Amazon’s unquintessential leadership is not confined to their corporate office. It literally permeates the entire company including their fulfillment centers from which all shipping of purchases directly from Amazon are done.
Unfortunately, Amazon customers are unknowingly complicit in this aspect of unquintessential leadership, although their demand – and payment for, in the case of Amazon Prime – is why this aspect is in place. Read the rest of this entry »
Sometimes it’s helpful to take a step back from something and look at the big picture in broad terms. What quintessential leadership looks like is no different.
This blog looks at specific aspects of quintessential – and unquintessential – leadership in detail more often than not because it’s in the details that determine which type of leader we are and how to move toward quintessential leadership if we are not already on that path. Read the rest of this entry »
It seems that it’s much easier for us to give easy and voluminous lip service to committing to do something than it is for us to actually take the actions and efforts to follow through on commitments we’ve made.
Part of the reason is that we don’t take our verbal commitments very seriously. They’re easy to say and take so little time and they temporarily pacify whomever we are talking to. But the reality is that there is no real intent to follow through behind them.
Another part of the reason is that we tend to over-commit, even though we can’t possibly follow through on everything we commit to, because we want to please people or we don’t want to disappoint them.
And still another part of the reason is that our tendency to commit to doing things that we end up not following through on is to make ourselves look good in the eyes of others as being generous benefactors.
No matter what the reasons are why we don’t follow through on the many commitments we make every day, the fact that we don’t follow through puts us on the path of unquintessential leadership.
Why?
Because quintessential leaders strive to follow through on their commitments, it’s important to go behind the scenes to examine how they do it (what this looks like) in a world where the majority of people, including those in leadership positions, fail to follow through on their commitments.
Quintessential leaders follow through on their commitments by:
Quintessential leaders value quality over quantity. They also value substantive action over superfluous talk.
That is why quintessential leaders carefully choose – and have no problem saying “No” to things and people – what they commit themselves to and follow through with.
Quintessential leaders are also people who do the right things for the right reasons, striving for anonymity and being completely under the radar.
Unlike the many people who say they’ll do something so that they’ll look good to other people, yet they fail to follow through at all, quintessential leaders always ensure that their left hands don’t know what their right hands are doing.
As we look at our own leadership lives – wherever we are in life, we lead at least one team and our lives are living examples to everyone around us to either reject or emulate – we must ask ourselves about our commitments and our follow through.
How are we doing?
The day a human being – other than teenagers, who don’t know any better – decides they know it all and there is nothing else to learn or no reason to continue educating themselves is the day they die from the inside out.
When people in leadership positions do this, they become foolish, ignorant, and irrelevant, fit for nothing more than to go live as a hermit in a cave somewhere.
Because when people in leadership positions stop learning and stop educating themselves, they become useless.
We live in a world where ego breeds ignorance in people in leadership positions. Increasingly, this triumph of ego over knowledge (I’ve discussed this before) is applauded, embraced, and endorsed.
When this egotism and ignorance is in people in leadership positions, two things happen.
For the majority of people impacted by them, an increase in gullibility (engendered by each of these people’s failure to continue to learn and educate themselves, preferring instead to let media and technology appeal to their baser – and ignorant – natures and give them neatly-packaged, but erroneous, talking points they can parrot) leads the majority just to accept whatever they hear as being true. Ignorance, then, perpetuates itself throughout society.
For the minority of people who are continuing to learn and educate themselves, these people in leadership positions lose their respect and their trust. And they lose this minority of people who either internally, first, and physically, eventually, walk away from them for good.
I’ll give a real-life example of this kind of ignorance because I hear and have heard statements about this over and over.
Not long ago, a person in a leadership position was talking to a group of people, which I was among. The person told the group that President George W. Bush didn’t know anything about the threat of attacks on 9/11/01 just like President Franklin D. Roosevelt didn’t know anything about the threat of attack on Pearl Harbor.
I sat there in disbelief because because both statements were totally false and if this person who is in a leadership position had continued learning and educating themselves, they would have never made those statements.
History has revealed that both presidents were well aware that the respective attacks were not only probable, but imminent. They chose to ignore that information because the attacks would give them the go-ahead to do what they would not be able to do any other way.
In President Roosevelt’s case, the only way the United States could get into World War II officially (it had already been unofficially involved since the late 1930’s) with the support of the American people was if America was attacked. Therefore, the attack on Pearl Harbor was his (and his advisors’) ticket into the global conflict.
In President Bush’s case, one of his objectives was to finish the job in Iraq – killing Saddam Hussein – that had been unfinished when the Gulf War (August 1990 – February 1991) ended.
He couldn’t just go attack, so he had to find a way to be in the Middle East. Al Qaeda’s uptick in activity and increased direct threats to the United States gave President Bush (and his advisors) the promise of an open door to complete his ultimate objective. When the attack came, the door opened.
Perhaps it’s hard to believe that a country would let its own people die in order the meet other objectives.
However, anyone who is continuing to learn and continuing their education – which includes history – will know that’s been the story of humanity.
Ignorance of the truth of our story as a species leads to more ignorance about our story in all its organizational contexts and ignorance about our story as individuals. The net effect is that we have no clue about the big picture and we believe lies and perpetuate them.
Because quintessential leaders keep the big picture in mind all the time, they know they don’t know everything about everything, and they know that ignorance breeds lies (quintessential leaders value and ensure, to the best of their abilities, truth in everything), quintessential leaders never stop learning and they never stop educating themselves.
How?
As anybody whose been through both the K-12 and higher educational systems in the United States knows very little learning and education happens in the process.
Much of what is taught are the propagated lies and sheer memorization of them (there are exceptions to this and I was fortunate enough to have a handful of educators along the way who were exceptions, just as I was fortunate enough to have parents who put a high premium on lifelong learning and education).
We come out of these systems with necessary pieces of paper, but, in most cases, very little real education and knowledge.
And that is when quintessential leaders embark on their lifelong quest for learning and education.
Quintessential leaders read widely. They read the classics (quality fiction), but mostly they read non-fiction on a wide variety of topics of substance.
Quintessential leaders know how to test and prove or disprove what they read. The more a person reads (and I’m talking about spending quiet and focused hours, not skimming something on 
the internet and saying you read it) the better they become at discernment and at being able to determine what is true and what is not.
Quintessential leaders know how to think about and apply what they read because what they’ve learned stays with them and becomes a part of their collective reserve of information and their behavior.
Because quintessential leaders are well-read, they are very attuned to verbal inconsistencies and outright verbal ignorance.
Without that learning and educational process continuing, quintessential leaders would be susceptible to believing everything they hear (or read), because discernment, understanding, and knowledge is absent.
As always, we must, as quintessential leaders, look at our own lives to see whether we are on a journey of lifelong learning and education.
Therefore, we need to ask ourselves some questions:
If we are not committed to and actively pursuing a lifelong commitment to learning and educating ourselves, then we are not quintessential leaders.
How are we doing?
We live in a society that is fundamentally dishonest. Nothing is ever as it seems. Lying is the norm. Selfishness and self interests drive everything we see, hear, and read.
Unfortunately, most of us – those in leadership positions and those who are not – are the perpetrators of this fundamental dishonesty and lying because we have become consumed by self-centeredness and our own self interests.
A predominant aspect of this fundamental dishonesty is our overriding propensity toward manipulation. We manipulate people. We manipulate situations. We manipulate things.
Manipulation is an unquintessential leader trait.
Manipulation is insidious. Most of us aren’t aware of how much of our daily lives are based on manipulation.
Manipulation is subtle. It comes couched in altruistic coverings that hide the real purpose behind the manipulation (the hidden agenda).
Manipulation – doing it and resisting it – is a vulnerability for all of us because it plays on our emotions.
Emotions are the weak spot for each of us. Emotions are fickle, volatile, and unreliable in terms of making sane, logical, and rational decisions.
That is why manipulation works so well. It usually catches us off guard and depending on what emotional buttons get pushed – practiced manipulators can read these emotional buttons like the backs of their hands, even if they don’t know the people, situations and things they are manipulating – we can fall for it before we even realize what’s happened.
Manipulation is essentially emotional blackmail.
There are a lot of people who have perfected emotional blackmail, both those in leadership positions and those not in leadership positions.
It’s important to remember that manipulation is not something that just crops up in adulthood. Manipulators are sometimes born, but they most often are developed from a very early age.
There is something fundamental in our human character that steers us even as toddlers to try to find a way to gain an advantage over others – namely the adults in our lives – and get what we want.
We all usually try manipulation first. If the adults in our lives allow us to get what we want through manipulation, then we develop the habit of defaulting to manipulation as how we interact with everything else in our lives.
With time and opportunity, we get really good at manipulation. Eventually, unchecked, we perfect it until we simply don’t know any other way than manipulation to operate in the world.
If this is our lives’ trajectory, then we also become fundamentally deceptive, dishonest, and devoid of integrity, character, and trustworthiness.
There are common emotional buttons that are pushed by experienced manipulators. These buttons are based on the primal emotions that drive the human race.
The most common emotional button that seasoned manipulators push is fear. These include:
Another common emotional button that skilled manipulators push is sympathy.
Sympathy is something that experienced manipulators don’t 
feel and practice themselves (in fact, manipulators are extremely harsh toward and brutally critical of everyone else and habitually advocate no sympathy for anyone else but themselves), but they are exceptionally good at generating it for themselves.
The sympathy emotional button gets pushed by the manipulator in the following ways:
A final common emotional button that experienced manipulators push is guilt.
Guilt is, in my opinion, the most subjective emotion we have and skilled manipulators don’t access it directly, but instead use insinuation.
The guilt emotional button is sometimes pushed by this statement:
Guilt emotional buttons, however, most often get pushed by some form of these two basic questions about what the manipulator has supposedly done for the person they are trying to manipulate:
The interesting thing about manipulators and the guilt emotional button is that the manipulator is always manufacturing a past that never happened (i.e., the balance sheet is not in their favor and often is the exact opposite of what they are insinuating).
But the combination of lifelong manipulators with our innate – and sometimes outsized – human capacity to experience guilt (even if we haven’t done anything wrong – am I the only one who gets a little nervous when a police car is behind me on the road even though I’m obeying all the traffic laws?) makes this emotional button harder to handle logically, and it is, in my opinion, the one to which we are most susceptible.
One of the most maddening things about manipulation and manipulators, though, is that they expect everything and give nothing.
Manipulation is selfishness and self-centeredness on steroids. Manipulators will not give up anything. They will not take responsibility for anything.
Manipulators will vengefully attack anyone and everyone who resists and refuses to fall for their manipulation.
In fact, manipulators fight back against this by making the resistors and the refusers of their attempts to manipulate the “bad guys.”
Manipulators do this loudly, publicly, and relentlessly. And because they are effective liars, manipulators usually manage to convince a lot of people that those who can’t and won’t be manipulated are horrible, awful, despicable people who deserve nothing but contempt and derision.
For the majority of people who fall for the lies of manipulators, these resistors and refusers effectively cease to exist as part of the human race.
It happens every day. Innumerable times a day.
Stop.
Look.
Listen.
Manipulation is all around us. Perhaps manipulation is in us.
Because we are striving to be quintessential leaders, we have to be aware of what manipulation looks like and how much of it may have crept into our own lives in our words and our actions.
That means being brutally honest with ourselves and asking the tough questions of ourselves.
Whether we are manipulators or not depends on our motivation in everything in our lives.
As quintessential leaders, we must ask and answer these questions of ourselves continually:
If we’re honest – and those of us striving to be quintessential leaders say we are honest, so we must back that up with proof in a world that is fundamentally dishonest – we may find that a lot of what we say and do on a daily basis is designed to manipulate people, situations, and things to work in our favor and for our benefit.
This is the difficult work of quintessential leadership.
Most people are unable and unwilling to do it because it means changing who and what they are at the core level of their lives.
It means doing the right thing all the time, no matter what the personal cost. It means giving up some things. It means being selfless, even when it would be a piece of cake to fulfill our selfish desires.
Quintessential leaders are not most people.
How are we doing?
The lack of a synchronized life of imitable authenticity among humans – and people in leadership positions – in what they say, who they are, and how they conduct every part of their lives is bemoaned almost constantly.
The reality is that what we do observe is an abundance of synchronized lives of not-to-be-imitated authenticity, more so now than ever before.
We now live in a society where being fundamentally selfish, self-centered, and driven by power and greed – something often hidden or obscured from public view in times past – has become not only visible, but accepted, expected, and applauded.
While some people in leadership positions posture with a public face of integrity, honesty, selflessness, transparency, and altruism with their words when their actions are the exact opposite (these are the ones who cause the bemoaning), most people in leadership positions now don’t try to hide how nefarious they are as people and in their leadership positions.
Bullying, cheating, one-upping, fighting, lying, treating people abominably, being perpetually profane and denigrating, and overall defective character among people in leadership positions is now considered admirable and the mark of strong leadership.
Are we who say we are striving to be quintessential leaders different? We should be. Increasingly, though, it seems that although we say we are different, in fact everything else about us says that we are less different that we purport to be.
In other words, we are hypocrites, saying one thing about ourselves while the rest of our lives says the exact opposite. It seems that we have gotten comfortable lying to ourselves – and others – about ourselves.
When we live (and believe) a lie – saying one thing and doing and being something completely different – we are not quintessential leaders, but instead we are destroyers.
Most importantly, we destroy trust. With trust, we destroy credibility. When we lose trust and credibility, we destroy our teams. In every part of our lives.
Oh yes, the people around us may do – or pretend to do – what we tell them to, but it is not out of trust and respect.
For a few – and it’s a small few – of our teams, the reason is fear.
For most of our teams, though, it is a stopgap measure until – and they are scrambling to find the fastest exit – they can get as far away from us as possible.
If we’re losing our teams in droves, as quintessential leaders (this implies we care and we don’t want to lose them – no effort means we were lying about being quintessential leaders to begin with) we need to ask ourselves the following questions.
Do we want to inspire fear in our teams? Do we want to threaten and coerce our teams into doing whatever we want or else? Do we want our communication to be profane, denigrating, disrespectful, and dismissive?
Are we willing to cheat – the end justifies the means – anywhere and everywhere in our lives to get what we want and/or to get ahead? Are we willing to throw other people under the bus to make ourselves look good? Are we willing to be dishonest (lying, stealing, faking) to either avoid consequences or to get more for ourselves?
Do we care about our teams or are they just expendable commodities that we use, abuse, and then throw away when we can’t use and abuse them anymore? Are we sycophants with people we see as useful or important and tyrants with everyone else?
Who are we really? Do we know? Do we care? Does it matter?
The people we are best at fooling are ourselves. Most of us, even those of us who are striving to be quintessential leaders, are not aware of the depth of our self-deception about who and what we really are on the inside.
Today, I challenge each of us to take stock of ourselves, of our lives, and of the disconnects we make between what we say we are and what we actually are.
We all have disconnects in our lives. Quintessential leaders acknowledge that, become aware of theirs, and undertake the process of doing something about it.
That’s imitable authenticity and that is a repeatable step (we can’t do it once and believe we’re done – it must be a daily part of our lives) that will lead to a synchronized life that sets a positive, realistic, and credible example to all the teams in our lives.
Anything less is unacceptable for quintessential leaders.
How are we doing?
The Quintessential Leader 