May 2013, and I am at the closing dinner for an executive program in Barcelona, Spain. As with other such programs, I have taught material on power in organizations—mastering organizational dynamics. The topic of power remains, unfortunately, much as the Harvard Business School professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter described it more than thirty years ago, the organization’s last dirty secret—something that nice people don’t talk about, let alone teach to executives.1 And my approach, describing organizational reality as it is rather than as we wish it to be, can be particularly challenging. As Publishers Weekly commented on a book I wrote on power (a description that also applies to my classes), “The book has a realpolitik analysis of human behavior that isn’t for everyone but its candor . . . and forthrightness are fresh and appealing.”2
A participant, who over the course of the evening has had too much to drink, decides to come over to the table where I am sitting. His inhibitions sufficiently lowered, he begins to berate me for the material I have taught, but mostly to complain about what I have failed to do. “I want to be inspired,” he says. “Sure, I understand you have taught us what the research literature says and how to navigate organizational reality, but I came to this program for inspiration. It is the job of teachers to inspire their students.” My reply: “If you want inspiration, go to a play, read an inspiring book, listen to great music, go to an art museum, or read some of the great treatises on religion or philosophy. I am a social scientist, not a lay preacher.” “No,” he insists, “it is your job, as a teacher of management, to inspire me.” Or, as a former MBA student put it slightly differently when we had dinner, “I have a soul-crushing job. I need hope.”
As the data reviewed in the last chapter demonstrate, many people have soul-crushing jobs and work for ineffective or even abusive leaders, and they apparently think the job of business schools and professors is to provide inspiration and hope. So many leadership players provide what the “customers” want. For instance, if you go to the website of the Belgium-based Vlerick Business School, there, on the very first page, is the headline “Looking for an Inspiring Management Course?”3 Vlerick isn’t alone. The Australian Graduate School of Management, part of the University of New South Wales in Sydney, also highlights on its website the fact that “we create inspirational learning opportunities.”4 “Inspiring” (or “inspirational”) seems like an unusual and possibly surprising adjective to describe a class or a program of study. I don’t see many medical schools, architecture programs, physics departments, engineering schools, law schools, or computer science departments advertising their classes as “inspiring.” Useful, rigorous, well-delivered, innovative, scientifically based courses and programs that provide a foundation of knowledge for effective professional practice—certainly. But “inspiring?” Probably not.
If you are a leader seeking to actually change a workplace’s conditions so as to improve employee engagement, satisfaction, or productivity, or if you are an individual seeking to chart a course to a more successful career, inspiration is not what you need. What you need are facts, evidence, and ideas. Cheering may be helpful at sporting events, but not so much in the nitty-gritty job of fixing workplaces and careers. This chapter lays out the many reasons why inspiration is not only a poor basis from which to attempt serious organizational change but also useless for figuring out how to have more personal success inside work organizations.
My view about inspiration is clearly in the minority. Inspiration of the sort that participant in the executive education course was seeking is precisely what the leadership industry mostly delivers—providing good feelings if not always enlightenment, entertainment if not invariably education, and, most important, (at least to the consumers thereof), hope rather than despair. And why not? Real life is difficult and depressing enough. Who wants to attend an executive program or hear a speech or read a blog post and not feel happier and more enthused as a result? So the leadership industry delivers what the customers want. Whether it is what they need is an entirely different matter.
To build a science of leadership, you need reliable data. To learn from others’ success, you need to know what those others did. The best learning, simply put, comes from accurate and comprehensive data, either qualitative or quantitative. But the leadership business is filled with fables. In autobiographical or semiautobiographical works and speeches, in the cases and authorized biographies leaders help bring into existence, and in their prescriptions for leadership, leaders describe what they want to believe about themselves and the world and, more importantly and strategically, what they would like others to believe about them. The stories leaders tell or have others tell about themselves on their behalf are primarily designed to create an attractive legacy. Sometimes such accounts are, to put it delicately, incomplete. Because these tales are designed to build an image and a reputation, they do not constitute qualitative data from which to learn. In fact, they aren’t data at all, any more than advertising is data or evidence. There are many examples of this phenomenon. Here are some.
Some years ago, the former Medtronic CEO and now Harvard Business School professor Bill George wrote True North with the former Stanford MBA student and now consultant and speaker Peter Sims.5 This bestselling book, like many in the genre, advocated the importance of authenticity as a leadership trait. At the time the book came out, I was serving on the board of directors of a publicly traded company with someone who had been quite senior in the financial function at Medtronic. When I commented to this individual on the publication and success of True North, fully expecting to hear how its principles were reflected at Medtronic, the person replied that the Bill George and the prescriptions in the book and the Bill George who had worked his way up the corporate hierarchy and then ran Medtronic were not quite the same.
Another person with long experience in the pharmaceutical industry, an individual who knows Medtronic and Bill George well, commented that the principles laid out in True North probably held more for the culture built by George’s predecessors than for George himself. And then he made another insightful statement: “Bill George today [as a Harvard faculty member teaching leadership] is probably closer to the principles in the book than he was while he was at Medtronic. The ideas in True North are undoubtedly closer to what he currently believes than to the behavior he engaged in while he was there.”
This example is not meant to criticize Bill George, who is a sincere and talented individual genuinely interested in making the world a better place and improving leadership. He is scarcely the only leadership-industry figure who has described a more aspirational than veridical version of himself and the company he led.
You can read Jack Welch’s books about General Electric and his management approach and never encounter the phrase “GE jerks.” Yet that is a term I first heard from a now-retired GE senior executive who reported directly to Mr. Welch. He used it to describe the kind of workers GE’s hard-driving culture created with its politics, competition, and forced-curve ranking. The phrase and that description of GE were shared by this former executive’s wife, someone who had worked in GE in a very senior role in human resources for many years. And it is an observation I have heard frequently from others who worked at General Electric. Nor do Welch’s writings about his management approach and accomplishments dwell on (or even mention) the pollution clean-up suits, price-fixing, or defense contract frauds that occurred at GE during his tenure.6
Motivated cognition is one factor that explains the unreliability of the stories we read. Not surprisingly, people are motivated to think well of themselves. Therefore, not only do individuals perceive themselves to be above average for most positive attributes and believe that the qualities in which they excel are the most important—the so-called above-average effect7—but individuals will also selectively remember their successes and forget their failures or shortcomings. In general, leaders want to remember their accomplishments and not remember some of their most negative behaviors, let alone disclose such things even if they did remember them—so they don’t.
But it’s worse than that. Even in the absence of motivational reasons to misremember and misreport, people invariably recall past events with considerable error, even if they try to be as honest and accurate as possible. The large literature concerning the unreliability of eyewitness accounts of accidents or crimes attests to the fact that even when people want to recall and report things accurately and have no incentive to do otherwise, memory plays tricks and makes recall frequently unreliable.8
Moreover, for the leaders who talk or write or blog about their leadership experience, the problem becomes even more pernicious. In telling their stories, leaders create and re-create their own reality so often that soon it becomes almost impossible for them to distinguish the actual truth from what they recall as being true, even if they wanted to do so. As the writer Ben Dolnick perceptively commented:
William Maxwell wrote, “In talking about the past we lie with every breath we draw.” I misunderstood this sentence, when I first read it, as a statement about the fallibility of memory; now I see it as a statement about the distorting power of speech—or of speech’s pretentious cousin, writing. Because one of the strangest things I’ve learned . . . is how the things you write begin to blend with, and then replace, the things you experienced.9
And there is another potential process that works to make the leadership stories told by leaders unreliable. An extensive research literature in evolutionary psychology speaks to the advantages—and therefore the pervasiveness—of self-deception. The evolutionary benefit of self-deception is clear: if you can deceive yourself, you can much more easily and convincingly deceive others, and thereby obtain the benefits that accrue from being able to successfully fool people. Summarizing this research and these theories, Robert Trivers, an anthropologist at Rutgers University, and William von Hippel, a psychologist, noted, “Our biased processing perspective suggests that the individual can self-deceive in a variety of ways, some of which prevent even unconscious knowledge of the truth.”10
What this means is that the stories one hears from leaders (or, for that matter, from anyone) may be untrue but not known to be untrue by the person telling the tales, because that person has so successfully deceived him-or herself. Between motivation to self-present and the unconscious ways in which people misremember and self-deceive, believing the accounts of leaders or anyone else without a lot of fact-checking would seem to be singularly unwise.
In spite of these cognitive biases, we nevertheless accept and indeed embrace the fables about leaders and leadership because the stories are so consistent with what most people would like to believe about the world. Many of the stories are consistent with the just-world phenomenon—a social science idea that, to paraphrase a wonderful line from the movie The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel, things will be all right in the end, and if they aren’t all right, it’s not yet the end.11 Many of the stories offer morals that fit what we want to believe, and many offer hope. We often engage in astonishingly little due diligence to assess the accuracy of what we hear.
The problem isn’t the storytelling per se. Indeed, as Chip and Dan Heath remind us, stories are often much more memorable and persuasive than cold statistics.12 The problem is that the leadership stories are often exaggerated or fabricated out of whole cloth, and their listeners don’t bother to do any fact-checking.
If the morals and the heroic nature of leadership stories remind you of myths, as they should, they might also remind you of many aspects of religion. For good reason: just as religion seeks to provide believers a sense of personal control, a belief in the fairness of the world, and a feeling of meaning and purpose, so, too, do the leadership myths and fables passed off as truth, often using remarkably similar means. That’s why I refer to these activities as a form of lay preaching.
In his essay about religion, Sigmund Freud commented on religion’s functions in ways that nicely parallel how and why the myths of leadership are created and persist whether or not they are true:
These [religious ideas] . . . are not the residue of experience or the final results of reflection; they are illusions, fulfilments of the oldest, strongest and most insistent wishes of mankind; the secret of their strength is the strength of these wishes. We know already that the terrifying effect of . . . helplessness aroused the need for protection. . . . Thus the benevolent rule of divine providence [or a benevolent leader] allays our anxiety in face of life’s dangers, the establishment of a moral world order ensures the fulfilment of the demands of justice, which within human culture have so often remained unfulfilled.13
But believing in the myths and stories about leadership and leaders has few positive consequences and lots of negative results. Understanding these costly consequences can help us understand why and how so much of what goes on in the omnipresent feel-good talks, books, and blogs makes things worse—in many cases much worse—for both workplaces and the people who lead them.
Does it really matter if leaders and others who tell their stories burnish the truth? Actually it does, in several ways and for a variety of reasons. First of all, as already noted, inaccurate accounts of leader behavior constitute a poor foundation from which to offer advice. And there are other problems as well.
At a cocktail party, someone who knows many leadership teachers quite well, an entrepreneur and a former business case writer, pulls me aside to relate instance after instance in which one particular individual, an experienced senior executive who also teaches classes on leadership, has presented himself, his companies, and his interactions with peers and subordinates in ways that are demonstrably false. When I ask this entrepreneur the same question I just posed, “What difference does this make?” the reply is immediate. The entrepreneur, seeing the enormous discontinuity between the espoused behaviors and what this person actually does, is, first of all, deeply disappointed and upset. More than that, he argues that the all-too-frequent examples of people who profess one set of behaviors and act the opposite produce cynicism on the part of those who see the hypocrisy. His telling conclusion: In our quest for inspiration over insight, we wind up with neither. We get no inspiration, as we learn that the leadership stories are more fiction than fact. And we obtain no insight, because we do not gather the data on which to build an understanding of effective leadership.
And there is yet another adverse consequence. Confronted with a leadership industry that promulgates a set of prescriptions that many employees come to see in their daily lives as having little resonance with the reality they experience, people become tainted and cynical, not just about the leadership industry but about social science research and its conclusions more generally. After all, if you can’t trust the leadership trainings, speeches, and books, many of which have garnered wide publicity and are featured on major television talk shows and in the media, why should you trust any other material delivered in similar formats to similar acclaim, even if that material covers different topics? Such distrust of what passes for social science in the study of leadership contaminates people’s reactions to other social science research, thereby making it all the more difficult to build evidence-based management practice.14
A woman who works in one of those iconic Silicon Valley companies sits in my office, telling me about the behaviors of three people: a peer, her boss, and the head of human resources for the company. She has run a marketing analytics exercise that has resulted in making the company about $4 million. Because of her success and, more important, because of her background and skill level, she has been promoted to head her own marketing analytics team, a position that leaves her as the youngest, least-senior leader in terms of company tenure, and as the only woman directly reporting to her boss. A peer has gone to their mutual boss and suggested that her unit be moved under him—a smart way for him to not only expand his domain but also get more talent working in his unit so the unit’s performance will appear better in the future.
“What was your response to all of this?” I ask. Her reply: to use her learning and ideas from a leadership course on interpersonal dynamics, colloquially referred to as “touchy-feely,” to attempt to repair the relationship with her peer. “Why did you do that?” I inquire. “Because,” she responds, “I have been taught to build relationships of authenticity and trust at work.” When I ask how her efforts went, she comments that of course they didn’t work at all, because her peer was not interested in “repairing a relationship” or behaving with trust and authenticity; he was interested in taking over her team for his own advantage—a not-uncommon situation.
When she went to her boss and later to the head of HR to explain what was going on, in each instance reminding them about how her colleague’s behavior was inconsistent with the company’s espoused values and with its many leadership-development activities, their response was to do nothing except to sensibly remind her that she needed to become able to effectively look after herself (a theme to which we will return in chapter 7). Today that woman works for another organization in a different part of the country.
People not only have problems in their current positions, but they also lose out on attractive job opportunities by believing in the prescriptions so frequently proffered for how leaders should behave. Another example: A South American executive (let’s call him Martin) was the CEO of a health care organization until he was forced out of his position by the company’s founder and some private equity investors. One complaint about him, even though he was extremely talented and intelligent—he had graduated from a leading U.S. business school—was that he was perceived as not being forceful enough. I had coached him to negotiate an exit that left his reputation intact, and he had subsequently moved on to run the country operations of a very large pharmaceutical company.
Now the company he had once run was being bought by a very rich health care leader, but, because that person was in his seventies, he would need someone to run the firm on a day-to-day basis. Could it be Martin? Not likely. At a dinner with a person who for years has overseen a large purveyor of management training events and who knows the situation well, I asked about Martin’s prospects. His immediate reply: the new owner had no respect for Martin, because he “isn’t a leader.”
When I pressed this person on what that meant, his reply didn’t address Martin’s culture-building or business-analysis skills, or his trustworthiness and authenticity, which, everyone agreed, Martin had in profusion. Instead, he spoke of Martin’s failures to show anger, be forceful, and advocate for himself. These comments seemed particularly surprising because they came from someone who runs seminars filled with speakers who advocate precisely the strengths that Martin has, and someone who would never, because of the audience’s response, have presenters on stage to advocate the opposite. Nonetheless, he agreed with the new owner about Martin’s unsuitability. What irony—someone who oversees large leadership seminars that feature people who promulgate one set of leader qualities and behaviors basing his evaluation and judgment of a possible executive on precisely the opposite set of qualities!
I know too many similar examples. People suffer career troubles because they believed what they were told in the books, blogs, and talks. One such person was told to build closer, more personal relationships with his subordinates, in a quest to build more authenticity into his leader-follower interactions. His reward? Some of his subordinates used the personal information he shared to undermine his reputation and his authority, not just in the unit he managed but also more widely within the company.
It is examples such as these, and the hundreds or thousands of others just like them that people encounter every day, that led the chief technology officer for a major media organization to provide the following shockingly direct advice to some students in my Paths to Power class in February 2014: “Go home and throw out the numerous leadership books—or better yet, give them to career competitors.”
There is still another way in which all this mythmaking and storytelling creates career troubles: the leaders who are the progenitors and the subjects of these stories sometimes believe the veneration and adulation they have successfully garnered. In the belief that they are, as great leaders, “bulletproof,” the leaders are insufficiently attentive—or paranoid—and sometimes lose their jobs as a result.
Case in point: George Zimmer, who in 1973 with about $7,000 founded the Men’s Wearhouse, an off-price retailer of tailored men’s clothing that more recently has expanded into the tuxedo rental and uniform businesses. In 2013, the company was doing about $2.5 billion in business with a market capitalization of $2 billion. Zimmer had filled the board of directors with people he knew and liked, had hired the senior executives and watched them grow with the company, and, most important, was the face of the company’s ubiquitous television and radio advertising, well known for his signature line, “You’re going to like the way you look. I guarantee it.” In 2011, when Zimmer had reached his early sixties, he and the board promoted Doug Ewert, a longtime company employee, to be the CEO, as Zimmer stepped into the role of chairman of the board of directors. In June 2013, Zimmer was summarily fired. How could George Zimmer be thrown out of the company he founded, whose brand he personally embodied, by people he had himself hired and known for decades?
There are many answers to this question, and a lot of them revolve around the belief in the mythical qualities of leaders. When the company’s stock price was depressed in 2012 and early 2013, the board was concerned about a hostile tender offer. As Zimmer explained to me, he had told the board that because of the personal nature of the company’s brand and its connection with its customers, embodied in him, and because of the strong, people-centered culture that was an important component of the company’s original success, also embodied in him, and his strong, emotional connection to the company’s fifteen thousand employees, he did not think anyone would or could mount an unfriendly bid for the company. Of course, the more Zimmer believed this, the even more inconceivable it would be for the company itself to get rid of him.
One of the elements of the company’s culture when Zimmer was the CEO was a compressed pay distribution between the executives and the frontline employees. One of the first things Ewert did when he became CEO was to raise the CEO’s pay significantly. And there were disagreements with Zimmer over the fate of K&G, a small chain of stores with an even lower price point that was not as profitable as the core brand.
Zimmer had ceded formal control of the company, but he was reluctant to just accept decisions with which he strongly disagreed. And in part because he had hired and brought the senior leadership onto the board, he was less deferential and at times could even be rude (or just bluntly direct) with those who disagreed with him. If you are a mythical, heroic, larger-than-life figure used to getting your way, rules and social conventions and corporate governance tenets don’t apply. In the showdown in which he was fired, George Zimmer was completely surprised when his opposition mobilized in secret, got others on board with their sense of momentum, and presented Zimmer with a fait accompli.
There is yet another problem with the mythmaking besides the disinhibition and overconfidence that come from having power and having held it for a long time that can cost leaders their jobs. Mythical, heroic leaders become vulnerable to losing their jobs because after a while, regardless of their business skills and leadership capabilities, they find it impossible to live up to the hype, as it would be for anyone. With great expectations and high hopes come, naturally enough, great disappointments.
When Carol Bartz, the former CEO of Autodesk, replaced Yahoo’s cofounder Jerry Yang as CEO in 2009, she came into a company that was going nowhere and struggling to define itself. She arrived surrounded by great expectations. “Her hiring was initially met with optimism by Wall Street, which saw her as a tough-talking savior who could whip the company into shape.”15 Some two years later, without even having a successor in mind, the board fired her—by phone. Under pressure from the first day on the job and hired as a savior, Bartz was doomed unless she had managed to perform a turnaround miracle that her successors had also failed to accomplish.
The leadership stories we tell, and the mythology of superperformance they create, produce other problems also. As we build up leaders to be larger-than-life, three things happen, all of which are harmful: (1) people invariably see themselves as not measuring up to these mythical leadership figures and therefore either don’t try or excuse themselves from seeking to do things because of their perceived deficiencies compared with these heroic figures; (2) individuals are reluctant to accept, let alone seek out, stories of failure or imperfection among the leaders who have come to be venerated, a lack of due diligence that produces an inability to see, let alone learn, from failure and setbacks; (3) in setting up people who are admittedly rare and unusual as exemplars, the leadership business falls into the problem of trying to learn from rare and in many instances random events, thus failing to develop recommendations that can be readily implemented by regular people and generate predictable results. Consider each of these problems in turn:
On the first point, humanizing leaders and acknowledging their imperfections can go a long way toward getting all people to acknowledge that even if they are fallible and imperfect, so were some of the most interesting and productive people in history; therefore, there is no reason for “ordinary” people not to try to accomplish great things. In this regard, Michael Dyson, an author and teacher, uses the example of the infidelities of Martin Luther King Jr. to illustrate the importance of not mythologizing leaders. After detailing the many ways in which King has been put on a pedestal, Dyson notes that after King’s womanizing became known, “I felt for the first time I was able to grasp what King accomplished in its true proportions. . . . Investing in King’s perfection allows us to dismiss the humanity of the underregarded. . . . With a more nuanced view of King in play, we should be inspired to create social change within our own communities, armed with the belief that good things can be done by imperfect people.”16
Nelson Mandela, sometimes called the father of modern South Africa, was also venerated almost as a saint, particularly toward the end of his life. While Mandela is someone to be admired and was an individual who accomplished a great deal, the mythmaking in many respects derogates his actual achievements. Mandela was a pragmatic politician who, as Pierre de Vos noted, was “among the most transformative of his era, but still a politician.”
Nelson Mandela was not a saint. We would dishonor his memory if we treated him as if he was one. Like all truly exceptional human beings, he was a person of flesh and blood, with his own idiosyncrasies, his own blind spots and weaknesses.17
People’s desire to see and hear only good things, to ignore contradictory or negative evidence, and thereby build portrayals of leaders on incomplete information, is at once understandable but also unfortunate. A second problem that arises: In the desire to learn only from success, people miss the opportunity to learn from failure, which is often a more promising and interesting teacher. The admonition to “learn from failure” is common and well known but mostly ignored.18 Amy Edmondson, a professor at Harvard Business School who has extensively studied health care settings, has argued that “healthcare organisations that systematically and effectively learn from the failures that occur in the care delivery process . . . are rare”; she has maintained that this creates significant obstacles to improving the results produced by these systems.19 Two management professors have noted that “failures may lead to ultimate success in both nature and business. Just as dynamic ecosystems depend on death to replace senescent organisms with vigorous growth, the termination of uneconomic activities is essential to wealth creation.”20
And the third problem: Amid all the mythologizing that besets leadership, people try to generalize and learn from exceptional cases. Holding aside the fact that such cases don’t hold up too well on closer inspection in many instances, learning from rare events is a singularly problematic endeavor. Research by Jerker Denrell, a professor at Warwick business school, shows that in many instances the relationship between skill and observed performance is surprisingly weak. That is because of the effects of luck and other random variations on observed outcomes, among other things.21 Denrell argues that in many circumstances, people who perform well but are not at the very, very top are actually better people to learn from. That is because their performance is more likely to be a result of their true abilities and actions instead of chance events, and therefore such individuals offer more reliable and valid examples from which to draw conclusions about how to become successful.
Even leaving aside the empirical accuracy, logical rigor, and usefulness of the leadership stories we tell and so uncritically accept, I have a more pragmatic concern with all of this inspiration-seeking: whether such inspirational storytelling is an effective way to produce change. It is not.
Of course, precisely because inspiration does not work very well to produce tangible change, one can make a good living doing it again and again.
We know a lot about how to change behaviors, and inspiration is not high on the list of effective strategies for doing so, for several reasons. First, inspiration works to increase the motivation to do something with more intensity or differently. But the motivational effect is likely to last only briefly, when the emotional uplift from the inspiration is still fresh.
Even more fundamentally, inspiration and the motivation it engenders do nothing to change the situations in which people work—how they are measured and evaluated and paid, whom they work with and what those people tell them, and so forth. When the inspiring event is over, people return to the same work environments they previously inhabited, and they probably interact with the same people both inside and outside work. They may react and respond somewhat differently postinspiration, but I wouldn’t bet on it, given the potency of situations to affect behavior in a sustained fashion.
This is particularly true if little changes in the informational environment that people confront. From an extensive social science research literature, we know that priming—the salience of information, including physical cues—has a large effect on people’s attitudes and behaviors. For instance, people vote more favorably on school bond issues when they happen to cast their ballots at a school instead of at a firehouse or some other location.22 People exposed to fast food logos are more impatient.23 Individuals who wear fake (counterfeit) branded sunglasses cheat more often across a number of different tasks.24 People working in a somewhat darker room also cheat more, as if the darker environment brings out their darker nature.25 The amount we eat depends in part on the size of the plate the food is served on.26 In all cases, the information—the cues—in our environments profoundly affects what we do. Reading an inspiring leadership book or blog or hearing an inspiring speech changes those environments not at all—at least not in enduring ways that cue different workplace behavior.
Effective methods of personal change and self-improvement recognize the importance of changing the information that people see and experience. Research shows that having people sign an honor code—an act that entails both making a moral commitment and making moral action salient—reduces unethical behavior.27 Want to walk more to burn up more calories and get more exercise? Get one of those devices that hang on your belt and measure how many steps you take per day. Want to change what you eat? Get and keep a diary of what you eat. Most devices and tools focused on changing people’s behavior proceed from a set of simple, evidence-based principles: you change people’s behavior by having them set some specific, measurable goals, reminding them of what they have committed to do, measuring their activities and providing frequent feedback, and providing positive reinforcement for progress.
Effective programs of personal change also recognize the importance of changing people’s social environment—changing the individuals with whom they regularly interact. People are profoundly influenced by those with whom they have contact, as these others provide information and also models for their behavior. For example, an evaluation of a network of more than twelve thousand people over a thirty-two-year period found that an individual’s weight gain was dependent on the weight gains of others with whom that person was socially tied.28 Alcoholics Anonymous (AA) works in part by providing social support—not inspiration—to people who are trying to stop drinking. As with the case of weight gain, research shows that not having pro-drinking others in people’s social networks increases their likelihood of abstinence, net of the effects of their involvement in AA.29
Keith Ferrazzi, a consultant and management speaker, related that a talk on how companies can accomplish cultural change prompted a manager in the audience to note the similarities in Ferrazzi’s prescriptions to elements of addiction programs.30 For good reason: Successful efforts at change at the individual or the organizational level have many elements in common, including emphasizing the importance of peer support and pressure, providing sponsors or mentors to help maintain accountability and encourage progress, acknowledging small improvements, and understanding that “you are the company you keep.”31 So while inspiration can make people feel motivated and good in the moment, it typically does nothing to change their networks of relationships or the informational cues with which they are bombarded. Consequently, inspiration is unlikely to produce enduring or even temporary behavioral change.
In a similar fashion, organizations do not improve their quality through lots of moving speeches and meetings about how important quality is. They seldom improve even by listening to tales of other places that have made great progress in improving quality. Rather, companies improve their quality by defining what the idea means in terms of specific operational measures, then routinely and frequently assessing those aspects of performance, sharing the outcomes with everyone (often in graphical form), and holding people accountable for improving the measures that are under their control.
When Amir Dan Rubin arrived as the CEO of Stanford Hospital and Clinics in 2011, the hospital had a history of underperformance along many indicators ranging from patient satisfaction to the incidence of hospital-acquired infections. In less than two years, Rubin and has colleagues transformed Stanford Hospital. Measures of patient satisfaction rose from the fortieth to the ninetieth percentile, waiting times in the emergency room decreased dramatically, and a hospital that had been rated as among the lowest in the Bay Area was now winning national awards for its measures of quality of patient care. The remarkable transformation had little to do with inspiration, although Stanford Hospital did adopt a mission statement (“To care, to educate, to discover”) and a vision statement as well (“Healing humanity through science and compassion, one patient at a time”). The improvement mostly occurred because Rubin built a robust operating model around a performance management system and installed a leadership team with a performance-improvement orientation. For every aspect of operations, the question was “Do you have a standard?” Standards and measurements, made visible through charts in every unit, were what drove the remarkable performance improvement—not nice words or inspiring stories.
These recommendations are not news. Indeed, the research on goal setting, which is both voluminous and in some cases decades old, shows that setting specific, measurable goals is much more effective for changing behavior and improving results than are general blandishments meant to inspire people to perform better by increasing their motivation through stories and examples.32
To his credit, the famed executive coach Marshall Goldsmith has made the idea of reflecting on specific behaviors on a daily basis to accomplish change and to improve behavior as a leader the foundation of his coaching practice; it is also an integral part of a leadership improvement program developed by Taavo Godtfredsen of Skillsoft. Goldsmith’s and Godtfredsen’s programs require a daily question process whereby at the same time each day (in the morning or evening, for example), individuals rate themselves on how well they have progressed on the five or six questions that have the greatest impact on their personal and professional objectives. Systematically and regularly reflecting on behavior, and even better, measuring such behavior, is much more likely to produce substantive change than mere storytelling and emotional uplift is.
If these problems aren’t enough, developing the unwarranted belief that you are becoming a better leader can also be quite counterproductive in several ways.
Some years ago, the social psychologists Benoît Monin and Dale Miller described the idea of moral licensing. This elegantly simple concept, which has been empirically demonstrated numerous times, shows that if people display moral or ethical behavior in one given instance, they then feel freer to behave less prosocially or less ethically at a subsequent time. Having displayed to others and themselves their moral credentials, and having thereby established their identity as good and moral people, individuals feel freed from having to prove their morality again. Instead, they are inclined to do more of what they really want to do, because having demonstrated their morality and their character, they are now freer of moral constraint.
In one study, people who first had the opportunity to demonstrate that they were nonprejudiced were subsequently more willing to express attitudes that showed bias.33 A second study suggested that when people disclose conflicts of interest, they then feel freer to provide exaggerated, biased advice—because, so the reasoning goes, having made their conflict of interest apparent, they consider themselves relieved of the obligation to act as ethically.34 Another experiment demonstrated that when people were able to write a self-relevant story using words that referred to positive traits, they subsequently donated just one-fifth as much to a charity as those who wrote a story referring to negative traits did.35 As a review summarizing the extensive research on moral licensing noted, “Past good deeds can liberate individuals to engage in behaviors that are immoral, unethical, or otherwise problematic, behaviors that they would otherwise avoid for fear of feeling or appearing immoral.”36
The implications of this psychology for the leadership industry are clear: once people believe they are better leaders—possibly because they have given talks or written about positive leadership, have attended lots of leadership trainings, or because they were once acknowledged for their good leadership—they are less likely to be as vigilant about their subsequent behavior, having already demonstrated their leadership credentials. These findings don’t merely explain why hypocrisy occurs; they account for why hypocritical behavior is produced by the very actions that demonstrate morality (or good leadership) and that thereby free people to not behave that way subsequently. It is perhaps not that surprising, then, that some of the most harmful and hypocritical leaders are those who enjoy the most favorable leadership reputations and do a lot of teaching and writing about leadership—actions that then provide them the discretion to not actually live up to those reputations in their real behavior.
All this sanctimonious talk about great leadership creates one additional problem: people, overconfident in their leadership abilities, let talk about leadership substitute for action. Bob Sutton and I described a similar phenomenon, the mission statement problem, in our book on the knowing-doing gap.37 We observed that companies seemed to think that once they had developed a mission statement and had promulgated it by posting it on walls and printing it on little cards, they were done. Having said something and maybe even repeated it, the companies believed they were living their mission statements—but of course, they often were not. A parallel phenomenon besets leaders and bedevils the leadership industry: having heard about leadership, studied leadership, talked about leadership, and espoused great leadership values, people believe they must be doing what they are saying. The activity makes people confident, even grossly overconfident, in their abilities and in the belief that they are doing what they are talking about.
Because talking often substitutes for reality, one ought to be quite skeptical about what actually goes on at places run by people who think they are leadership experts. One ought to be skeptical, for instance, about taking advice on leadership and human resources from someone from the senior leadership of a firm with a turnover rate hovering around 30 percent—a rate that characterizes some consulting firms offering leadership advice.
Indeed, there often seems to be a negative relationship between leaders’ contributions to the leadership industry and their actual leadership behavior. In part, that’s because of the moral licensing effect, but yet another process is at work. People can and do produce talks, books, and other promotional materials to proactively head off or otherwise divert attention from their real behaviors, which may be nothing like what they write or speak about. Their need to engage in such activities is often greater to the extent that their leadership behavior is worse—sort of like the worst polluters and the companies that pay their workers the least running advertisements touting their environmental bona fides and how wonderful a few employees think their careers are. Put another way, much wisdom can be found in that famous line from Shakespeare’s Hamlet: “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”
The recommendations about how to move the teaching and practice of leadership forward, and how employees can avoid career problems resulting from leaders who don’t do what their companies (or maybe even they) espouse, follow logically from the discussion of the problems and their causes. None are particularly difficult to implement, but nonetheless they remain unfortunately rare in practice.
Virtually no intelligent or even semi-intelligent person invests financial resources without doing some amount of diligence to ensure that the claims being made on behalf of the investment are true. That does not mean investment fraud never occurs or that people don’t get misled, but most individuals spend some effort checking out what they are told. But somehow such behavior disappears when it comes to leaders and leadership. People hear all kinds of stories, and ironically, the more heroic and therefore implausible the story, the more strongly individuals seemingly want to and therefore do believe such tales without doing any checking. Simply put, the motivation to believe in heroes and a just world circumvents people’s critical faculties. So people join organizations and sign up with leaders only to be disappointed, or worse.
Here’s one example: The head of a small management consulting and leadership-development company in San Francisco persuaded a talented, experienced executive to work for the company in a senior administrative and leadership role to help the business grow. The consulting firm’s leader was extremely intelligent, articulate, and charismatic, with sound ideas about organizational change and with great business-development skills; he also espoused great leadership values. But soon after the talented executive signed on and began working, she recognized that although the firm’s leader could speak gracefully and convincingly about many positive leadership qualities and did great consulting work, his own leadership was almost completely inconsistent with his recommendations. He did not walk the talk, to use the common phrase, and in fact, pretty much walked the opposite of his talk. Not only did the new hire leave after a short time to find another job, but she was also involved in litigation regarding her tenure and quick departure. And yet she could have easily prevented the problem by doing due diligence and taking the results of such diligence seriously. The firm at one time had four partners, yet now there was just one, and some of the prior partners knew the problems well. Moreover, the firm had gone through a number of consultants and staff over the preceding few years. Talking to those people and triangulating on the issues uncovered in those conversations would have prevented a bad choice of employment and the resulting psychological and economic costs.
Take your favorite leaders, someone about whom you have heard amazingly wonderful things (often, by the way, from the person him-or herself). Then spend even thirty minutes doing a search to see if the claims hold up—whether it involves visiting websites such as Glass Door and others that report employees’ opinions of the leadership they encounter, or reviewing social media profiles or even the public records of legal actions filed. Do some research before you believe, and, more important, act on your beliefs, about leaders and leadership. And in your research efforts, try to use multiple, independent sources. Confirm the information you receive, just as you would do if you were reference-checking a prospective employee. You are reference-checking someone much more important—someone you are possibly going to work for—so do the task well.
Get beyond the hype before you begin, so you can figure out the strengths and weaknesses, the good and the bad, you will confront. No one—not Martin Luther King Jr., not Nelson Mandela, not Gandhi—is without fault or imperfection. True, you won’t embark on this new endeavor with the rose-colored glasses so many people seemingly desire, but you will be better prepared to navigate your environment, and you will be much less likely to be profoundly disappointed.
Life is often about trade-offs, and the leadership industry cannot provide all things to all people. The leadership industry has clearly been better at providing heroes, myths, stories, and inspiration than it has been at making workplaces better or leaders last longer in their jobs. At some level, that’s not completely the leadership industry’s fault. If audiences want inspiring stories and will pay for them, the market will work at least moderately well and provide those stories. If people prefer excitement to education, emotional uplift to intellectual insight, then they will get what they prefer.
This means that the leadership industry’s faults and failings come in large measure from that industry’s clientele, the human resource executives and CEOs who hire the leadership gurus—and the employees who fill out all of those smiley-face surveys based on how good the leadership industry’s infotainment has made them feel. It was only when consumers demanded higher-quality, safer, more reliable automobiles that the car industry responded. Similarly, when shoppers demanded organic food, they got it, not only from new chains like Whole Foods Market but even from more conventional food retailers. Only when and if the consumers of leadership products and services stop craving inspiration and instead pursue insight, only when people demand organizational measures and leadership practices that help improve the condition of organizational workplaces, will anything change.
To this point, I have shown the enormous disconnect between decades of leadership writing, development, speaking, blogging, and so forth and the sorry state of workplaces and leadership. I argued that the emphasis on sentiment over science and on good feelings over reality contribute to the persistence of workplace and career problems.
In the next five chapters, I turn my attention to five attributes that are often asserted to be useful, and indeed essential, for effective leadership: modesty, authenticity, truthfulness, trustworthiness, and concern for the welfare and well-being of others, particularly those being led. Without for a moment denying the extensive, maybe even overwhelming, research connecting these attributes (and others) to various dimensions of group or organizational performance, and while acknowledging that these are great qualities and that work environments would be in much better shape if more leaders had them, I want to pose two simple, pragmatic and important questions. First, is there evidence that these qualities do in fact characterize most, or maybe even many, leaders? And second, since they often do not, are there both theory and data that can help us understand why doing the opposite of what the leadership industry recommends might be much more sensible, certainly for individuals and their careers but in some cases even for other outcomes?
I ask you to put aside your judgments and feelings to the extent possible and try to confront, as clinically as you can, the logic and the evidence. If we are going to build better leaders and create better working conditions, we need to understand the current state of play and, most important, the forces that have produced the world that we actually live in.