Posts Tagged ‘manipulation’

The Unquintessential Leader Trait of Manipulation

Posted: October 14, 2015 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership
Tags: , , , , , , , ,
1

Manipulation is emotional blackmail and an unquintessential leadership traitWe 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.

Fear is an emotional button that manipulators pushThe most common emotional button that seasoned manipulators push is fear. These include:

  • Fear for safety
  • Fear for security
  • Fear of harm
  • Fear of loss
  • Fear of punishment

Another common emotional button that skilled manipulators push is sympathy.

Sympathy is something that experienced manipulators don’t Manipulation includes pushing the sympathy emotional buttonfeel 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:

  • Constantly drawing attention to themselves
  • Constantly presenting themselves as vulnerable and delicate
  • Constantly reminding everyone of how much they are suffering
  • Constantly seeking validation and accolades because of how “well” they’re suffering

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:

  • I’m disappointed…

The guilt button is pushed by manipulationGuilt 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:

  • Have you forgotten…?
  • Don’t you remember…?

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:

  1. Why am I saying this?
  2. Why am I doing this?
  3. Am I being honest?
  4. Is this exclusively for my benefit or will it benefit everybody?

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 Unquintessential Leadership Aspects of Emotional Marketing

Posted: August 31, 2015 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Practical Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
1

The Unquintessential Leadership Aspects of Emotional MarketingWe live in an incredibly noisy world.

The world is so noisy, in fact, that most people have resorted to the most base tactics – and those involve emotional reactions and responses – to be seen and heard.

These tactics, which are more common than not and are all around us, even though we may not even be aware of them, include gimmicks, sensationalism, and manipulation.

But are gimmicks, sensationalism, and manipulation okay to use? Should quintessential leaders use them?

That’s the topic we’ll discuss in this post.

Lets look at some examples of what gimmicks, sensationalism, and manipulation look like first.

As you go through your day today, I challenge you to look at all that you read and see and be aware of whether they are gimmicks, sensationalism, and manipulation or not.

If you’re paying attention, I believe you will have an eye-opening day.

The front page of the August 27, 2015 New York Daily News, pictured below is an example of sensationalism.

Gimmicky, Sensational, Crass Communication is Unquintessential Leadership

The ad below for the ASPCA (American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals) featuring Sarah McLachlan’s 1997 hit song “Angel” is an example of manipulation.

These quotes and titles from a random sampling of the internet in the last week are gimmicky, sensational, and manipulative.

“…with ABC company’s finest immune boosting products as well as various soothing and calming treasures to help beat the stress…”

“How to Wreck Your Future”

“This Kind of Olive Oil Can Kill Cancer Cells in One Hour”

“Lose 20 Pounds in 21 Days”

What do all of these have in common?

First, they appeal directly to emotions and are designed to provoke an intense emotional response. Disgust. Sadness. Elitism. Fear. Hope. Happiness.

The second thing that they have in common is that they are dishonest, deceptive, manipulative and unproven.

The third thing they have in common is that they play on the gullible susceptibility of humans by promising, in most cases, something they can’t deliver.

But this is the way the majority of society has adopted to entice people to open the doors of their message or product because “smart” marketing says if someone opens the door the odds of them coming in and staying are very high.

This is the bait and the hook. And once emotions are involved, it doesn’t matter whether it’s true, right, logical, factual, or proven. Because emotional decisions don’t depend on anything real (how things are), but instead on sensation (how things feel).

Back in the day, this would have been called yellow journalism. Now it’s called emotional marketing.

There are many things wrong with these techniques. Here are a few of them.

Emotional Drivers are the heart of Emotional MarketingFirst, when a person or an organization is appealing to emotion, they are appealing to the irrational side of humans. Decisions made strictly on an emotional basis, with no consideration of logic and facts, are always, at the least, regrettable decisions and, at the worst, bad decisions.

And these kinds of decisions can – and often do – have disastrous consequences in peoples’ lives.

Second, a person or organization using emotional marketing is being dishonest and deceptive. Not only are they promising the moon, which no human can deliver, but they are intentionally misleading and manipulating other people to buy whatever they’re promoting or selling.

If a person or an organization draws people in under false pretenses and in an untrustworthy manner, then the logic follows that whatever they are promoting or selling can’t be trusted in terms of efficacy, quality, or longevity.

Third, people or organizations using emotional marketing are revealing both a lack of care and concern for others and a lack of personal integrity and character.

Because emotions are subjective and easily manipulated by gimmicks and sensationalism, using this type of marketing to reel customers in is a reflection of both a win-at-all-costs and the-end-justifies-the-means mindset, which is at the core of unquintessential leadership.

Unfortunately, most people are unaware of the emotional marketing that is thrown at them continually. And because society, in general, has abandoned logic, reason, and critical thinking in all its decision-making, it’s a safe bet to say that most people don’t really care if they are being manipulated and deceived by emotional marketing.

But we all should be aware and we should care. Consider the following statements from a generic emotional marketing campaign:

generic emotional marketing gimmicks

Notice that the first statement can’t be substantiated and has no objective data (ingredients that are different or better than specific competitors or the results of customer taste tests), but it promises healthier and tastier than any other tea that exists in the world.

The second statement also can’t be substantiated and is again lacking objective data to quantify it (e.g., 100 people who drank XYZ brand of tea in Yuma, Arizona on a 118-degree day in August said it was refreshing).

The third statement appeals to how a person looks (less calories equals less weight) and how a person feels (better than ever before).

The question of “how do you know?” is never addressed because of our lack of awareness and lack of care about being manipulated into buying something because it appeals to us on an emotional level.

emotions versus rational and critical thinkingWhen we get accustomed to accepting things without proof, to using our emotions to guide our decisions and choices in life, to abandoning logic, critical thinking, and reason – which emotional marketing makes easier and, eventually, the default way we live life – we are at great risk for being more susceptible to deception, dishonesty, and manipulation every where in our lives.

Quintessential leaders don’t use emotional marketing. They don’t use gimmicks, sensationalism, and manipulation. They use facts, logic, and critical thinking. They prove what they say and do before they say and do it. And they expect everyone – their teams, their audiences, and their customers – to do the same. Nothing less than this method is acceptable.

The reality is that nothing less than this method should be acceptable for any of us, but even more so for those of us who are striving to be quintessential leaders.

The mirror test, as always, will tell us whether we have fallen into the trap of emotional marketing as quintessential leaders.

Do we consistently appeal to emotional responses by gimmicks, sensationalism, and manipulation to motivate our teams, to build our customer bases, and as a way of life?

Have we abandoned facts, logic, and critical thinking in our decision-making? Do we prove everything for ourselves or do we just accept whatever we see, we read, or we are told without any substantiation?

Have we moved more toward emotional marketing and away from factual, logical, and provable information in our lives, both as leaders and as consumers?

Do we even know the answers to any of these questions?

If we find that we don’t know the answers, then now is the time to examine our lives and figure out what we are doing and why.

If we find answers that show that we have embraced emotional marketing both as leaders and as consumers, then today is the day to begin to change that with a return to facts, logic, critical thinking, and truth, which will lead to us rebuilding our integrity and becoming trustworthy.

Does this matter to you?

If not, then you cannot claim to be a quintessential leader. In fact, you can’t claim to be any kind of leader. Instead, you are a duped follower of a dishonest, deceptive, manipulative, and untrustworthy system that has infiltrated every part of modern society.

If that’s okay with you and you can live with it and yourself, then this post won’t matter to you and you’ll dismiss it along with any other things in your life – including those occasional pangs of conscience that knock on your brain but you brush away and ignore – that demand a higher standard, a different standard, a standard that sets the right example for others.

But if it’s not okay with you, then join me in daring to be different and daring to do the right thing all the time and daring to become a quintessential leader in every aspect of our lives.

How are we doing?

The Quintessential Leader Perspective On the Art – and Beauty – of Silence

Posted: January 16, 2015 in General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
5

still waters run deep the art of silenceThere is an expression that “still waters run deep” that is often applied to people who tend to be mostly silent and low-key in their exterior lives that belies much complexity, thoughtfulness, and depth in their interior lives.

In other words, these people are masters at the art – and revel in the beauty of – silence. They enjoy the sound of silence. They crave more silence than not. And they are completely comfortable – in fact, they are most comfortable – in and with silence.

Before we discuss the art and beauty of silence, we must clear up some common misconceptions.

First, the art of silence doesn’t mean never talking (or writing), nor does it mean a lack of passion when talking (or writing). It’s not an either/or trait, unlike the way a lot of this-or-that, all-or-nothing generalists tend to portray the art of silence.

Second, the art of silence doesn’t indicate weakness, shyness, fear, or being intimidated. Too often the art of silence is portrayed as an inferior trait. Nothing could be further than the truth!

Third, the art of silence doesn’t mean not listening and not hearing. In fact, it means just the the opposite. Unlike talkative people who have great difficulty (and many times are completely tone-deaf) listening to and hearing anybody else because they’re so busy talking themselves, people who are masters at the art of silence hear and see everything that is said or done.

The difference is the art of silence, which includes self-control and self-discipline, knows when and/or if to respond to things that are said and done, which is why the art of silence is a quintessential leadership trait.

While the art of silence comes naturally to some people (introverts, for example, as described in Susan Cain’s Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking), it is something that can be learned by everybody.

How do quintessential leaders use the art of silence? And why do quintessential leaders use the art of silence? Those are the two aspects of the art of silence that we will look at today.

One of the ways that quintessential leaders use the art of silence is to filter out distractions. Distractions come in many forms, but one of the most prevalent and hardest to avoid and/or ignore is incessant talking.

Some people who talk incessantly just need to talk all the time. And if they can find someone who will engage with them interactively, then they have even more to talk about.

Some of these people can’t abide any kind of silence, so in the absence of external noise, they talk to fill the void. Everything that comes into their minds comes out of their mouths.

There is no editing and there is no evaluation of timing, appropriateness, or audience. The words are simply there and they must be uttered immediately out loud.

Because there is no content control for people who need to talk, there is often inciting and offensive content in what they talk about as well.

The other kinds of people who talk incessantly are people who think out loud to process their ideas. These people are also looking for engagement because they want external feedback as they work through the process.

the art of silence and the beautiful of silence quintessential leadershipThe same lack of content control, timing, and appropriateness may accompany this.

More likely, though, the biggest distraction in this kind of incessant talking is the drawn-out, rambling, unorganized, and sometimes incoherent process of formulating ideas out loud (people who are masters of the art of silence go through the same idea-formulating process, but they do it internally, not externally).

Quintessential leaders use the art of silence to stop the distraction of incessant talking by refusing to engage in the moment (incessant talkers need engagement, so if someone won’t engage, they’ll move and find others who will).

Quintessential leaders also use the art of silence in this situation because if their flow of productivity in working/thinking/life, which requires complete focus and attention, gets interrupted, they will lose a lot of time in the future to get back into that flow, if, in fact, they are able to. In other words, the total cost of not using the art of silence far outweighs any benefit of immediate engagement. 

However, for some idea formulations (either in terms of importance, experience, and/or coaching), quintessential leaders are very willing to participate, but the timing and the scope must be negotiated and agreed upon in advance.

And there are two crucial reasons why.

The first reason is because quintessential leaders will have the time to come fully prepared for discussions like these. The second reason is so that quintessential leaders can carve out a piece of time to give the person and the process their undivided attention.

Another area where quintessential leaders use the art of silence is the area of dealing with challenging people. No matter what teams we lead in life, there will always be a challenging cast of characters among them.

Challenging people may be uninformed and biased-by-spinning loudmouths. They may be instigators. They may be argumentative. They may be talebearers (includes gossiping). They may be extremely needy. They may be drama queens or kings. They may be attention-seekers. They may be manipulators.

In whatever form challenging people appear (and I’ve listed some of the major areas above), quintessential leaders must be adept in using the art of silence in the right way at precisely the right times to effectively neutralize and/or eliminate the area of challenge.

There are two things that all challenging people are looking for in terms of satisfaction with these kinds of behaviors. One is total engagement. The other is total agreement (or a really good knock-down-drag-out argument).

Quintessential leaders give them neither with the art of silence.

Silence has several positive results.

First, quintessential leaders are modeling the right behavior – in effect, coaching them in “this-is-what-it-looks-like” – for their teams to learn as they encounter challenging people along the way.

Second, the art of silence immediately shuts down the challenging person. It also removes them and their influence from the team, because if there is no satisfaction in one place, challenging people will quickly go looking somewhere else for it, since that’s the driving need behind these behaviors.

noisy discordant screeching A third way that quintessential leaders use the art of silence is to create enough space between them and everything and everyone else to create a place in their lives where they can retreat to as often and as long as they need to. This place is a place of assured peace, safety, comfort, and….wait for it…silence where quintessential leaders go to recharge and regroup.

Quintessential leaders don’t disconnect from life when they go to this place. They are fully engaged in everything that is important in life in necessary, productive, and practical ways.

However, they are completely distanced from all the unnecessary, all the impractical, all the frivolous, and all the jingly-jangly-clanging noise that comes at us from every direction and makes up our modern existences.

This is a personal and internal requirement for quintessential leaders, because this place must exist for quintessential leaders to be quintessential leaders. How often and how long the stays are will vary from situation to situation and individual to individual. But they must occur regularly.

If they don’t, then quintessential leaders become unquintessential leaders because they will lose sight of the big-picture, the vision, the focus, and the effective use of the art – and beauty of – silence.

And they will end up simply being another discordant note in the ever-increasingly-screeching and ear-splitting symphony of noise that has become the never-ending soundtrack of our lives.

Are we effectively using the the art of silence or have we forgotten and are on our way to becoming an insignificant off-key note that is lost in a maze of unpalatable noise?

I can answer that for myself alone.

What is your answer? 

 

“Building Trust and Being Trustworthy” – Excerpt from Chapter 2

Posted: December 25, 2014 in Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leader Books, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
Tags: , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , ,
8

the quintessential leader building trust and being trust worthy book

In the first post of this series, the excerpt from chapter 1 included a list of all the components we must develop and have to build trust and be trustworthy.

This post, which includes an excerpt from the second chapter of Building Trust and Being Trustworthy, begins to look at each of those components extensively in terms of what they are and aren’t and what they look like and don’t look like in practice. 

The first component of building trust and being trustworthy that we must have is honesty.

Building trust and being trustworthy is an integrated trait of quintessential leaders.

It is also an integrated trait that all of us – because each and every one of us leads at least one team, small or large, of people in our lives – need to develop and have as part of the core of who we are and what we are. In essence, this trait is at the center of exemplary character and conduct, and none of us should settle for anything less than this in ourselves and others.

Unfortunately, most of us settle for less. A lot less. In ourselves. In others. 

The majority of people in leadership positions today are not trust builders and they are not trustworthy. Many of us, frankly, are also not trust builders and trustworthy.

We live in a world that with no moral code as its foundation that expects trust to be non-existent or broken. Look around. It’s everywhere, including, in many cases, very close to you.

And society has become so accustomed to this that it glorifies it instead of condemning it.

Politicians who lie routinely, who line their pockets with money and perks while making decisions that hurt and destroy the people they are supposed to represent, who cheat on their wives because they can.

Arts and sports celebrities who have no regard for faithfulness to their spouses, who live hedonistic lifestyles that destroy their families, the people around them, and, eventually their lives.

Religious leaders who cheat on their wives, who cheat on their taxes, and who scam their congregations both in how they deceitfully handle the word of God and in coercive and corrupt financial matters, acquiring wealth and power in the process.

Business leaders who destroy millions of lives by deceit, fraud, and illegal actions that result in their employees and customers losing everything while they escape any kind of punitive action and instead reap obscene profits and end their tenures – only to go to another financially lucrative position – with golden parachutes that are equally obscene.

And we, as individual leaders for our teams, who cheat on our taxes, who are routinely dishonest with the children (our own and others) and other people entrusted to us, who routinely steal things from our workplaces (you most likely didn’t pay for that pen you’re using at work, so it doesn’t belong to you), who routinely break traffic laws, who will walk out of stores with something we were not charged for and never think twice about it, who will take extra money that we’re not owed in financial transactions without blinking an eye, who cheat on our spouses, who marry until “divorce do us part,” and who, as a course of habit, break confidences of family and friends, gossip about family and friends behind their backs, and destroy reputations in the process.

Maybe we haven’t thought about building trust and being trustworthy at this kind of nitty gritty level.

But until we do – and we develop and have this trait as the core of who and what we are – we will not build trust and we will not be trustworthy. And we will not be quintessential leaders.

Trust and trustworthiness is probably the single most important trait we can possess. And it is also the most fragile.

It can take a long time to build and be, but it can be broken irreparably in a single second.

Therefore, this is a lifetime work on and in ourselves that we must commit to making an integral part of our character by continually developing it, maintaining it, and growing it. 

This goal should be our goal.

But it requires courage. It requires diligence. It requires vigilance. It requires continual self-examination. It requires continual change. It requires the ability to, much of the time, stand alone to maintain.

It is not for the faint-hearted. It is not for the vacillators. It is not for the crowd-pleasers. It is not for the pretenders. It is not for the wannabes. It is not for the weak.

But if you’re reading this, I know that you’re not any of those kinds of people. Those kinds of people won’t even read this because it requires time, effort, change, and commitment, and too many of us are, sadly, either just too lazy or we just don’t care. 

Building Trust and Being Trustworthy takes an in-depth look at the “this is what it looks like in practice” aspect of each of the components we need to develop and have to build trust and be trustworthy. The second chapter discusses the component of honesty in building trust and being trustworthy.

olive-horizontal-line

Excerpt from”Chapter 2: The Honesty Component of Trust and Trustworthiness”

“Let’s look at some specific examples of what the quintessential leader trait of honesty looks – and doesn’t look – like. Maybe a leader is honest with his team not hiding any truth from them. But what if his or her team routinely sees the leader exhibit dishonest behavior outside the confines of the team?

Is the leader honest with his or her superiors, or does the leader routinely fudge, obfuscate, tell “little white lies” (there is no such thing: a lie is a lie is a lie) to them about things? This routinely occurs in most organizations. Sometimes it done under the guise of protecting the team and sometimes it’s done out of habit. Either way, it’s dishonest.

Is the leader honest with his or her peers or is he or she known to exaggerate or embellish on a regular basis? This is ego-driven dishonesty and comes from a spirit of competition and one-upmanship. This is definitely not a quintessential leader we’re talking about, but it reflects a lot of the people we see in leadership positions in organizations.

Does the leader respect company property and use it honestly? For example, if the leader has a company credit card does he or she use it strictly for company/business-related expenses or does the leader do things like put personal expenditures on it from time to time or use it to take everyone out for a night on the town during a business trip? Is their computer, phone, car – and anything else the company might provide – used solely for business or are they routinely employed for the leader’s personal use? If company property is used for anything other than directly-related-to-business purposes and things, then those uses are an example of dishonesty.

And here’s the net effect of these areas of dishonesty. Even if a leader is honest with his or her team, because he or she is dishonest in every other part of his or her life, the team can’t trust him or her. The team will question even the things that are true and will never trust the leader. The evidence is too compelling that, in the balance of things, he or she is untrustworthy.”

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.