A wise man once wrote, “That which has been is what will be, that which is done is what will be done, and there is nothing new under the sun.”
Unquintessential leadership has always existed. In fact, it has been the predominant way that the human race has operated from the beginning.
Unquintessential leadership is completely natural to us, while quintessential leadership is completely unnatural to us. (more…)
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.
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.
This month, in U.S. news, two prominent people in leadership positions in the sports world who have shown themselves to be thoroughly unquintessential leaders have emerged. One of the ties between these two people – Lance Armstrong (7-time Tour de France winner) and Manti Te’o (the highly-touted former Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy runner-up) – is that of broken trust as a result of blatant dishonesty, spin, angling, the blame game, and outright deception.
As quintessential leaders, it is absolutely imperative that we understand how trust is built and how we become and stay trustworthy, because as is the case with Lance Armstrong and Manti Te’o, once trust is destroyed and trustworthiness is gone, it is difficult, if not impossible, to ever get back.
My eBook, “Trust & Trustworthiness” provides a compellingly insightful and comprehensive compilation of the quintessential leadership components of building and keeping trust and becoming and being trustworthy and what they look like in practice.
Although I enjoy sports, professional cycling and college football are two sports I don’t have any interest in nor do I really understand exactly what the mass appeal of them is.
However, I would have had to have lived under a rock for the past twenty years or so not to have a fairly good knowledge about Lance Armstrong and his career. The interesting thing about Armstrong, though, is that years ago, when he really hit his stride and became a household name, I observed a certain disconnectedness and ruthless coldness about him that made me uncomfortable. His eyes, I think, betrayed him. When the then-rumors about his doping began to swirl, I believed they were more than just rumors and were probably credible.
Armstrong vehemently insisted for years that he had never used drugs to enhance his physical performance and continued that steadfast denial even in the face of the irrefutable proof of his usage of banned substances and his distribution of those substances to others in the cycling world in the 1000+-page report from the United States Anti-Doping Agency (USADA) released in June 2012.
One of the most disturbing things I observed about Lance Armstrong during this period of accusations and denials was his viciousness and his determination to destroy as many lives as possible along the way. His behavior seemed more like that of a sociopath than of a man defending himself against unfounded and baseless claims. He spent a lot of time and energy ridding himself of accusers and, in his mind, enemies, fingering them as being cheaters and liars and claiming to be a victim of vindictiveness spurred by jealousy over his accomplishments.
After seeing portions of Lance Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey and reading the full transcript, it turns out that Armstrong was the cheater and the liar all along. Watching his body language and his eyes and observing the calculated and emotionless responses to Winfrey’s questions, it’s clear that Armstrong has strong sociopathic tendencies and that is the epitome of unquintessential leadership.
The first thing that I noticed about Lance Armstrong in the actual interview clips was that he still doesn’t believe he did anything wrong – and he never will. There is no contrition. There is no regret. There is no remorse. There is no guilt.
There is nothing behind the very feeble gestures that he’d like us to believe are admissions of dishonesty, wrong-doing, and cheating. No one who knows this man should ever expect a genuine apology from him. Whenever someone starts this statement: “I guess I’ll have to apologize…,” that person is not convicted within him or herself of his or her guilt, culpability, or the need to right a wrong.
In Lance Armstrong’s mind and heart, he’s innocent of any wrong-doing. One of his claims to defend his doping is that “everyone else was doing it.” That’s the oldest excuse in the world, but only unquintessential leaders use it. All the other wrongs in the world don’t make a quintessential leader’s wrong right. Wrong is wrong and right is right.
People in leadership positions set the example for those they are responsible for leading. So when Lance Armstrong dopes, lies, cheats, and blames and crushes other people, what example is he setting? It’s unquintessential leadership on steroids, pun intended.
The most telling quote for me of Lance Armstrong’s interview with Oprah Winfrey was this one about cheating: “At the time, no. I kept hearing I’m a drug cheat, I’m a cheat, I’m a cheater. I went in and just looked up the definition of cheat and the definition of cheat is to gain an advantage on a rival or foe that they don’t have. I didn’t view it that way. I viewed it as a level playing field.”
This is the heart, core, soul of Lance Armstrong. He has no integrity and he epitomizes the very worst – the opposite of quintessential leadership – of unquintessential leadership.
Manti Te’o, the former Notre Dame linebacker and Heisman Trophy contender, has a shorter, but equally unquintessential leadership track as that of Lance Armstrong. Another appalling aspect to this story is the same kind of unquintessential leadership being shown by Notre Dame’s executive staff, most notably athletic director, Jack Swarbrick, who has countered Deadspin’s revelation of the fraud and dishonesty perpetrated by Te’o by continuing to assert that Te’o was the victim of a hoax.
Te’o’s story of the death of his grandmother and girlfriend within a 12-hour period of each other fueled sympathy and admiration both by the media and the public for the young football player in September of 2012.
However, as Deadspin revealed this week, the story was a lie. Te’o’s grandmother did die in September 2012, but there was no girlfriend and no subsequent death from leukemia. It turns out that this was a publicity move of dishonesty and fraud – probably to up the chances of Te’o winning the Heisman Trophy and being drafted higher in the NFL – that, no matter what the assertions of Te’o and Notre Dame officials are, Te’o was intimately involved in and continually purported to be true.
The fact that Te’o actively participated in the fraud is what highlights his own and Notre Dame’s lack of quintessential leadership. How Notre Dame’s athletic director can keep telling people that Te’o is an innocent victim of a hoax when Te’o’s own words convict him and show him to be thoroughly involved in the web of deceit is beyond comprehension. It seems that once people go down the road of dishonesty, eventually they begin to believe their own lies to the point that truth is never and can never be within their grasps again.
Te’o’s dishonesty, with Notre Dame’s apparent approval and backing, has destroyed any credibility – and that includes trust and trustworthiness – he had. Even if he is drafted by the NFL (personally, I think they’d be crazy to draft him), no one will ever trust him again. He has proven himself to be an unquintessential leader: unreliable, undependable, dishonest, untrustworthy, and selfish, self-centered, and self-absorbed.
Te’o, in the end, like Lance Armstrong, and like every other unquintessential leader, is all about himself. They don’t care about the team or the truth. They have no integrity. They lack any authenticity. They are pretenders, wannabe’s, and examples of the opposite of what we as quintessential leaders want to be, should be, and, indeed, must be.
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.
The Quintessential Leader 