On Leading with Greatness

What would it take to up your gaslighting game?

Welcome everyone to my supremely succinct and most authoritative lesson on how to gaslight effectively. After decades of close observation while suffering at the hands of gaslighters, I am delighted to offer this compact treatise on the ways and means of gaslighting to you, the morally reprobate public.

My regular followers will be surprised that I would offer advice on how to gaslight. After all, I usually write appeals to people’s basic human decency and rail against bullies and liars and other incompetent humans. In other words, most bosses.

I recently heard a local politician quip, “I’m not one to judge a book by its cover, but they put covers on books for a reason.” It’s a clever turn of phrase, and he has a point. Modern book covers are a marketing tool and are supposed to indicate, reflect, or symbolize something about the contents of the book. Therefore, the cover should have some meaning and some bearing with regard to the book itself.

What if I told you I knew one weird trick for doing a better job hiring?

Anyone who hires employees wants to do it better. Even if your hiring record is superb, you must realize you are living on borrowed time. Your very next hire might be the toxic, culture-crushing mistake you had evaded thus far.

I oversaw a lot of hiring in my day, and I am pretty proud of my record. Sure there was the occasional challenging case, but even those few had their virtues and most worked out just fine with some guidance. I took hiring very seriously, but my approach was somewhat novel.

Your values serve three purposes in your work that would seem contradictory. First, they anchor you, assuring that you do not go too far astray. Second, they drive you, serving as a means to propel you forward. Third, they serve as a destination.

How can values do all three?

* Keep you in place,

* Move you forward, and

* Loom somewhere in the distance?

So how can you put your values to work in all three states? There is a four-part process that starts with identifying your values.

Recently I ran a brief workshop during a weekly meeting of my Master Networks chapter. I pretty much have carte blanche during these trainings, so I try to change it up quite a bit. This time, I took a different approach altogether and, instead of presenting ideas or leading a discussion, I turned it into a controlled brainstorming session. I asked the twenty-plus people in the Zoom room, “what is a leader?”

The response was excellent with almost everyone able to contribute a word, phrase, thought, or definition in the ten minutes we had to complete this training. Later I shared a written synopsis with the participants. In it, I formulated a definition of a leader based on our brainstorming:

A leader is someone who guides others while serving alongside them, nurturing them, and focusing on self-improvement for themself and the entire team.

Why do we tend to think that more is always better?

A long time ago, when I was an English professor, I reported to a department chair who had an odd quirk. Whenever we were to work on a new task or design a new course, she would fall back on the same strategy: “We will take what we are doing now and just do more of it.” Every time she said that she would smile broadly and tilt her head to one side as though she had just invented the formula for instant success. The whole scene was bizarre as were her two underlying assumptions:

* What we were already doing was a-ok and not worth improving; and,

* That quantity was the same as or more important than quality, that size was all that really mattered.

What is an iconoclast, and why should you behave like one? Every great leader thinks and behaves like an iconoclast. Would you be best described as a conformist, a contrarian, an individualist, or an iconoclast? How can you behave more like an iconoclast?

My vast and deep experience working for others and failing miserably at it can stand as inspiration and model for those who also aspire to be lousy employees. For me, my formula for failure starts with my bad attitude. I have been headstrong, some have even said arrogant, in the cause of doing the objectively right thing. Worse still, in my twisted mind, bosses exist primarily to help their people do their job better, not the other way round. That is why, when I was a boss, I spent much of my effort on smoothing the way for my people to succeed, a source of severe criticism from the bad bosses I reported to.

What is the connection between curiosity and dissent?

The Russian-American author Vladimir Nabokov [na BAW kiff] in his novel Bend Sinister wrote, “Curiosity … is insubordination in its purest form.” This association of curiosity and insubordination resonates with me because my experience bears it out. For instance, I don’t tell the story often, but I once had my voice taken away because of my curiosity. I am not sure I ever got it back entirely.

Do you offer others dignity?

What if I told you that there is a resource of endless increase that would benefit you and those around you? That this resource is readily available to each and every one of us, that it is inexpensive, and that expending it can result in a full return with interest. That the only byproduct of using it is goodwill and trust.