Organizational Dysfunction – A Total Absence of Quintessential Leadership at the Top

Posted: November 30, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2

There is a proverb that says insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results. That quote is commonly attributed to Albert Einstein, but there is no definitive proof he actually said it. However, being pretty familiar with Albert Einstein as a person, philosopher, mathematician, and scientist, it seems very consistent with the way he thought and lived his life and did his work.

Organizational dysfunction starts with this definition of insanity. The reality is that most organizations that exist, wherever or in whatever sector of the world, have some dysfunction in them. Humans, by nature, are dysfunctional, and since humans make up organizations, it follows that dysfunction, to some degree, will exist.

With quintessential leadership at the top, though, most of the dysfunction can be changed or eliminated so that the organization itself is not dysfunctional.

However, when there is no quintessential leadership at the top levels of an organization, the organization becomes dysfunctional. The interesting thing about dysfunction, which is abnormal or impaired function, is that once it becomes the norm, it only gets worse until the whole system – in this case, organizations – fails and eventually dies.

Ironically, as organizations get more dysfunctional, the more effort people in top leadership positions put into attempting to save the organizations from death by doing the same wrong, non-working, and sometimes just plain dumb things that made the organizations so dysfunctional to begin with. When I see this, it reminds me of someone hyperventilating and when the panic of not being able to breathe sets in, the person hyperventilates even more, making it even more impossible to breathe.

It’s counterintuitive, isn’t it? It doesn’t make sense, does it? And, yet, in every dysfunctional organization, when the big picture is analyzed to see how the organization got to where it is and what the organization’s response is, it’s the same reaction as a person who’s hyperventilating and panics.

There are many obvious signs of organizational dysfunction and a lack of quintessential leadership at the top, just as there are signs of deepening dysfunction within an organization, but I’ll cover just a few of these here today.

A tell-tale sign of organizational dysfunction is elitism and an upper class (who’s important) and everyone else (who’s not). If you see “us” and “them” or “we’re special and you’re not” in organizational thinking, you’re dealing with organizational dysfunction.

Elitism and upper classes are created by a group of people, starting with the people in top leadership positions, who confer on themselves (and make sure everyone else knows), with no basis for doing so, an elevated and special status above everyone else in the organization. This group pitches this status out like a bone to a dog to the rest of the organization as something to aspire to and it creates minions and sychophants who, driven by a desire to be part of the upper class and have its self-conferred power and nothing else, will do anything, legal or illegal, moral or immoral, right or wrong, good or bad to get there.

These people naturally float to the sub-leadership positions (because all dysfunctional organizations have an elaborate multi-class structure) because they will also agree with everything the elitists say, do, and promote. This is a key reason why organizations get more dysfunctional because there is no one in a leadership position who is a quintessential leader and will say, “This isn’t working and we need to figure out why and how to correct it,” or “That’s wrong; here are the right ways that could be done,” or even “That’s a dumb idea. It’s failed over and over, so it’s time to start over and figure out how to implement a smart, workable idea.”

The irony is that the more dysfunctional an organization becomes, the less disagreement of any kind is tolerated, which means there’s simply no place for quintessential leadership in that organization in a way that will bring the organization out of its dysfunctional state (there will always be a few quintessential leaders even in the worst of dysfunctional organizations, but they will be mostly invisible except to the people who work directly with them).

When an organization reaches extreme dysfunction, then absolute agreement with everything about the organization becomes the mandate that is explicitly communicated to every individual in the organization with some sort of “either you’re with us or you’re against us” or “if you don’t agree, you might as well leave” statement attached and the threat of elimination from the organization if disagreement is found (whether expressed or suspected as a result of intense coercion, which is often employed at this point, to root out dissension).

Another sign of organizational dysfunction is that the people in top leadership positions make sure they’re taken care of, no matter what, to the exclusion of the rest of the organization. An example that illustrates this, which I read earlier this morning on Forbes’ website, is that of Hostess executives getting bonuses for the liquidation of the company while 18,000 people are losing their jobs.

The dysfunction of an organization begins when that organization structures itself by corporate charters and organizational documents so that the elite are protected and taken care of, while there is no similar protection or care given to the rest of the individuals in the organization (who fall into an “at-will” class – so, yes, there is a bottom class!). Additionally, and this is duplicitous and egregiously wrong on every level, many organizations use these founding documents to ensure that people who’ve been identified as the elite of the elite are the only ones eligible to assume the top positions in the organization. Often, these same organizations will offer a public posture of opening the floor up to democracy in filling these positions, which is dishonest, while the elite have made sure that only the people they want to fill those positions actually meet all the criteria.

And this sign leads to the next sign of organizational dysfunction, which is a lack of trust, a lack of respect, and a lack of loyalty to the organization by the individuals in that organization who are not in the elite class.

From an objective and big-picture standpoint, this is the inevitable result of watching, as a part of, an organization form dysfunctionally, operate dysfunctionally, and be seemingly clueless that its dysfunctional. 

And the response from the elite is just as baffling. They become more dysfunctional and the organization becomes more dysfunctional.

Instead of the elite looking around them and at themselves and realizing they’ve created and are perpetuating and worsening the organizational dysfunction, they make all the non-elite individuals in the organization the problem.

This is communicated in statements like “we don’t get the respect we deserve” and “nobody cares about loyalty anymore”. The reality is that when people in top leadership positions create and perpetuate dysfunctional organizations, it involves trust-breaking tactics (dishonesty, manipulation, and deceit, to name a few) and the result is a lack of loyalty to the organization (really, who in his or her right mind is going to pledge loyalty to an organization that, first, is not loyal to him or her, and second, has proven a lack of integrity by its actions?).

Once those statements are communicated, then the next step by the elite is to try to dictate and demand respect and loyalty by imposing very constrictive restrictions on the individuals in the organization. This creates a very hostile environment and destroys morale and motivation. 

At this point, the dysfunctional organization is already in the actively dying process. Some of the non-elite will start looking for an environment where quintessential leadership exists and they can trust, respect, and have a measure of loyalty (loyalty to humanly-devised organizations should not be absolute because humans – myself included – make mistakes, do things wrong, mess up, but the response to those screw-ups is what matters and what builds or destroys trust, respect, and loyalty) and leave as soon as they are able.

Others will just quit with no other prospects in sight and either drop out of the organizational pool altogether or become entrepreneurs and start their own organizations. And others – this will be the majority – will just quit and stay, ensuring the imminent death of the dysfunctional organization.

The saddest part of this is that dysfunctional organizations don’t have to exist. They shouldn’t exist. But until quintessential leadership is being lived, practiced, and a part of every individual within that organization – quintessential leaders mentor, coach, and provide the opportunity for everyone they interact with, professionally and personally, because that’s who they are, to learn how to be quintessential leaders – we will continue to have and see the increase of organizational dysfunction. 

Absolute Power Corrupts Absolutely

Posted: July 13, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
2

“”Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Great men are almost always bad men.”
John Emerich Edward Dalberg Acton

This week Judge Louis Freeh released the results of his investigation into Penn State’s culpability in Jerry Sandusky‘s unfathomable, despicable, and morally bankrupt abuse of children for a prolonged period of time and the picture that emerges is morally unconscionable, reprehensible, and disgusting for the university, for the football program, and for Joe Paterno.

There’s absolutely no doubt that Jerry Sandusky already proved himself worthy of those verbs many times over, but now after the release of the report, it is evident that so is everyone who else involved in positions of power with Penn State from 1998 to the present. And none more so than Joe Paterno.

I know next to nothing about college football. The fact that I know several coaches’ names is because I watched The Blind Side. But until then, the one name I recognized was Joe Paterno, who was resoundingly lauded for his discipline, principles, and morality with regard to the football program.

It turns out that was all a lie, idolatrous press – probably perpetuated by Paterno himself – that covered up who Joe Paterno really was. Paterno, it turns out, was the person with all the power at Penn State. And while there’s plenty blame to go around among to executive staff there because no one had the character and the guts to stand up to him and do the right thing no matter what, it’s clear that absolute power absolutely corrupted Joe Paterno.

The evidence shows that the only person Joe Paterno cared about was Joe Paterno. Whether he started out that way is open for speculation, but there is no doubt as he accrued power, he became selfish, self-centered, and self-absorbed – a total narcissist. If he ever had any to begin with, he lost all moral conviction, accountability, responsibility, compassion, and empathy.

It would be too simplistic to say it was simply because he didn’t want to lose power. The reality is that power became his idol and that became the driving force in his life. The picture that emerges is of a man who was a bully and a tyrant, a man devoid of care, concern, protectiveness, and love for anyone but himself and his empire.

In many ways, Joe Paterno is no different than Nero, than Hitler, than Stalin, than Pol Pot, than Idi Amin, than “Papa Doc” Duvalier, than any other brutal, malicious, destructive dictator that we can think of. If that sounds like hyperbole, it is not. This absolute corruption is something they all share.

There are calls for the NCAA to ban Penn State’s football program, but in the world of sports – and college sports and college football in particular – it is not uncommon for successful coaches to be given this kind of absolute power. And again and again, we see that it absolutely corrupts. Human lives become unimportant, good values and principles no longer matter, doing the right thing at all times is non-existent. Demagogues emerge and power, success, and money become all that matters and the demagogues will lie, cheat, steal, coerce, threaten, and even tolerate moral and legal wrong-doing to preserve them.

Taylor Branch wrote an article for The Atlantic in November 2011 – before the Sandusky/Penn State story broke – entitled “The Shame of College Sports,” which was a real eye-opener to me about this connection between ascending power, money, and success and the equal declination of principles, values, and care and concern for human beings and their lives. It’s well worth a read.

The Penn State story is a sad and obscene and abominable one, but I can guarantee you that it’s just one in an ever-expanding ocean of many. 

Taking a Short Break for Family Visits and Vacation

Posted: June 28, 2012 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership
0

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
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

“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.

The Most Quintessential Leader in My Experience

Posted: May 24, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

In my earlier post, The Most Unquintessential Leader in My Experience, I reviewed in summary form, the characteristics that made this person the antithesis of a quintessential leader. In today’s post, I will review the characteristics of the most quintessential leader I’ve had in my career. Much of what he taught me by example went over my head at the time – I encountered him on my second fulltime job out of college – but as time has passed, I find myself reflecting more and more on the invaluable lessons of quintessential leadership that he used and modeled for me and have tried to incorporate those in my own quintessential leadership.

Unlike the last post in which the unquintessential leader was nameless, I will name this person. He was Wayne Grovenburg. He died in a motorcycle accident in Oklahoma in 2000, so I’ve never gotten a chance to thank him personally for his great example, so this is my overdue tribute to his legacy as a quintessential leader.

I was hired by Wayne and another technical manager as a technical writer for a little – but growing – software company that had spun off from a larger long-established electrical components distribution company. The software had been developed in-house to handle the unique business cycle of a distribution company, but the executives of the existing company saw the potential of the need for this product by other distribution companies.

About half the employees were legacy employees with the parent company and about half had been hired when the new company started up. The person who had been writing the user documentation for the software was a legacy employee who was old compared to most of the other employees and had a quasi-marketing background. She wrote most of the marketing literature for the company and was involved in doing trade shows early on, but was phased out as the company looked for a more professional image.

The quasi-marketing person was my supervisor, but I reported ultimately to Wayne. The age difference between the quasi-marketing person and me was at least 30 years, so that alone set up the scenario for inevitable clashes. We were also both very intransigent when we believed we were right, so this added to the inevitability of butting heads. A lot. I was very young, very brash, and very confident in my knowledge and abilities. She was an aging employee who was, in the end, trying to keep a paycheck until she could retire and pursue her real interests, which were nebulous and ethereal. Her real interests were reflected in her writing style which didn’t sit well with my logical, down-to-earth, let’s-get-it done mentality. Another potential for conflict. She had no knowledge about technical writing; I had helped one of my college professors write a technical writing textbook while I was finishing up college, and I’d had about a year’s worth of experience working with real technical writers at a large software/hardware company, so I knew what I was doing.

Another technical writer was hired at the same time I was. She was a good bit older than me as well, but she had military technical writing experience, so we were okay together professionally.

My first day at work quasi-marketing person handed me one of the user manuals she had written and asked me to edit it. It was bad. I read the first of what we later covertly called “the Tony stories” and it was neither technical nor instructive. In fact, it was insulting from the perspective of the user because it basically explained the process of his or her job to them instead of showing how to use the software to do a job he or she already knew inside and out.

I grabbed one of the red pens I had gotten from the administrative assistants up front and got to work. When I handed the manual back to quasi-marketing person two hours later, she opened it up and immediately burst into tears seeing that most of the pages were bleeding with red ink. I had not expected an emotional response, but before I could even address that, she had run off to find Wayne.

Before she found him, though, she had tried to trash me, in hysterical tears by then, to almost everyone else in the company. Ironically, her first stop had been at the administrative assistants’ area. When I had met them all that morning, I made a point of noting their surroundings to see what was important to them, and had engaged in a little getting-to-know you conversation with each of them based on what I saw in their work areas. I knew, intuitively, that this group of people could make my time at this company pleasant or hell, and since I genuinely liked them, based on my brief interactions with them, I decided it was going to be as pleasant as I could make it.

Quasi-marketing person was also a bit of an elitist, so she talked down to the administrative assistants and also spent a good bit of time berating them. The only time she talked to them was when she had to, and there was no love lost between them and her (I got all of this in my introductions to them that morning). They, though, were the eyes and ears of the executives in the company, so I have no doubt the executives knew what quasi-marketing person was up to. Other than the president of the company, none of the rest of them had much use for her.

She finally found Wayne and went behind closed doors with him. I got a call from the administrative assistant to the president and she asked me to come up front (this began the pattern of how we would communicate when she was watching my back). When I got there, she and the other administrative assistants told me what happened and then said “Don’t worry. No one takes her seriously.”

After a couple more hours, Wayne came to my cube and asked me to go to lunch. We went and he gave me one of the most meaningful conversations and some of the best advice I’ve ever gotten professionally.

He wasn’t angry or upset with me. He wasn’t angry or upset with quasi-marketing person. But he realized that if the two of us could not figure how to tolerate each other without these flashfires – from her – every day, we’d get nothing done and he’d be spending all his time trying to referee between her and me, which meant he wouldn’t be getting his work done either.

He intuitively understood how to communicate with people and he was very effective in making his points without being critical or destructive to anyone. He also had that rare knack for knowing how to effectively communicate with each of his team members in spite of the diversity of our backgrounds and temperaments. And, of all the people I’ve worked for along the way, I never felt like I needed to put body armor on, even if the conversation was serious and I needed to make some changes for the good of the team and the company.

He made a very wise decision in putting the responsibility to keeping the relationship with quasi-marketing person in my hands. He knew that she was not going to change and that talking with her to help her see her deficits was an exercise in futility. So, in that lunch meeting, we had a heart-to-heart and he reminded me to stay focused on the company mission and on the big picture. He advised me to find less in-your-face ways of making changes – after all, that garbage that I’d read was exactly why he and the other technical manager hired me and he reminded me of that and the value they knew we were bringing to the company – and, if necessary, to go around her if I knew face-to-face could bring on an eruption (she was furious by the time she talked with him). He finished by reassuring me that I had his support and all of us, except her, were on the same page, but she was there because the president felt obligated to her, so I’d have to find ways to live with that and live with that peacefully.

Several things stand out in my mind to this day about that conversation. The first thing that Wayne did was refocus me on the big picture: the goal. Since I’m a goal-oriented person, this was the best approach he could have taken at the outset of the conversation.

The second thing was the balanced and gentle way Wayne discussed both my strengths and my weaknesses. Not once did I hear “you were wrong” come out of his mouth, but by the end of the conversation, I knew what I had done wrong and I knew what I needed to change.

The third thing that Wayne did was to engage me a participatory way in the process of keeping the peace while the necessary transition of redoing the documentation happened. By making me responsible for watching myself and giving me advice on what to do to help keep the peace, he made me his partner that day and it made a huge difference. I wasn’t just the new kid on the block, the youngest person in the company, but instead I was a full-fledged participant in the company and the team.

The fourth thing that Wayne did that made a deep impression on me was that he didn’t take sides. Not once did he bad-mouth quasi-marketing person to me, even though I suspect, looking back, that she was a thorn in his side, since she certainly was to almost every other person in the company. Whatever he felt personally about her, he kept to himself. And he made it clear that he would not put up with anyone disrespecting her. That was an ethical standard that I try to remember in my leadership today, because it can be a very hard thing to separate personal feelings from professional obligations.

The last thing he did was to end the conversation positively, making sure that I didn’t walk away from the conversation and lunch believing I was the worst person on the planet. He brought up some of the things that I could have done better or differently, which was exactly how he phrased it, and then gave me practical ways on how to do it better or differently – in effect, giving me tangible parameters within which to work that were acceptable to him and to the company to get the job done -, without attacking me or tearing me down. And in the end, he let me know that I had his support and everything was okay between us.

Unfortunately, that was not the last conflict quasi-marketing person and I had, but I took the wise and generous mentoring of the most quintessential leader I’ve experienced in my career, did my best to implement it and build his belief and trust in me, since he had already demonstrated that he had belief and trust in me, and eventually she was moved out of the department and out of the team.

Wayne’s gone now, but his lessons and his example resonate with me to this day. So I’m a bit late, my friend, but thank you!


The Most Non-Quintessential Leader in My Experience

Posted: May 21, 2012 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

I have worked with one person who was a quintessential leader. The next post will be about that person and how grateful I am that our paths intersected early in my career, because I learned a lot from him not only about what quintessential leadership looks like in practice, but also about having the highest standards of integrity and practicing what a person says he or she believes.

The rest of the people in leadership positions throughout my career so far have been managers (and not stellar in even that arena) and non-quintessential leaders. Some were decent people personally, but had no leadership skills. Others were not decent people personally and also had no leadership skills. As I’ve sorted through the names, faces, and experiences, contrasting and comparing them all, one person leads the way in non-quintessential leadership and I will point out the areas in which this became glaringly obvious.

You may recognize these characteristics in someone you know and/or have worked with. And the more of these symptoms that are evident, the more toxic the work environment and the lower the morale will be. If you are experiencing burn-out and all that encompasses, then you probably have a non-quintessential leader like this.

He had a reputation when I got hired and I quickly heard that he was a “yes” man, a suck-up to those above him – and a tyrant to those who worked for him, and wishy-washy, going with whatever the prevailing winds moved the executive leadership of the organization, which left his teams in constant disarray.

Ironically, he did not want me to be hired because he thought I was too assertive and too committed to changing things drastically. In the conservative mindset of the organization, change was viewed with suspicion and resistance, and if anything did actually change (very few of the fundamental changes that needed to be made to become efficient, effective, and productive were made while I was there or have been made since), it was only after going through layers and layers of committees, organizational red tape, and many hoops held up by the executive staff to jump there. Change – or the attempt to change – was thoroughly exhausting and was mostly an exercise in futility.

He was ignored (and I didn’t find this out until later, but I realistically know that it was only a small contributor to the tenor of the relationship he and I had, because I know I shared the same kind of relationship with him in general that all his other team leaders did) and the CTO, who liked me personally and professionally and wanted someone who would shake things up in a positive and productive way, made the offer of employment to me, which I accepted.

As I began the job and was observing, evaluating, and listening to my team members and my peers, I also observed, evaluated, and listened to those who were responsible for overseeing all of us. The first thing I noticed about this man was that he had gotten where he was not because he was qualified for a leadership position, but because he was skilled in playing the elaborate political games this organization reeked with. He ingratiated himself with the people who wielded power in their respective business units and who had the unqualified support of the CEO.

They were like gods to him and he bowed at their altars regularly, slavishly acquiescing to their every whim and demand, whether it made sense or not, was reasonable or not, was right or not, to the exclusion of the majority of the organization’s other employees.

In disputes in which they leveled charges against his employees, they were always true and right and his employees were always dishonest and wrong. He never checked facts and never investigated a situation before drawing a conclusion. He simply took their word at face value and supported them. Not once in all the time I was there did I ever see him support or go to bat for one of his employees.  Ever.

For context, it is important to note that the people he cowtowed to and curried favor with were an ivory-tower group of people who were prima donnas and consistently made mountains out of mole hills, if there was an issue, and if there was not an issue, but they decided a person wasn’t paying them enough attention or being subservient enough, they fabricated issues.

And this group of people was who he always threw his support behind. He was more interested in himself – and his career, because he was a lifer at this organization – than he ever was with his teams. And that was reinforced time and again.

His climb up the ladder was the result of his own self-centeredness and kissing up to the right people. He did not have any leadership skills and was not even that knowledgeable about the technical areas he was responsible for. But he had teams that made him look good and he never had any problem taking all the credit himself and promoting himself when things went right.

Equally, when things went wrong – both because of poor leadership on his part and because he constantly agreed to things that either couldn’t be done the way he agreed to them or couldn’t be done in the unrealistic timeframes he agreed to or both – he never took any responsibility, instead placing all the blame and castigation – he was quite adept at that – on his teams.

He was neither respected nor liked by any of us. But we were stuck with him, so we did our best to do our jobs in spite of him. It was never easy. The turnover rate of his teams was (and still is) the highest in the organization and yet no one ever questioned it nor did anything to address it. Those who’ve endured had other personal reasons for staying, but it has not been without a lot of grief and heartache and ulcers along the way.

Toward the end of my tenure there – when he’d crossed a major line by calling me into a “meeting,” closing the door, and proceeding to yell and scream at me, getting worked up into a full rage which had him standing banging on his desk and threatening me (I was alarmed enough for my physical safety that I was trying to assess how close I was to the door and whether I could get out fast enough if he came after me), and the administrative assistants sitting outside the door were “frightened” (I heard this after the fact) for me and went to alert the CTO, who shrugged and did nothing – I spelled it out to him (I refused to meet with him alone anymore after this meeting, and after three months, he couldn’t remember what he did and after I told him, could not understand why I was so upset about it).

Prior to my last annual performance review there, I wrote a document and gave it to him and told him we would not do my performance review until he had read it. Performance reviews with him were a nightmare. They lasted a full day and consisted of him haranguing all of us over our deficits. None of us ever got more than a cumulative “meets expectations,” and, of course, raises were tied to that, so none of us ever got much, if any, of a raise. Early on, after talking with one of my peers who also became a good friend (we were complete opposites in temperament and approaches, but together we made a very successful team), I discovered that our director blasted me for not doing more of what he criticized my peer for doing and he blasted my peer for not doing more of what he criticized me for doing. That’s an impossible situation to try to navigate.

He kept delaying my last performance review and one day I got a call from the CTO saying he wanted to meet with me. In the meeting, he said that my director had tried to read my paper and just couldn’t get through it. The CTO said it was hard for him to get through it, not because it wasn’t well-written, but because it presented a lot of information in a “dense,” high-level way that, although it was completely understandable, required a higher level of intelligence and capability than this director had. I then aired my professional grievances against him and the CTO’s response was disappointing. He said that this director had a “limited range of responses” and it was my responsibility to just deal with it.

By then, I was seriously pursuing other career opportunities, so I just walked out and finally did the performance review, which netted me the usual “meets expectations.”

When I submitted my “burn-no-bridges” resignation letter to this director, he was genuinely surprised. He was so enmeshed in the organizational mindset of “you stay here until you die or are fired (which rarely happened)” that he could not wrap his brain around the fact that someone would actually leave by choice. He did not ask me why I was leaving, nor did he express any regret (and although 200 or so people showed up at my going-away party, he did not). My last action of significance, though, was making sure that the person I had groomed to replace me and who I knew would stand toe-to-toe with him just like I did in support of my team members (she was more charming and proficient verbally than I was and, amazingly, he liked her better than most) got my position. I left, knowing that although there was no leadership at the top, that my team members had a leader who was poised to become a quintessential leader.

Older Entries
Newer Entries