On Leading with Greatness

The human species is both blessed and cursed with an impressive power of recall. Recall allows us to review the past, searching for wins to replicate and losses to learn from. When we contemplate the present and future, sequences — the order of things — are difficult to ascertain or predict with any accuracy, but in scanning the past we can often easily see connections that escaped us at the time. We may notice that action B resulted from action A or that more activity in this particular venue at a particular time would have prevented this particular outcome. The power of recall is an important and mostly positive skill, but recall can also cripple us with regret and the subsequent need to overcompensate in future endeavors.

The great Mississippi Delta bluesman Robert Johnson (1911-1938) was a revolutionary guitarist with a wicked way with words. While he still has a living stepsister who published a captivating memoir last year, much is not known about his life and death. Johnson’s prodigious musical powers in combination with his short life and enigmatic biography have naturally generated much lore, one tale being his visit to the crossroads.

Have you ever worked with a liar? I mean someone who just could not resist the urge to exaggerate, fabricate, fib, and prevaricate throughout the day. I am not talking about someone who has a diagnosable condition that compels them to lie. Nor am I concerned with someone whose grasp of reality is so tenuous that they cannot distinguish it from fiction. I mean someone who chooses to lie so much that it becomes almost an instinct, a mindless habit, like nail biting or Facebook.

Welcome to my first Ted talk.

Two types of politics pervade most workplaces. One is the politics of possibility, the idea that, through sheer persuasiveness and appeals to values, people can be recruited and motivated to work together for good. That their passions and their intellect can be encouraged to join forces in common cause for the betterment of all.

The other is sadly much more pervasive, the politics of power, which centers on the ego and the zero-sum game and relies upon the machinery of personal destruction. In this brand of politics, the we is never evoked but in service to the I. Accomplishments remain singular affairs.

Leaders at every level need to understand that an individual’s perception is reality. This statement is not the same as “everything I believe to be true is true,” which is just lazy, fanciful thinking. Nor is it a license to insist that everyone share your perceptions, which is bullying. Indeed, the failure to grasp this last point or, more cynically, an effort to exploit this last point has led this nation to the cultural-political precipice where we teeter .

True competence is an overall achievement, not a matter of a few data points clustered around specific categories. It is one of the greatest fallacies in leadership that value is achieved simply by reaching a goal. How you get there, why you want to get there, and what else you do along the way matter.

Vulnerability is strength.

That sentence sounds outright Orwellian although, unlike the dystopian slogans George Orwell invented for his novel Nineteen Eighty-Four (“War is peace.” “Freedom is slavery.” “Ignorance is strength.”), it is profoundly true and uplifting.

So let’s extol the virtues of intentional frailty, of showing the soft underbelly, of standing down when others stand rigid, of letting it all hang out, of looking the fool, of wearing it on your sleeve.

If, though, you are like most of humanity, you have had a bevy of bad bosses in your past and present. If you are a boss, chances are that you are a less-than-stellar boss to some degree. Sorry. It’s not me, it’s statistics, but feel free to defy the stats. Someone has to be above average, and according to the report I linked, women are more likely to be so than men (but not always, so don’t rest on that either).

Among the myriad effects bad bosses have on their organizations is the tendency of the employees to sort themselves into dysfunctional classes in order to protect themselves and advance their interests. Most of us as employees, whatever our titles, have occupied more than one of these classes in response to changing jobs and circumstances.

Perhaps you can locate yourself on this list. Or maybe I missed a category. I’d love to hear from you whatever the case. Feel free to leave a comment.

Last week I sought to reframe our perception of transparency and its opposite, opacity, not as something we merely should do but as a matter of foundational principle. True transparency in a leader is not an action or state but is the result of a values choice, a personal standard to live by. Opacity, though, seems easier and is a much more common, almost universal, move among leaders. This popularity is probably due to the superficial (and illusory) simplicity of opacity.

Simply put, transparency is a commitment to honesty while opacity is a commitment to dishonesty.

Let’s reframe how we think about transparency, and its opposite, opacity. We usually think of workplace transparency as a form of enhanced communications or a way of keeping people in the loop. Although those two benefits of transparency are evident, the true practice of transparency has to do with an organization’s ethos. As much as transparency is about doing this or not doing that, at its core, it must be a principled commitment to personal and organizational honesty and integrity.