with these developments and warned Henry of excommunication if he continued. However, Henry barged forward.

Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief statesman and an ardent supporter of the English reformation (a position that led him down a path similar to Wolsey’s in actions and made him a hated enemy of those in the English court who did not want to break with Rome), called a meeting of the English bishops in which he charged them with treason because of their loyalty oaths to the pope which conflicted with their loyalty to Henry.

The bishops realized the untenable situation they – and their lives – were in, and when they were brought to court to face the charges at Henry’s request, they offered Henry money and pledged their loyalty to him as “the supreme head of the Church of England.”

Henry took the bishops’ pledge to Parliament in January of 1532 and demanded that they produce official legislation that codified the pledge of loyalty to him, while keeping Catholicism as the official faith of England. This precipitated the final break with Rome.

In 1532, Thomas Cromwell engineered a meeting between English church officials and Parliament from which a conclusion was reached that an appeal to Rome about the dissolution of Henry and Catherine’s marriage was not necessary. The result was an English conclave of the bishops and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which the decision was made to allow the divorce of Henry and Catherine.

This resulted in the immediate severance of the English church from Rome, Henry being excommunicated, and the door opened for his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Catherine, however, continued to appeal to Rome, as a Catholic in good standing, until her death to intervene and restore the marriage. The bridges that Henry burned made her appeal fall on deaf ears.

In January 1533, with a new/old (Henry never gave up his Catholic beliefs and the Church of England stayed essentially Catholic in theology and look and feel, much as it does even today) church in place with Henry as its supreme leader, Henry and Anne were married.

Another unquintessential leadership trait that Henry had now becomes more apparent: the chase appeals to him far more than the conquest. By all accounts, the marriage was tumultuous. Henry began cheating on Anne almost immediately, and she, unlike Catherine, but very much like Henry, was strong-willed, opinionated, and not afraid to fight with Henry. Anne also made many enemies at court because she was  a strong person, so there were many people eager for a chance to undermine her and get rid of her.

Perhaps Anne’s worst fault, in Henry’s eyes, was that she didn’t give him a legitimate male heir. The marriage produced a daughter, Elizabeth I, in September 1533, who in the end succeeded Henry VIII, but not without her own wild and crazy ride to succession, but if there were any other pregnancies, they ended in miscarriage.

Anne’s enemies in court, sensing Henry’s disillusionment with her, began badmouthing her to Henry as early as 1534. Another unquintessential leadership trait that Henry had is that he listened to and believed them because it would give him an excuse to get rid of her and marry again in hopes of producing a legitimate male heir.

On May 2, 1536, Henry had Anne arrested on charges of adultery (unproven) and witchcraft (also unproven, but the highly-charged superstitious mindset that had developed during the Middle Ages and cast a long shadow over human thinking until the 18th Century, was very much alive and well), among others.

Anne was executed by beheading 17 days later on May 19, 1536. That this is unquintessential leadership should go without saying.

In the next post, we’ll do a quintessential leadership analysis on the last 11 years of Henry VIII’s life and reign.

Quintessential Leadership Analysis of King Henry VIII – Pt. 1 – The Early Years

Posted: February 15, 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, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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This begins the series of posts that will do quintessential leadership analyses on historically-significant people in leadership positions. Today’s post will look at the early  years of King Henry VIII of England.

And just to get the levity out of the way, while I was thinking about this and refreshing my memory on some of the details, I was amused by how many times the scene from the movie, Ghost, where Patrick Swayze sings “Henry the 8th” to Whoopi Goldberg until she agrees to help him, drifted in and out of the serious research I was doing. It’s a very funny scene, and obviously, quite effective from a cinematic standpoint.

But on to the the real Henry VIII and the quintessential leadership analysis of the first part of his life.

Henry VIII was born in 1491, one year before Christopher Columbus, under the patronage of King Ferdinand and Queen Isabella of Spain, would begin the series of voyages that would change North, Central, and South America, and the Caribbean islands forever…and not for the better.

He was the second son born to Henry VII, the first monarch in the Tudor dynasty. Henry VII came to throne after defeating Richard III (whose remains were recently discovered) in 1485 during the Battle at Bosworth Field. As a side note, one of my favorite Shakespeare plays is The Life and Death of Richard the Third. It, however, must be read in the context of when it was written – during Elizabeth I’s reign – so the portrayals are very favorably skewed toward the Tudors and very harshly skewed against the Plantagenets, of which Richard III was the last ruler.

Being the second son of Henry VII, who by all accounts was the exact opposite of Henry VIII in every way except the obsessive paranoia that plagued both men (Henry VII seems to have always been very paranoid, while Henry VIII became more paranoid in the last half of his life), Henry VIII started life with the prospect of being a simply a prince, since his older brother, Arthur, was heir to the throne. 

In many ways, in hindsight, it’s because of Henry VIII’s birth order that his formal education included so little government and economics, consisting primarily of what we now call liberal arts: languages, literature, music, and art. That is also what probably gave him the air of being a “Renaissance Man.” Henry VIII was very intelligent and very gifted. He was an accomplished author and musician. He was also a gifted athlete. He had a passion for gambling as well. These were the things that Henry VIII enjoyed and loved to spend his time doing.

Great for a prince, probably (I think of Prince Charles of England now as an example), but awful for a king. And some of these interests and proclivities were what made him dangerous – and an unquintessential leader – as a king.

Henry VIII was also a devout Roman Catholic, very knowledgeable on liturgy and theology, and authored a best-selling book in Europe denouncing Martin Luther and supporting the church in Rome. Paradoxically, Henry VIII Henry VIII as a young manwas also very handsome as a young man and, even before his marriages, had begun to be a womanizer. Like so many things in Henry VIII’s life, his professed beliefs and the contradictory behavior showed an unquintessential leader at the very core. It also, and this became more apparent throughout his life, showed a complete lack of self-control – also an unquintessential leadership trait.

Henry VII arranged a marriage early on for Arthur with the youngest daughter of Ferdinand and Isabella, Catherine of Aragon. The young couple married in 1501, but Arthur died five months after they were married.

After Authur’s death, Henry VII offered Henry VIII, who was 10 years old at the time, to Ferdinand and Isabella as a husband for Catherine, who was five years older, when he was old enough. These were political marriages and with Spain still at the top of game in Europe, Henry VII wanted to ensure peace and prosperity for England by a continue alliance with Ferdinand and Isabella. The logic was pragmatic: it’s unlikely, although not impossible, that a ruler will initiate a war against a country where one of his children is the spouse of the ruler.

Ferdinand and Isabella agreed.

When Henry VIII was eligible to marry Catherine at age 14, he rejected the marriage at the insistence of Henry VII, mainly because Isabella had died and Spain was not as politically strong nor as valuable to have as an ally. However, after Henry VII’s death, beginning a long series of unnecessary “in-your-face” decisions in opposition to his late father, Henry VIII married Catherine. It was a decision that would, in time, change the course of English and European history forever.

Henry VIII’s early reign showed many unquintessential leadership traits (although, some stayed the same throughout his reign, others replaced the younger ones as time went on). One that stayed the same was his method of dealing with people – all people – who were either inconvenient or got in his way. He simply got rid of them. The first two people he had executed were two of his father’s advisors, Richard Empson and Edmund Dudley.

Other unquintessential leadership traits became apparent in the way Henry VIII governed – or, more precisely, didn’t govern – early on. For some time after ascending to the throne, Henry VIII lived much the same life he lived as a prince, devoting most of his time to doing the things he enjoyed and following his passions. The unquintessential leadership trait that emerged was handing all the governing responsibilities over to a single person – Thomas Wolsey – who both quickly started consolidating his own power and making a lot of enemies. The fractious and dangerous environment of Henry VIII’s court began here. Henry, when he finally did decide to take complete control (another unquintessential leadership trait), used this to his advantage, encouraging and instigating the constant atmosphere of fear, intrigue, suspicion, and lies that led to death that characterize his reign. None of this was quintessential leadership.

He was a spendthrift all his life. His tastes were lavish, excessive, and his need for instant gratification quickly took the English coffers from the economically-stable position that Henry VII had left them in to a constant need for cash infusions throughout Henry VIII’s reign, which ended with him and England deeply in debt.

In part II of this look at Henry VIII, we’ll pick up at the point where his marriage to Catherine became inconvenient.

Unquintessential Leadership News for Week Ending February 15, 2013

Posted: February 15, 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, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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I plan to make this a weekly feature on this blog, beginning with today’s post. I’ve done this type of post a couple of times already this year, breaking a story or two down in detail.

However, beginning with this post I will summarize the stories – some you’ve heard and some you probably missed – and give a big-picture statement about the the failure of quintessential leadership in each of them, and then invite you, as quintessential leaders, to do your own more in-depth analysis about the quintessential leadership failure aspects of each of them.

I do this because the heart and core of who I am is a coach. My role as a coach is to highlight and guide, but I firmly believe that each of us must actually put some effort into the analysis, the learning, and the application process to fully benefit from it. We’re on this journey to become fully quintessential leaders together. Therefore, we must all be engaged and participating in the process. I invite you to join me in meeting that goal.

The first story of unquintessential leadership that caught my attention this week was the FBI sting that left 10 Atlanta police officers facing corruption charges, when it became clear that they were accepting large sums of money from street gangs to provide protection during drug deals. Law enforcement is entrusted with protecting those of us who obey the laws – local, state, national – and removing those who don’t – street gangs and drug dealers certainly are among those – and this is yet another example of that trust and trustworthiness being broken.  That is unquintessential leadership.

For a detailed and in-depth discussion of the components and traits involved in building trust and being trustworthy, please purchase my eBook, Building Trust and Being Trustworthy. You can also purchase a paperback copy from Amazon or a Kindle version.

The second story also involves law enforcement – Chris Dorner, who was terminated by the Los Angeles Police Department in 2009, and took a resoundingly unquintessential leadership route to protest what he believed was an unfair and unmerited – which it could well have been – termination. It doesn’t take much, from a big-picture point of view, to see how this is unquintessential leadership. Any claims that Dorner had about bias, prejudice, and mistreatment during his tenure and in his termination from the LAPD (he laid this out in a very coherent, well-organized document that shows this was an intelligent, sane man talking) were erased by how he chose to force the issue: with threats, murders, and hostage-taking. Eventually it cost Chris Dorner his life – who didn’t know that would be how it ended? – but if there were any real problems that he wanted addressed and corrected, no one will listen or do anything about it because the last actions of his life seem to support his termination.

Beyond the obvious – I do hope the obvious is obvious – what can we learn from this about how we resolve issues and about how our methods need to be consistent with quintessential leadership? It’s important to remember that not every issue, dispute, or disagreement is win or lose, with no in between. Some are. But those involve moral foundations and principles and are non-negotiable under any circumstances.

But for the everyday issues, disputes, and disagreements we deal with, are we able to see that a draw is sometimes quintessential leadership in action? The “how” we do something matters as much as the “what” and “why.” Are you the kind of person who draws a line in the sand about absolutely everything? If so, you’re not a quintessential leader.

I urge you to take some time to think about this in your own lives. I have seen many people with legitimate whats and whys go down in flames because of how they tried to address and resolve them. On the other hand, I’ve seen just as many people who had absolutely no basis for their whats and whys – in in many cases, were completely on the wrong side of everything – prevail because of how they dealt with them. Both of these are the extremes, but it should be a lesson for us.

Another story of unquintessential leadership this week involves a company. Carnival Cruise Lines failed all leadership tests this week with their handling of the result of an engine room fire on Carnival Triumph earlier this week. The right – and quintessential leadership – action would have been to send some means of rescue (ferries, another ship with support to do the transfer, etc.) out immediately. Carnival Cruise Lines didn’t do that because of the cost involved. Their greed – as well as their belief that their industry is “bullet-proof” – underlines the lack of quintessential leadership at this company.

I read a statement from Carnival Cruise Line CEO Gerry Cahill this morning and if I were on the board of directors for this company, he would have been terminated right after this statement: “We pride ourselves on providing our guests with a great vacation experience, and clearly we failed in this particular case.”  Failure was simply a matter of not providing a great vacation experience? Mr. Cahill is an unquintessential leader in action.

Another continuing story of unquintessential leadership this week are the Armed Services Committee confirmation hearings on Chuck Hagel as Secretary of Defense. The “politics-as-usual” circus surrounding this highlights how much of a lack of any quintessential leadership there is in American politics. But freshman senator Ted Cruz of Texas brought the unquintessential leadership spotlight on himself this week during the hearings. Read the story. This is not quintessential leadership. Period.

And the last story of unquintessential leadership that I’ll point out today is the story of Oscar Pistorius. You can read the story if you don’t know it already. Any time I hear of athletes involved in incidents like this, my first thought goes to overinflated egos – an unquintessential leadership trait. My second thought goes to the rampant use of performance-enhancing drugs among professional and Olympic athletes, which is illegal, unfair, and wrong – also unquintessential leadership traits – and the emotional and hormonal side-effects of those drugs, which can contribute to actions like these.

Ultimately, though, the full responsibility for this falls solely and completely on Oscar Pistorius. If he took performance-enhancing drugs, he knew the risks, and he made the choice. All the tears, shaking, and “strongest denials possible” won’t change the fact the he is responsible for every choice he made – including this one.

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