Posts Tagged ‘twisting’

“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
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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.

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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.”

Quintessential Leadership Analysis of Henry VIII – Pt. 2 – 1525 to 1536

Posted: February 21, 2013 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, Examples and Analyses of Quintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art, Team Building & Development
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This post will do a quintessential leadership analysis of Henry VIII during the years between 1525, when Anne Boleyn came on the scene and Catherine of Aragon became an inconvenience, and 1536, when Anne Boleyn was executed.

It’s important to note at this point that although Catherine of Aragon produced only one child – Mary I – during their marriage (she had several miscarriages, as did Henry VIII’s Catherine of Aragonother wives, which now seem to have been scientifically linked to Henry VIII himself, who may have had a rare blood type known as Kell positive), up until 1525, she and Henry VIII seemed to have had an amiable marriage, in spite of Henry’s philandering.

Anne Boleyn, who often carries the lion’s share of the blame for what happened to Catherine and in England during the next 11 years, was in fact only a single factor – although perhaps the tipping one –Anne Boleyn in what led to the tumult and upheaval within the royal family, the country, and the church during that time.

Several factors had an impact on why Henry VIII suddenly reversed himself on the legality of his marriage to Catherine in 1525 after they’d been married for 16 years (their marriage would not be annulled by the Church of England until 1533, but Catherine of Aragon never accepted the decision and maintained that she was Henry’s wife and the queen until her death from natural causes in 1536).

The French monarchy, the Holy Roman Empire, Thomas Wolsey, and Henry’s and Wolsey’s enemies at court were major players in where English international relations were in 1525 and how they were quickly thrown up in the air and changed dramatically within a year.

By 1520, France and the Hapsburg dynasty were becoming the powers to be reckoned with in Western Europe. In 1520, eager for a Franco-Anglo alliance, Thomas Wolsey arranged a meeting between Francis I, the king of France and Henry VIII at Field of the Cloth of Gold in the Netherlands in 1520.

Henry and Francis were very much alike in their educations, interests, and athleticism. They were also both extremely competitive. In addition to the political purposes of this meeting, tournaments had been arranged to show off the skills and abilities of the two young kings with the agreement that they would not compete against each other.

Henry broke the agreement – an act of unquintessential leadership that he became well known for – by challenging Francis to a wrestling match in which Henry emerged as the loser.

As a result, no alliance came out of the two-week meeting and relations with France were definitely worsening.

Not long after the Field of the Cloth meeting, the ever-scheming Wolsey, whose greatest aspiration was to be a pope, decided to throw England’s lot in with Charles V, who was at the time the king of the Hapsburg dynasty.

(After defeating Pope Clement VII in Rome in 1527, Charles and Pope Clement became allies. In 1530 Pope Clement VII crowned Charles as the Holy Roman Emperor, so Charles’ ties to the Roman Catholic Church were not only strong and close, but unbreakable, and he could exert a lot of influence over papal decisions.)

Charles V was also the nephew of Catherine of Aragon and his allegiance to his aunt was unquestioning.

In the 1520 meeting that Wolsey arranged between Charles V and Henry VIII, they agreed to form an alliance against France, with Charles providing the land power and Henry providing the sea power. In addition, Mary I was betrothed in marriage to Charles V, which strengthened the bond of the alliance.

Charles led a very successful campaign against France, capturing Francis I in the first battle in 1525. This was also the year that Anne Boleyn came to court.

The same year Henry named his illegitimate son, Henry Fitzroy, as heir to the throne, and gave him the titles and lands that would ensure his succession. The move infuriated Catherine, who believed Mary should be the heir to the throne, and perhaps initiated the bitterness that consumed her, understandably, the rest of her life.

Even though Henry had a male heir in place, he still wanted a legitimate male heir to succeed him. This driving desire brought out other unquintessential leadership traits in Henry that would be present the rest of his reign: changing the rules when they didn’t suit him, bullying, and trying to force everything to go the way he wanted it to and if it failed, blaming anyone and everyone involved and eliminating them by arrest on false charges and execution. The bloody period of Henry VIII’s reign was about to begin.

Anne Boleyn had already caught Henry’s eye. However, she refused to become his mistress and indirectly told him the only way Henry could have her was if Anne was his wife. Eager for a legitimate male heir and convinced, probably accurately, that Catherine would never be able to give him a male heir, Henry sought a way to dissolve his marriage to Catherine so he could marry Anne Boleyn.

Citing “new ecclesiastical understanding” based on Leviticus 18:16, Henry met with Wolsey and told him that God had cursed the marriage and he wanted Wolsey to go to Pope Clement and have it annulled. Henry used the issue of not knowing whether the marriage between Arthur and Catherine had been consummated (it is unlikely it was and Catherine maintained that it had not been, in which case the scripture wouldn’t apply), but passionately said that piety and obedience to God left him no choice but to end the marriage.

Wolsey was a shrewd politician and understood the position Henry was putting himself and Wolsey in politically and religiously and tried to talk Henry out of divorcing Catherine. Henry, showing another unquintessential leadership trait, refused to listen and demanded that Wolsey obtain the annulment. 

Pope Clement VII, at first, simply ignored Wolsey’s request. At the time, he and Charles V were enemies, and he knew that granting the annulment would have serious consequences for Rome. Henry kept pushing Wolsey and Catherine began a campaign of her own to save the marriage by sending surreptitious messages to Charles asking him to intervene.

When Charles heard that Henry wanted to divorce his aunt, while he did not intervene then with the pope, he immediately ended his engagement to Mary and took a wife. When Henry found out, he ended his alliance with Charles and entered into an alliance with France against him.

Meanwhile, Wolsey was between a rock and a hard place. Pope Clement, who had by now been captured in Charles’ defeat of Rome, had given him the authority to have a convocation of the cardinals in England to get the facts together, but had denied them any authority to make a binding decision. 

The struggle between the pope and Wolsey and Henry, who by 1528 had declared, in another unquintessential leadership stance, the sole and supreme religious and political law in England. While Henry didn’t directly, at this point, say the church in Rome didn’t have any authority over him, he certainly implied it. Henry began to take his case to the citizens of England, hoping to gain mass support from his subjects. 

He had two big obstacles. One was the sheer power the Catholic church had over aspects of the average Englishman’s life. The church was the center of English life. The second was Catherine’s popularity among the people, and the sense they had that she was getting a raw deal from Henry.

Obstacles like these never deterred Henry. As an unquintessential leader, he just bulldozed over everything that stood in his way, doing whatever he wanted to get the outcome he wanted. He certainly lived by the motto that “the end justifies the means.”

Wolsey continued to unsuccessfully try to obtain the annulment. Finally, Henry got fed up with his failure to do so – and because Anne Boleyn didn’t like and didn’t trust, for good reason, Wolsey and urged Henry to get rid of him – and had him arrested in November 1530 on charges of treason. Wolsey died of apparently natural causes – but who knows? – on his way to his trial on those charges later that month. Had he not, there is absolutely no doubt he would have been convicted and executed.

By 1531, Henry had moved further toward openly questioning the authority and the power of the pope and the Catholic church. He sent all the evidence for the divorce and the ensuing cardinal convocations with papal restrictions to the leading theological scholars at all the major universities in Europe to ask for their opinions. They were all in agreement that Pope Clement had exceeded the limits of his power and authority.

He also had English theologians developing reforms to the church in England, which included non-papal and non-Roman authority but only English authority – with the ruler as the head of the church – and he took the legal arguments to Parliament to adjudicate in December of 1531. Parliament also agreed that the pope had abused his power.

Pope Clement obviously was not happy with these developments and warned Henry of excommunication if he continued. However, Henry barged forward.

Thomas Cromwell, Henry’s chief statesman and an ardent supporter of the English reformation (a position that led him down a path similar to Wolsey’s in actions and made him a hated enemy of those in the English court who did not want to break with Rome), called a meeting of the English bishops in which he charged them with treason because of their loyalty oaths to the pope which conflicted with their loyalty to Henry.

The bishops realized the untenable situation they – and their lives – were in, and when they were brought to court to face the charges at Henry’s request, they offered Henry money and pledged their loyalty to him as “the supreme head of the Church of England.”

Henry took the bishops’ pledge to Parliament in January of 1532 and demanded that they produce official legislation that codified the pledge of loyalty to him, while keeping Catholicism as the official faith of England. This precipitated the final break with Rome.

In 1532, Thomas Cromwell engineered a meeting between English church officials and Parliament from which a conclusion was reached that an appeal to Rome about the dissolution of Henry and Catherine’s marriage was not necessary. The result was an English conclave of the bishops and Thomas Cranmer, the Archbishop of Canterbury, in which the decision was made to allow the divorce of Henry and Catherine.

This resulted in the immediate severance of the English church from Rome, Henry being excommunicated, and the door opened for his marriage to Anne Boleyn. Catherine, however, continued to appeal to Rome, as a Catholic in good standing, until her death to intervene and restore the marriage. The bridges that Henry burned made her appeal fall on deaf ears.

In January 1533, with a new/old (Henry never gave up his Catholic beliefs and the Church of England stayed essentially Catholic in theology and look and feel, much as it does even today) church in place with Henry as its supreme leader, Henry and Anne were married.

Another unquintessential leadership trait that Henry had now becomes more apparent: the chase appeals to him far more than the conquest. By all accounts, the marriage was tumultuous. Henry began cheating on Anne almost immediately, and she, unlike Catherine, but very much like Henry, was strong-willed, opinionated, and not afraid to fight with Henry. Anne also made many enemies at court because she was  a strong person, so there were many people eager for a chance to undermine her and get rid of her.

Perhaps Anne’s worst fault, in Henry’s eyes, was that she didn’t give him a legitimate male heir. The marriage produced a daughter, Elizabeth I, in September 1533, who in the end succeeded Henry VIII, but not without her own wild and crazy ride to succession, but if there were any other pregnancies, they ended in miscarriage.

Anne’s enemies in court, sensing Henry’s disillusionment with her, began badmouthing her to Henry as early as 1534. Another unquintessential leadership trait that Henry had is that he listened to and believed them because it would give him an excuse to get rid of her and marry again in hopes of producing a legitimate male heir.

On May 2, 1536, Henry had Anne arrested on charges of adultery (unproven) and witchcraft (also unproven, but the highly-charged superstitious mindset that had developed during the Middle Ages and cast a long shadow over human thinking until the 18th Century, was very much alive and well), among others.

Anne was executed by beheading 17 days later on May 19, 1536. That this is unquintessential leadership should go without saying.

In the next post, we’ll do a quintessential leadership analysis on the last 11 years of Henry VIII’s life and reign.

January 2013 Unquintessential Leadership in the News

Posted: January 18, 2013 in Examples and Analyses of Lack of Leadership and Unquintessential Leadership, General Things about Quintessential Leadership, Myths and Misconceptions About Management, Qualities of a Quintessential Leader, Quintessential Leadership, Quintessential Leadership is an Art
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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.