Thirteeners
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The company is about the organization you created to fulfill its mission, and it’s about your employees (your internal clients) and your customers (your external clients).
The most important question a leader can ask is this: “What does this company truly need from me right now?” That is the primary focus of authentic leadership.
Real Leadership Versus the Pretense of Leadership
In the future, you will find that the management/leadership model you’ve always used, perhaps for decades, won’t work in the new economy and the emerging workplace. If you want to lead your business out of the current calamities of the marketplace, you’ll need to find a different way to look at who you are as a leader and who you are for your employees. Moreover, you’ll need to determine who you aren’t.
Ask yourself this fundamental question: “Am I truly committed to cultivating who I am as a leader for the future, or am I more interested in—and committed to—reinforcing the chronic pretense of my leadership and expecting everyone else to make the changes needed?”
That question may seem harsh or cynical, but most organizations today aren’t going to survive the next five years unless their leaders realize that it’s their thinking and their behavior that most stands in the way of their organization’s success.
The predominant myth in business (and elsewhere) is that to be a leader whom people will follow, you must already “know” the answers or come with ready solutions to the most vexing problems your organization faces. If that’s what you believe, then you’re only pretending to lead. So on one hand there’s leadership, and on the other there’s the pretense of leadership. Which approach have you honestly adopted as your modus operandi?
Think of a time when you exercised authentic leadership—when you worked for your organization rather than making what happened about you. How did it feel? What were the results?
Think of a time when you carried on the pretense of leadership. How did it feel? What were the results?
Consequences of Pretending to Lead
Many leaders—even some very good leaders—struggle with and refuse to give up the pretense of leadership. More often than not, it’s exactly this thinking and the behavior it produces that cause them to fail. This thinking covers up something that’s missing. As a result, the entire company often gets diverted onto the wrong path, one that reflects the past.
The most obvious example of this is the way in which “leaders” in government and the financial industry created a subprime (or more accurately, substandard) mortgage industry that took down the economy of the United States and much of the rest of the world. People went merrily down the path of financial ruin, following leaders who would not allow others to contribute to the thinking that steered everyone into this mess. Greed certainly played a part. But it’s impossible for greed to gain a foothold without the pretense of leadership that says, “I know best. Your way is wrong, and you need to follow us because only we can best take care of you.” This kind of insidious paternalism makes an entire community weak.
The problem with allowing yourself to fall into a pretentious style of leadership is that you create a culture of patriarchy and paternalism. The message you send your employees is: “I own you (because I sign your paycheck), I know what’s best for you (because I have the answers), and I will take care of you (because I have the best of intentions and want you to be loyal).”
In today’s workplace, most employees and clients believe that is pure bullshit. They’ve lived through a financial disaster in which 600,000 people a week were added to unemployment lines. They wondered if they were next, and they’ve stopped trusting leadership—including yours. They’ve been told to hope that better times are coming, but as we discussed in Chapter 2, hope is as destructive as pretentious leadership. Hope has never been a winning strategy. It is a fictionalized version of reality, trafficked on so many levels and on so many street corners that it’s become a commodity—and one that causes damage to those who believe in it.
You don’t need to create more hope in your company. You need to open up a connection to and a conversation with your employees for things to happen that weren’t going to happen otherwise.
Stop Pretending and Start Leading, Because Nobody’s Buying Your B.S.
You might ask, “What if they figure it out? What if they realize that I don’t possess all the insights, answers, and solutions to the challenges that face my organization? Then what?”
The answer is this: Then, you can start becoming a real leader.
The real problem in business is that most leaders aren’t thinking about how to authentically improve their leadership. They’re more concerned about making certain nobody knows that they don’t have all the answers. They spend much of their time diligently covering up their poor decision making instead of working to build their business through others. Most leaders try hard to keep everyone in the dark about the fact that “they don’t have it.” But guess what? Nobody’s buying it. Such behavior just makes employees return the favor. Most people who live in fear of losing the “deception of paternalism” aren’t the CEOs. They’re the employees who won’t take responsibility for growing and expanding their roles. They’ll simply continue to make their leader feel like the emperor while never daring to say that he or she has no clothes. That’s the key point. Your employees already know you’re just pretending, so continuing to pretend will do you no good. In fact, it’ll just make things worse.
To Start Leading, Step Outside Your Comfort Zone
When you cling to the notion that you are only valued for your answers and that a leader without answers brings little value to his or her business, you teach your employees to think the same way. You create the next generation of pretending leaders.
Leadership is about stepping out of your comfort zone—getting out of the box—and the irony is that the instructions for getting out of the box are outside the box.
Begin by Stepping Out of the Past
Until you recognize that your true value as a leader is in your ability to lead an inquiry into the solutions for your organization (and not try to provide all the answers), you are doomed to repeat your own bad decisions and those of others who came before you. That’s because the past has a grip on you that you can rarely see from your current perspective. It’s there in the conversations you engage in, the choices you make, and the actions you take and direct others to take. You think that you can see what is ahead of you, and you think you know what you must do to avoid failure, but what you see as your future is really only a reflection of your past.
Until you uncover your old behavior as a leader and put that in the past where it belongs, all you can expect is incremental performance increases, if that. Breakthroughs are not born of past-based thinking.
Managers grasping for a way to fundamentally shift their organizations’ performance have to recognize that most programs for change treat symptoms rather than the underlying conditions at the heart of the matter.
For example, when you reduce expenses to mitigate an impending drop in performance, you are merely addressing the symptoms. You have done nothing to alter the organization’s thinking to operate more effectively. In fact, addressing symptoms is more damaging to your organization’s performance because of the powerful and destructive memes created inside your organization.
A more powerful future is infinitely possible, but to own it, you must be willing to give up the pretense that as a leader, you always need to know the answers. Instead, you must begin to learn how to ask the right questions.
Are You Up to the Challenge of Becoming a Real Leader?
So, what are you going to choose for yourself from this point forward? If you’re committed to seeing your company grow and prosper and become a real leader, then read on.
In the following months, your challenge will be to lead your team through a powerful inquiry that uncovers and reveals the true context of your organization. This conversation will permit you and all the stakeho
lders to renew your culture and discover possible results that up to now you’ve only dreamed of.
Reality Check: Find Out If You’re Leading or Just Pretending
To get a handle on whether you’re really leading or just pretending to lead, read each of the monologues that come next. Each of them is a negative viral meme that infects leaders. Then score yourself on how closely that monologue matches your own thinking. Give yourself a score of 5 if your thinking matches the monologue or is very close to it and a 1 if the monologue does not match your thinking at all. Then add up your total score to see if you’re leading or just pretending to lead. Once you know your total, read about the specific dangers of each of the ten ways of pretending to lead.
Blaming your employees for not doing their job“The market is bad and business is off. I need to find out which employees aren’t pulling their weight so I can weed them out. They seemed so promising when I hired them, but they just haven’t worked out. I’ve given them warnings, and they know that I’ve let others go before, so if they’re going to survive, it’s going to be pretty much up to them.”
Blaming the market“My business is suffering, and something or someone is to blame. It’s the market, or the president, or Congress, or the bank. All I have time for is putting out fires and solving huge breakdowns. Nothing’s working, yet I’m doing all I can just to keep up—and I resent it.”
Changing your strategy“Everyone has some kind of strategy, and I’ve spent a lot of time perfecting mine. When my business isn’t growing, I go back to perfect the plan or redo it.”
Failing to embrace chaos“It’s chaotic enough around here with all the problems we have getting the work out the door and serving clients. I’m trying to get rid of the chaos, so we can get some work done. I spend lots of time putting out fires, and I wish I could just get time to work through some issues and find solutions that everyone can work with. But I don’t have the time. It’s too crazy around here.”
Addressing symptoms instead of core issues“When there’s a breakdown that causes us to miss a deadline or fail to deliver on a promise to a client, the first thing I must do is determine if it is a problem that needs fixing, and then go to work to get the problem solved. Often, that involves figuring out who is at fault and establishing new rules to prevent it from happening again.”
Deviating from your core business“When there is a limit on how I can expand and find new vertical markets, I begin to dream about what else I can provide my clients so they won’t leave. I’m looking for something that’ll really undermine my competition.”
Being attached to outcomes“If I’m not sure of the outcome, its best to avoid the risk, so I don’t end up failing and then having to deal with the aftermath. If something goes wrong, then there’s something very wrong with me and my abilities.”
Managing people rather than promises and failing to value employee promises as you would any other valuable asset in your company“It’s tough to ask people to put their ass on the line for something important for the growth and profitability of my company. Hell, it’s tough to put my own ass on the line. If I told people that I was taking an important action, they’d hold me accountable for following through. That’s really scary, so I won’t hold them accountable for their promises if they’ll let me off the hook for mine. After all, I need to treat my employees with respect, and when things don’t get done, it’s often for a very good reason. If I told them they absolutely need to keep their word or don’t bother coming to the next meeting, they’d resent me, and all the other employees would think I was bullying them into working harder. I’d probably lose some pretty good employees, and I can’t afford to have that happen.”
Failing to pay attention to the conversations you lead“I’ve been in business for years, I know what it takes to be successful, and I know what my employees need to do to make “our” projections. They just need to do it the way I did it, and they need to listen to me about how to do it. I don’t have time to sit down and go back and forth with people about what they think should be different or changed. I pay them all well, and I just want to see the performance out of them that reflects their paychecks.”
Treating your employees like family“This company is my baby. I started this company with just me, and I want everyone to get along. Today there are 100 of us, and it’s important I take care of my business—and them—you know, like I did with my own kids.”
Rating Your Results
Score Results
1–15 Congratulations, you’ve passed the reality check! You haven’t fallen victim to the ten main ways of pretending to be a leader. To drive home the point about how crucial it is to continue leading and not pretending, read on about the dangers of the ten ways of pretending to lead.
16–30 You’ve got one foot in reality. You’re probably doing an okay job of leading some of the time, but you’re falling victim to comforting thought patterns you’ve learned from others, and they’re causing you to pretend that you’re leading sometimes as well. You need to step out of your comfort zone so you can get back to reality and start becoming a real leader 100 percent of the time.
31–50 Oh yes, you’re the Great Pretender. You’ve created or inherited a business culture that rewards the pretense of leadership rather than real leadership. As a result, your company is disconnected and not executing your strategy. Read on to find out the ten things you’re doing to yourself and your company by just pretending to lead. Then make a commitment to stop pretending and start the process of becoming a real leader.
The Consequences of the Ten Ways of Just Pretending to Lead
Blaming your employeesSure, there will be employees who simply can’t cut it, and it may be better for you if they were not cutting it somewhere else. But if your employees watch you dismiss people who in the past were doing great and today are struggling, that creates the negative viral meme of “The boss is watching, so just don’t screw up.” Smart and talented employees struggle at times, and that’s a fact you need to accept. Beyond that, committed yet struggling employees are usually a symptom of a much deeper problem that you can’t see and haven’t yet addressed.
Blaming the marketIt’s easier to look out there and blame everyone else than to look within and see that for years, you’ve stuck with the same strategy, the same products, and the same solutions that made you successful in the beginning. If you’ve been in business for even three years, the world has changed during that time. There have been major paradigm shifts, and while you were busy working in your business; you forgot to work on your business. Futurist Joel Arthur Barker has said, “When the paradigm shifts, everyone goes back to zero.”12 Some people shift to respond to the new paradigm; others never see change coming.
Changing your strategyWhen business volume falls off, the first thing many leaders do is convene a new strategy session. But reacting with a new strategy—a new or different list of things to do—could be the worst thing possible. While 87 percent or more of companies don’t ever fully achieve their strategy, it’s usually not the strategy that’s the problem. The reason most people do strategic planning is to have a road map to remind them where they said they were headed, but most written strategies end up on shelves or in drawers.
A good strategy is actually a conversation for the future of your organization. If you’re a $10 million company and you want to be a $20 million company, the conversations you engage in need to change. A strategic plan is not a goal to get to—it’s a conversation that calls you to be (a $20 million company, for example) in the future. It’s insufficient and foolish to scale your strategy to fit the next level of growth. You need an entirely new conversation for the company you want to build. If you want to be a $50 million company, start thinking and talking like one. Imagine what that company will look like when you get there. Then stand in your imagined future and begin to describe how you got there.
Failing to embrace chaosChaos is a dirty word in most people’s vocabulary, but when you think of chaos you�
�re probably thinking of tumult. Merriam-Webster defines chaos variously as
“the confused unorganized state of primordial matter before the creation of distinct forms” or “the inherent unpredictability in the behavior of a complex natural system.”
Chaos is natural and unavoidable, and it gives rise to the new. In business, chaos is transformative; it creates urgency and is represented by a creative tension that causes people to excel. Merriam-Webster defines tumult as
“a disorderly agitation or milling about of a crowd, usually with uproar and confusion of voices; a turbulent uprising; a violent outburst.”
Tumult does not lead to creativity. It just stresses people out and drives down performance. So don’t fear chaos. In the end, allowing it to happen can be one of the most powerful aspects of your strategy.
Addressing symptoms instead of core issuesIt’s only natural when disruptive issues pop up in the workplace that the first thing we want to do is snuff them out as fast as we can. That rarely works. Most of the time, it just temporarily masks the real problem, which continues to have a detrimental impact on workplace performance.
Disruption is a symptom of other issues. Perhaps you can’t see it now because when the pressure is off, it feels like you nipped it in the bud. But you didn’t; you just addressed the symptoms. The core issues remain, so they will just show up somewhere else, and you will go through the same exercise of pulling people in and talking through the problem (actually symptoms) again and again and again.