How people in leadership positions approach the responsibilities of leading their teams is just as important as what they should be doing to fulfill those responsibilities.
Whether people in leadership positions are subjective or objective in their approach determines whether they are quintessential leaders or unquintessential leaders.
Let’s talk first about what being subjective and being objective means. (more…)
We live in a society that is fundamentally dishonest. Nothing is ever as it seems. Lying is the norm. Selfishness and self interests drive everything we see, hear, and read.
Unfortunately, most of us – those in leadership positions and those who are not – are the perpetrators of this fundamental dishonesty and lying because we have become consumed by self-centeredness and our own self interests.
A predominant aspect of this fundamental dishonesty is our overriding propensity toward manipulation. We manipulate people. We manipulate situations. We manipulate things.
Manipulation is an unquintessential leader trait.
Manipulation is insidious. Most of us aren’t aware of how much of our daily lives are based on manipulation.
Manipulation is subtle. It comes couched in altruistic coverings that hide the real purpose behind the manipulation (the hidden agenda).
Manipulation – doing it and resisting it – is a vulnerability for all of us because it plays on our emotions.
Emotions are the weak spot for each of us. Emotions are fickle, volatile, and unreliable in terms of making sane, logical, and rational decisions.
That is why manipulation works so well. It usually catches us off guard and depending on what emotional buttons get pushed – practiced manipulators can read these emotional buttons like the backs of their hands, even if they don’t know the people, situations and things they are manipulating – we can fall for it before we even realize what’s happened.
Manipulation is essentially emotional blackmail.
There are a lot of people who have perfected emotional blackmail, both those in leadership positions and those not in leadership positions.
It’s important to remember that manipulation is not something that just crops up in adulthood. Manipulators are sometimes born, but they most often are developed from a very early age.
There is something fundamental in our human character that steers us even as toddlers to try to find a way to gain an advantage over others – namely the adults in our lives – and get what we want.
We all usually try manipulation first. If the adults in our lives allow us to get what we want through manipulation, then we develop the habit of defaulting to manipulation as how we interact with everything else in our lives.
With time and opportunity, we get really good at manipulation. Eventually, unchecked, we perfect it until we simply don’t know any other way than manipulation to operate in the world.
If this is our lives’ trajectory, then we also become fundamentally deceptive, dishonest, and devoid of integrity, character, and trustworthiness.
There are common emotional buttons that are pushed by experienced manipulators. These buttons are based on the primal emotions that drive the human race.
The most common emotional button that seasoned manipulators push is fear. These include:
Another common emotional button that skilled manipulators push is sympathy.
Sympathy is something that experienced manipulators don’t 
feel and practice themselves (in fact, manipulators are extremely harsh toward and brutally critical of everyone else and habitually advocate no sympathy for anyone else but themselves), but they are exceptionally good at generating it for themselves.
The sympathy emotional button gets pushed by the manipulator in the following ways:
A final common emotional button that experienced manipulators push is guilt.
Guilt is, in my opinion, the most subjective emotion we have and skilled manipulators don’t access it directly, but instead use insinuation.
The guilt emotional button is sometimes pushed by this statement:
Guilt emotional buttons, however, most often get pushed by some form of these two basic questions about what the manipulator has supposedly done for the person they are trying to manipulate:
The interesting thing about manipulators and the guilt emotional button is that the manipulator is always manufacturing a past that never happened (i.e., the balance sheet is not in their favor and often is the exact opposite of what they are insinuating).
But the combination of lifelong manipulators with our innate – and sometimes outsized – human capacity to experience guilt (even if we haven’t done anything wrong – am I the only one who gets a little nervous when a police car is behind me on the road even though I’m obeying all the traffic laws?) makes this emotional button harder to handle logically, and it is, in my opinion, the one to which we are most susceptible.
One of the most maddening things about manipulation and manipulators, though, is that they expect everything and give nothing.
Manipulation is selfishness and self-centeredness on steroids. Manipulators will not give up anything. They will not take responsibility for anything.
Manipulators will vengefully attack anyone and everyone who resists and refuses to fall for their manipulation.
In fact, manipulators fight back against this by making the resistors and the refusers of their attempts to manipulate the “bad guys.”
Manipulators do this loudly, publicly, and relentlessly. And because they are effective liars, manipulators usually manage to convince a lot of people that those who can’t and won’t be manipulated are horrible, awful, despicable people who deserve nothing but contempt and derision.
For the majority of people who fall for the lies of manipulators, these resistors and refusers effectively cease to exist as part of the human race.
It happens every day. Innumerable times a day.
Stop.
Look.
Listen.
Manipulation is all around us. Perhaps manipulation is in us.
Because we are striving to be quintessential leaders, we have to be aware of what manipulation looks like and how much of it may have crept into our own lives in our words and our actions.
That means being brutally honest with ourselves and asking the tough questions of ourselves.
Whether we are manipulators or not depends on our motivation in everything in our lives.
As quintessential leaders, we must ask and answer these questions of ourselves continually:
If we’re honest – and those of us striving to be quintessential leaders say we are honest, so we must back that up with proof in a world that is fundamentally dishonest – we may find that a lot of what we say and do on a daily basis is designed to manipulate people, situations, and things to work in our favor and for our benefit.
This is the difficult work of quintessential leadership.
Most people are unable and unwilling to do it because it means changing who and what they are at the core level of their lives.
It means doing the right thing all the time, no matter what the personal cost. It means giving up some things. It means being selfless, even when it would be a piece of cake to fulfill our selfish desires.
Quintessential leaders are not most people.
How are we doing?
Recently I posted on the rampant narcissism and entitlement that pervades society, including most people in leadership positions, today.
The song in the video above, “What Have You Done For Me Lately?,” by Janet Jackson kept coming back to me as I’ve continued to think about the specific attitudes that characterize entitlement and narcissism, and this post will discuss a riff on this attitude, which is “What’s in it for me?”
The driving mindset behind “What’s in for me?” is simple and selfish. It translates into “I’m not going to do anything that doesn’t benefit or reward me.” It is manifested in many ways, a few of which we’ll look at today.
One the primary places where this attitude and mindset exists is in modern sales and marketing operations. It is a key phrase that both salespeople and marketing specialists use when they are talking to customers, either in person or via media.
It’s rather duplicitous, though. On the surface, it seems to be selfless in appealing to customers’ narcissism and entitlement only. However, it’s revealing of the sellers’ mindset because when customers buy, sellers make money and profits, so sellers are always asking “What’s in it for me?” as well.
One of the ever-popular sales/marketing techniques where this attitude is blatantly revealed is pyramid or multilevel marketing (MLM) sales (also known as schemes).
These kinds of sales depend on a tiered sales system, where the top person in the tier gets paid every time everybody under them buys something. If the person has salespeople on their tier, then those salespeople get paid every time their customers order, and the top person on the tier gets paid as well.
In other words, every single sale in that tier amounts to “What’s in it for me?” That is a primary reason why MLM salespeople consistently have so much aggressive and repetitive marketing and advertising for products that are sold this way.
That is also why there are a plethora of “sounds-too-good-to-be-true” (remember what your parents taught you about this statement), unprovable, deceptive, and outright dishonest claims around many of the products sold using this method.
And, of course, the parent companies for these MLM products make a fortune on the backs of their salespeople (independent distributors).
Why?
Because the MLM salespeople do all the marketing, all the advertising, and all the legwork for new customers, and the cost to the parent company is minimal compared to direct sales and marketing costs for non-MLM companies.
This is the unquintessential leadership attitude of “What’s in it for me?” at its worst and most obvious.
But it would be a mistake to assume that this is not the mindset in the majority of organizations today, because unquintessential leadership abounds, and this is the unwritten and unspoken mantra that is the underpinning of that leadership.
Would it surprise you, though, if I told you that the “What’s in it for me?” attitude is not just a prevailing organizational attitude, but an increasingly prevalent individual and personal attitude as well? That means we – you and I – are very susceptible to having and operating by this unquintessential leadership mindset in both our private and public lives.
What does it look like in us as individuals? That’s what you and I, as people who are striving to be quintessential leaders, need to be able to identify so that we can ensure that it’s not an attitude that we have and live our lives by.
Let’s ask some questions to find out what this mindset looks like in us as individuals:
If we answered “no” or “it depends” to any or all of these questions, then we need to examine our attitudes for the unquintessential leadership “what’s in it for me?” mindset that has somehow begun to creep into our autopilot programming.
Obviously, none of us as individuals can take care of all the genuine needs that exist in the world. But within our little spheres of the world, we can certainly make a conscious and continual effort to do what we are able when we’re able.
And that means that we, as quintessential leaders, should always be proactively looking for genuine needs that we can fill.
When is the last time we cleaned out our family’s drawers and closets and donated the clothes, shoes, etc. that we don’t wear anymore to a homeless shelter or to a battered women’s shelter?
When is the last time we went – and took our kids – to visit homebound elderly people we know or elderly people in an assisted living facility or a nursing home? Many of these people have no visitors, including, sadly, their own families, at all and life, as they end it, is alone and lonely.
These are just a few examples. We should be able to come up with many more and take action to help freely and selflessly, because that’s the opposite of the “What’s in it for me?” attitude.
While these questions deal with our private lives, we also should be doing the same thing in our public lives.
When is the last time we had a conversation with our team members just to see how they’re doing and to see if they have personal needs that we can help out with?
A good example is the increasing number of employees who have a fulltime job at our organizations and also have a fulltime job at home as caregivers not just for their spouses and children, but additionally for their aging parents as well.
We could organize the rest of our team to provide meals for the employees and their families two or three nights a week (this could be as simple as a casserole and a salad made on Sunday and brought to work on Monday).
We could see if there are errands like grocery shopping or picking up medications at the pharmacy that we can do for the employees to cut down on the number of things they have to do in addition to working fulltime and being a extended family caregiver fulltime.
Again, this is just one example. As quintessential leaders, we should be looking for these areas to serve – because that’s what selfless giving is – others around us everywhere in our lives.
So it’s time for each us to look in the mirror of our lives and ask which of these questions defines our mindsets and attitudes: “What’s in for me?” or “What can I do for you?”
If the question is the first, then we need to make changes. If the question is the second, then there’s always room to improve.
How are we doing?
Contrary to popular opinion, vision and focus are not the same thing. They are related, but vision and focus are distinct from each other in many ways. To be a quintessential leader, we must possess both vision and focus and know when and how to execute them consistently and well.
Frankly, many people in leadership positions today do not have either vision or focus. The majority of the exceptions to this have one, but not the other. That sliver-thin few, then, that possess both vision and focus are the ones we want to focus on in this post and, as we strive to be quintessential leaders ourselves, that we want to emulate.
What is vision and what role does it play in quintessential leadership? Vision is a big-picture and well-defined view of a distinct and yet-to-be-realized goal. Our mission statements, organizationally and individually, must capture vision.
This is the first step of quintessential leadership. Vision must be clear and concrete in its expression and it must create a framework within which we operate. In other words, if anything about us – thinking, being, doing, saying – goes outside that framework, then we have lost our vision.
Vision answers essential questions in broad terms, distinguishing the uniqueness of why we and our organizations exist and what we alone bring to the table to achieve a stated objective.
(If we cannot find anything unique in our existence – and by unique, I don’t mean philosophical differences, power plays, personality differences, etc. – then we won’t have a very compelling vision.
It will be difficult, if not impossible, if our stated vision looks almost identical to all the other organizations in our field, to distinguish why we should be the organization of choice. Not only that, but where there is no unique vision and there are lots of very similar competitors, the end result is confusion and attrition. In other words, everyone in the field loses in the end.)
Vision answers these questions:
One of the biggest problems I see with vision statements in general is the wrong objective. Getting money, getting more customers, doing this, doing that are all short-term objectives and they are selfish objectives, and they are the wrong objectives.
Vision’s objective is long-term and consists of not what we get, but what we give. Because reaching long-term objectives requires giving a substantial investment of ourselves and our resources to the effort to give something better than what exists now to others beyond the organizational boundaries.
In other words, vision requires a selflessness that very few people in leadership positions now have. But quintessential leaders do and you see it in everything they are, they say, and they do.
Vision is the first and necessary part of being a quintessential leader. The second and equally-important part of being a quintessential leader is focus.
Focus is keeping your eye on the goal and moving toward it without deviation. It sounds simple, but this is, in many ways, the harder part to actually accomplish.
We live in a distraction-filled world that makes getting focus, keeping focus, and maintaining focus toward long-term goals the most difficult accomplishment to actually achieve for all of us.
Much of this is because our attention spans have been shortened to almost non-existence both subtly and overtly.
The overt ways have come to our doorsteps as a result of the technological revolution.
A constant and steady stream of new and cool gadgets litter and clog up our neurological landscape and they all seek to claim our attention and our desire at the same time.
24/7 virtual connectivity through email, cell phones, and social media are all increasingly fragmenting our time and attention while demanding our continual obsequiousness.
The subtle ways our attention spans have been practically destroyed can be attributed to the media and the workplace.
Media’s contributions have been shorter commercials with more products advertised, 24/7 multiple-channel access to talking heads, and, from digital providers, multiple-screen programming that can be simultaneously (sports channels lead in this area). With the addition of streaming services, our neurological landscapes have just become completely overcrowded and overwhelmed.
The workplace has contributed to this with its championing of multitasking – the more things you can do at one time, the more brilliant, the more talented, the more wonderful you are – and multitaskers, creating in the process, including most of the people in leadership positions, a superficial semblance of productivity that upon closer examination shows no depth, no forward progress, and no focus.
So how do quintessential leaders keep their focus when it’s clear all the odds are against them?
They never allow the vision, the mission statement, and the goal out of their sight. They, like salmon, swim upstream against the tide of distractions, exercising extreme self-discipline and extreme determination all the time to get to that goal.
Quintessential leaders are big-picture and long-term people and that’s how they live and breathe. As a result, they’re able to move right through the distractions without getting caught up in them for the most part.
Occasionally, though, even quintessential leaders will get taken in temporarily by a distraction that may seem important or significant. But the difference is that quintessential leaders recognize that it’s a distraction.
So what do quintessential leaders do? They always evaluate the distraction in terms of their vision, their mission statement and their focus. If the distraction is within that big-picture framework and needs to be addressed or resolved on the spot, quintessential leaders take care of it immediately and starting moving forward again.
Quintessential leaders, then, are never moving and doing just for the sake of moving and doing. If moving and doing does not have a purpose within the vision, the mission statement, and the goal, it’s irrelevant and eliminated.
Quintessential leaders are very proficient at this because they’ve either been doing it all their lives – some of us are naturally wired this way – or they’ve learned how to do it in the process of becoming quintessential leaders.
It’s not always easy, it’s not always fun, and it’s most definitely not always popular.
But quintessential always eventually reach their goals, in the end, no matter how long, how bumpy, how rough, how intense, and how grueling the journey between the initial vision and the completed objective is.
So let’s look at ourselves in relationship to our vision and our focus.
Unquintessential leaders (people who have no vision and/or no focus) tend to complain about having too many things to do at once, not being able to finish anything, finding it hard to focus on what they’re supposed to be doing, having no breathing room or free time to recharge.
Unquintessential leaders also complain about not being organized and being perpetually confused about what they’re supposed to be doing, and, often, in the end, they quit, either literally or symbolically (just going through the motions as a pretender).
Quintessential leaders (people who have both vision – with the right objective – and focus), on the other hand, rarely complain about the effort and the toll it takes from and on them – and it does because all effort takes a toll, but the difference is whether it ultimately means anything or not – and the only thing they will complain about, at times, is having to expend even more effort to keep all the distractions and noise out so that they stay focused on the objective.
There is no disorganization, no lack of clarity, and no confusion. And they don’t quit, no matter what gets thrown in their way along the route from vision to goal.
So, my fellow quintessential leaders, how are we doing?
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 