Leadership Drift This Week
Leadership Is Too Important to Be an A-hole
Language warning: I’m using a few stronger words than usual in this edition.
Not to be pedantic, but if a commander-in-chief muses that “taking out” a couple of major American cities is a “small price to pay” for keeping the country safe, they're objectively not keeping the country safe.
It’s easy to ignore imbecilic decrees; there seems to be an infinite supply. It’s equally easy to grow numb to them; that’s by design. A shrug and a chuckle from other supposed leaders is either ignorance or complicity, and another example of the anti-leadership plaguing the nation.
Leadership is what we do with responsibility for other human beings.
Effective leaders want people strengthened, not diminished.
They use power responsibly.
They see talented people for what they can become, not reduced to their weaknesses.
They hold high standards without humiliation.
They have ambition without dehumanization.
They demonstrate strength without cruelty.
Most sane people yearn for leadership without assholery.
When someone uses power in a way that diminishes people, it pisses me off. A piece of my leadership point of view reads, “Poor leadership decisions don’t just tick me off; they motivate me to find better ones and to foster the leader within others.” For 24 years, I’ve occasionally done battle with well-intentioned but small-minded people who have urged me to soften that, so I don't offend or lose opportunities.
My recent birthday has brought me to a place of fresh, renewed perspective. I have perhaps entered my “Fuck off, respectfully” era.
Leadership is too important to screw up. It will contain anger, aspiration, responsibility, creativity, teaching, and action. In my career, I’ve spent a lot of time turning that into increasingly sophisticated ways of helping organizations with leadership. Useful, real, occasionally excellent work, but it’s softened me. It’s sanded my edges, because for a micro moment, the ludicrous statement caused me to think, “That’s bad leadership.”
That is wholly insufficient.
Anyone in a leadership capacity has to pause and ask, “How did we get to a place where someone entrusted with enormous power can think and speak this way, and what can be done to produce better leadership?” Because, for as many good leaders as there are out there, they don't currently outnumber the lousy ones. Browse a week's worth of headlines for proof.
I continue to believe, as a general rule, the wrong people are leading. Most effective leaders know the truth behind that statement. They, like me, work to foster the leader within others. Or, in my language, help people find the aha within.
Effective leaders clear obstacles so people can reach what they’re capable of. They inspire people who, in turn, inspire themselves. And they explicitly combat the damaging effects of people who abuse power through intent or ignorance.
You can probably answer: what happens to human beings when leadership is exercised badly, and what becomes possible when leadership is exercised well? We've all experienced both. Yet our memories, desire to fit in, and reluctance to rock the boat too often keep us from doing anything about it.
The consequences of leadership are too important to keep outsourcing to the incompetent, the corrupt, and the lazy who prefer the title to the practice.
If you are a leader, or leader-adjacent, you must remove fear and encourage others to lead. People shouldn’t be afraid to lead. And once they lead, they shouldn’t be assholes about it. The role is too important.
As demonstrated recently, prolifically and pervasively, far too many assholes hold leadership roles.
Leadership is too important to screw up.
It’s too important to abuse.
It’s too important to outsource to people who want the power without the responsibility.
And it’s too important to be an asshole about.
Manage Better. Lead Well.
Drift Pattern of the Week:
Weak Accountability
A leader behaves badly, and everyone around them adjusts instead of confronting it.
Meetings become carefully managed. People stop delivering unwelcome information. Colleagues explain away the behavior. Direct reports learn what not to say.
The pattern is easy to overlook because nothing appears immediately broken. Work continues. Results may even look good. But the organization gradually teaches itself that accountability flows downward while protection flows upward.
Left unaddressed, accountability becomes selective. The people with the most power become the people least accountable for how they use it.
Leadership Practice
Before your next leadership meeting, identify one behavior you’ve tolerated in yourself or another leader because confronting it feels inconvenient. Name it plainly. Decide what responsible leadership requires you to do.
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Diagnostic Question
If someone with less power behaved exactly as you do when you’re frustrated, ambitious, or under pressure, would you consider their behavior acceptable leadership?
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From My Desk
Some organizations become remarkably sophisticated at describing the consequences of poor leadership while remaining strangely cautious about naming the behavior that caused them.
We talk about engagement scores, retention, communication problems, culture, morale, and performance. Sometimes those are useful descriptions. But sometimes they are ways of talking around the person, decision, or behavior everyone already knows is creating the problem.
Professionalism and avoidance are different.
Effective leaders don't need to be cruel to be candid. But they do need enough courage to say what is actually happening.
Recommended Resource
Leadership Drift Self-Check
The hardest leadership problems are often the ones that have become normal.
The Leadership Drift Self-Check helps leaders examine the everyday conditions that can quietly move an organization away from healthy leadership: weakened accountability, communication breakdowns, integrity gaps, neglected teams, and other forms of drift that rarely announce themselves as emergencies.
It is useful when something consequential isn't working, but the organization hasn't yet agreed on, or perhaps doesn't want to name, the leadership problem underneath it.
The value is not a score. It is the opportunity to see something differently: where leadership may be contributing to the problem, where responsibility has become blurred, and where a small correction could prevent a larger failure.
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Leadership Drift Quote
“Power becomes leadership only when it is exercised with responsibility for the people affected by it.”
Karl Bimshas on Leadership Drift
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Leadership is a responsibility. Use it to strengthen others.
