It’s September 2013, and I am giving a talk to alumni and other executives on some of the material covered in this book. About forty people are gathered at the newly opened Vlerick Business School facility in Brussels, Belgium. A hand goes up and an experienced senior executive comments, “I have seen everything you have described and can vouch for its accuracy. But this is depressing, even if it is true.”
In my reply, I acknowledge that what one finds depressing is a relative concept, and that while this individual may find my description of the work world quite sobering, a sentiment I can certainly understand, I don’t. Instead, I say, “I find it even more depressing that talented, earnest, young, and for that matter, not-so-young entrepreneurs and leaders in all types of organizations all over the world lose their jobs and their companies at unacceptably high rates.”
I continue, “I find it depressing that after decades of books, lectures, leadership-development programs, and all the other components of the large leadership industry, virtually every shred of evidence shows most workplaces filled with distrustful, disengaged, dissatisfied, despairing employees. And,” I conclude, forgoing any pretense of political correctness, “I find it depressing that we would want to discuss the state of leadership in organizations from the perspective of what feels good and uplifting, rather than what the evidence shows to be true.”
This executive’s comment is not all that unusual. After a talk about this book to an academic audience in Spain, I get a similar response—the material is provocative and probably true, but not “uplifting.”
The difference between management science and medical science is telling. “Depressing” may be an emotion felt by medical researchers and by practitioners confronted on a daily basis by the inevitable limitations of current treatments, and certainly people would love to be “uplifted.” But “depressing” or, conversely, “uplifting” are almost certainly not how doctors and other medical researchers evaluate evidence or figure out how to make progress in treatment. Averting our eyes from the facts may provide solace, but it does so at the price of progress. There is no theory or evidence that suggests that improvement comes from ignoring bad news, paying inordinate attention to rare, exceptional cases, or from failing to measure base rates for how often something occurs. No wonder medical science has made significant strides in treating many diseases while leadership as it is practiced daily all over the world has continued to produce a lot of disengaged, dissatisfied, and disaffected employees.
So we end where we began, with the pragmatic question of whether all the inspiration and feel-good stories produced over the decades have done any good. This is not a question about competence, motive, purpose, intentions, sincerity, or even hypocrisy (which there is in abundance). It is a simple question about the state of the world of work and leadership after the expenditure of so much time, effort, and money with so few results. Yes, some people would argue that things might even be worse without all these efforts. But holding aside the impossibility of empirically demonstrating the truth of that counterfactual argument, it is a tough argument to accept, given the dismal data on employee engagement, job dissatisfaction, trust in leaders, and career catastrophes.
The discussions about leadership often seem sort of like being under the effect of nitrous oxide (laughing gas) or other forms of mild anesthesia. By leaving people feeling good while somewhat uninformed about reality, the leadership enterprise helps produce people happily oblivious to many important truths about organizational life in the real world. In this zoned-out, semiconscious, blissful state, people are insufficiently prepared for what they will encounter at work and, most important, insufficiently energized to accurately diagnose and change that world of work. That’s because people think everything is just peachy fine, or soon will be. But if the world of work in a few more decades is to look any different—or better—than the one today, people need to understand the world not as we might want it to be, but as it is. To get from one place to another, you need to know as best as you can where you are, where you want to go, and, most important, the obstacles and barriers you will likely encounter en route.
Moreover, as Jim Collins pointed out in Good to Great, unrealistic optimism and a failure to see the situation as it is can be not only unhelpful—it can be fatal. He called this the Stockdale paradox, after James Stockdale, a U.S. military officer held captive for eight years during the Vietnam war. Stockdale was tortured numerous times and had little reason to believe he would live to see his wife again. Although Stockdale understood his predicament, he also never lost hope that he might endure it and not only survive his ordeal but use it as a defining experience in his life. And here is the paradox:
While Stockdale had remarkable faith in the unknowable, he noted that it was always the most optimistic of his prisonmates who failed to make it out of there alive. “They were the ones who said, ‘We’re going to be out by Christmas.’ And Christmas would come, and Christmas would go. Then they’d say, ‘We’re going to be out by Easter.’ And Easter would come, and Easter would go. And then Thanksgiving, and then it would be Christmas again. And they died of a broken heart.” What the optimists failed to do was confront the reality of their situation. They preferred the ostrich approach, sticking their heads in the sand and hoping for the difficulties to go away. That self-delusion might have made it easier on them in the short-term, but when they were eventually forced to face reality, it had become too much and they couldn’t handle it.1
And, of course, such unfounded optimism often precluded taking action to deal with the situation as best one could, which is precisely what Stockdale did.
As detailed throughout this book, many of the most powerful and economically successful leaders in organizations of all types demonstrate little to no correspondence with the prescriptions for what leaders are supposed to do. No wonder there is so much cynicism in the workforce.
So there’s Carly Fiorina, the former president of Lucent’s $19 billion global service-provider business and the former CEO of Hewlett-Packard—the first woman to ever run a Dow 30 company—who has been described as someone with “a silver tongue and an iron will.”2 Fiorina was not one to brook opposition to her decisions, the frequent prescriptions for consensus-based decision-making notwithstanding. And it did not matter whether the disagreement came from inside her management team, where you didn’t stay if you opposed her ideas too frequently, or from the son of cofounder William Hewlett, who fought with her mightily over the Compaq acquisition.
There’s Rebekah Brooks, a former editor at the U.K.-based News International, part of Rupert Murdoch’s News Corporation. Brooks was recently on trial for overseeing people who engaged in the phone-hacking of journalists and, for that matter, the hacking of a teenage murder victim’s cell phone—hacking and spying on potential news targets using private detectives that occurred on a massive scale. Her success in swiftly climbing News Corporation’s ranks, according to many accounts, came from Brooks’s “clear-eyed ruthlessness” and unceasing and skillful networking with the rich and powerful in the establishment, including both former and current prime ministers. And of course, her success came from her ability to build a close relationship with her ultimate boss, Rupert Murdoch, who came to think of her as one of his daughters.3
Lyndon Johnson, the youngest Senate majority leader in the history of the United States and considered by many to be one of the most successful and productive U.S. presidents, verbally abused and berated his aides throughout his long career. He was notorious for calling them into the bathroom while he was on the toilet to give them dictation and instructions.4 Johnson’s former press secretary, Bill Moyers, commented that Johnson “possessed an animal sense of weakness in other men.”5
Henry Kissinger, the Nobel Peace Prize–winning former secretary of state and national security adviser, wiretapped his subordinates. He did this not just to uncover national security leaks but to monitor their loyalty—to him, not to the president or the government. He was demeaning and even cruel to the people who worked for him.6
Roger Ailes is a former political consultant and a conservative political icon who became the head of Fox News. Fox News is incredibly profitable, earning an estimated $816 million in 2010, nearly a fifth of the earnings of the entire News Corporation. Ailes is clearly one of the most powerful figures in television history. But he does not fit the typically advocated leadership profile. According to one source Ailes is a “tyrant”; he has said, “I only understand friendship or scorched earth.” The culture at Fox News is one of intimidation: “‘It’s like the Soviet Union or China: People are always looking over their shoulders,” says a former executive with News Corp, who was quoted in a Rolling Stone article.7
Linda Wachner rose rapidly from the position of buyer to become the CEO of the clothing manufacturer Warnaco; she was one of the first female CEOs in the clothing industry. Between 1993 and 1999 she earned $158 million from salary, bonuses, options, and dividends. Although Warnaco filed for bankruptcy in 2000, a result of too-rapid expansion, Wachner walked away with $3.5 million in stock in the reorganized company as well as $200,000 cash. Wachner’s management approach, something that got her to the top and kept her there for a while as she amassed a pot of money: swearing at and publicly berating her subordinates (which drove away key talent), exhibiting colossal ego, and showing an “abrasive and abusive” style of management.8
J. Edgar Hoover ruled the Federal Bureau of Investigation with an iron hand, virtually personifying the FBI for decades. He intimidated everyone from presidents to members of Congress. But the evidence is clear that Hoover engaged in illegal wiretapping and surveillance, blackmailed his bosses in the Department of Justice, and got rid of subordinates who in any way challenged either his power or his vision for how the bureau should operate and what its priorities should be.9
To work for Steve Jobs of Apple was to face the risk of at any moment being “Steved” as it came to be called, berated and fired—with such firings sometimes being rescinded on the same day. When my Stanford colleague Robert Sutton decided to add a chapter on the virtues of being an asshole to his book The No Asshole Rule, he did some casual research to see whom to include. Sutton did a Google search pairing the term with the names of some prominent CEOs who might fit the description. Steve Jobs came out on top, far surpassing Oracle’s Larry Ellison, who came in second place.
And speaking of Larry Ellison, he has patterned his management approach after medieval samurai warriors. Ellison’s outbursts in meetings with his staff are famous not just for his use of invective but for their length—sometimes going on as long as an hour.10
Jeff Bezos, the founder and CEO of Amazon is also famous for his outbursts of temper and his put-downs of employees, including the line, “We are going to have to supply some human intelligence to this problem.”11
Paul Allen, who cofounded Microsoft along with Bill Gates, wrote that working with Gates was like “being in hell.”12
Tina Brown, for more than three decades a leading figure in the world of magazine publishing, inspired fear among those who might criticize her. She was known for churning and changing magazines up until the last minute, keeping her subordinates on edge.13
This list of leaders who, on the one hand, earned vast sums and retained power for decades while, on the other hand, being in almost every way contradictory to the customary bromides about modesty, serving others, and being truthful is almost endless, and it’s a list that grows longer all the time.
One response I sometimes get to this or similar lists is that many of these people weren’t really all that successful. Fiorina and Wachner got fired, Martha Stewart is lonely, Steve Jobs at one point could hardly get anyone to attend a birthday celebration, Johnson was perpetually insecure and forced from his office by Vietnam, Hoover lived a closeted life and had few real friends, Brown’s last couple of publishing ventures failed, and so forth. I have several responses. First, in the real world, almost no one lives a perfect life, perfectly happy with everything going perfectly all the time. Second and more importantly, although one can debate how truly successful these leaders were, there is no denying one fact: that each of them and the multitude of others who do not fit the leadership models so often proffered reached great heights and positions of power in the first place. So instead of attempting to reconstruct perceptions to make reality fit your view of a just and fair world, it might be more helpful to understand why and how people who don’t fit the visions of what leadership should entail reached such powerful positions. Such understanding is the fundamental prerequisite for altering the dynamics that produced these people, whether you like them or not.
Moreover, it’s not just that there are numerous successful leaders who don’t fit the prescriptions for honesty, modesty, trustworthiness, taking care of others, authenticity, and the many other positive attributes we ascribe to leaders. It’s worse. As we saw in chapter 1 and as you can see every day in the news, many of the leaders who do appear to fit the aspirational models we hear about often do so mostly because people believe the leaders’ own hype and haven’t looked too closely at what these leaders actually did and what it was really like to work with them. Wanting to believe in fairy tales, people avert their gaze and often actively avoid evidence that challenges their worldview.
So what we have are prescribed models of behavior that are notable by their absence in most companies or, for that matter, public agencies. And in many instances, as I have argued, the advice people receive about what to do to be successful in their careers is inconsistent with what we know about human behavior. Why do such fables persist?
If you search for the phrase “You can’t handle the truth” on your favorite search engine, the first thing that will probably come up is the scene from the movie A Few Good Men, in which a lawyer, Daniel Kaffee, played by Tom Cruise, is interrogating Marine Colonel Nathan Jessup, played by Jack Nicholson, about whether the colonel had ordered a hazing (called a Code Red) of a soldier in his command, an act that had resulted in the soldier’s death. Jessup, provoked and enraged, snarls, “You want answers?” Kaffee replies, “I want the truth.” Jessup then goes into a tirade about the realities of what is required to protect the United States and its interests, beginning with the phrase “You can’t handle the truth.”
That sentiment, that people can’t handle the truth, pervades much of the social world and governs how people behave inside and outside organizations, and for good reason. Research shows that people who deliver bad news often suffer adverse consequences14—hence the admonition “Don’t blame the messenger.” The evidence demonstrates that people actively try to avoid confronting distressing information.15 Because they seek to avoid uncomfortable truths, individuals sometimes avoid seeking medical help in the presence of symptoms that concern them, not wanting to hear a dire diagnosis. Of course, such behavior often makes the situation worse, as real medical problems frequently become more dangerous and difficult the longer they are left untreated. Many people prefer happy movies, or at least movies with happy endings, in which good triumphs over evil, right over might, justice over injustice.
And people who want to be successful—to become or to remain insiders—avoid telling the truth if such truth could be perceived as a criticism of other insiders, people, or companies with power. As Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren wrote in her book A Fighting Chance,16 she received precisely such advice to avoid criticizing powerful others from Lawrence Summers, a former president of Harvard University and U.S. treasury secretary:
I had a choice. I could be an insider or I could be an outsider. Outsiders can say whatever they want. But people on the inside don’t listen to them. Insiders, however, get lots of access and a chance to push their ideas. . . . But insiders also understand one unbreakable rule: They don’t criticize other insiders.17
This preference for good news and uplifting stories, this reluctance to criticize powerful leaders or organizations, this unwillingness to face the problems besetting so many workplaces, pervades the world of leadership, where people make a living telling happy tales about leaders who are authentic, honest, modest, and interested in the welfare of others. But the spinners of yarns don’t bother to tell the other stories, about the leaders who were the opposite. And there is little indication of the relative prevalence of the two types of leaders, and precious little attention is paid to the career consequences enjoyed by them.
Simply put, in a world where people can’t handle the truth, they don’t get the truth—and they suffer in numerous ways as a result. One of the most important outcomes of the happy talk is, as I indicated at the beginning of this book, a lot of horrific work environments filled with bad bosses—environments that do not change and won’t change until we confront the facts about what actually is going on and why. Another consequence is career setbacks for people who fail to understand the full range of organizational dynamics.
If we want to change the world of work and leadership conduct in many workplaces, we need to act on what we know rather than what we wish and hope for. It is also imperative that we understand why we are stuck where we are. I will thus conclude by summarizing some of the various suggestions made in the earlier chapters, as well as summarizing some fundamental principles for fixing what ails the numerous set of activities devoted to educating and developing leaders, based on what we know about leaders, leadership, and the social science that helps us understand individual behavior in social and organizational contexts.
In part because the leadership industry is in the business of educating future leaders and furthering the development of people who are currently in leadership roles, many people in the industry believe that it is important to primarily if not exclusively present models of what should be rather than what is. This belief in emphasizing what ought to be also produces recommendations to study and talk about positive models rather than the entire range of leaders, to emphasize success stories, and to avoid asking the tough questions of how many good versus bad bosses there are and why there are so many bad bosses after so many years of giving people sound advice on how to be better leaders.
For example, two colleagues who teach classes on leadership often tell me that I write about scorpions or spiders or, sometimes, cockroaches. Holding aside the prevalence and survival capacity of cockroaches and spiders, I’d like to note that my colleagues’ well-intentioned message is that the job of teachers is to present positive role models and to tell people, including students at all levels, what they should do and how they should be to live more purposeful, more effective lives and create workplaces that bring out the best in everyone. In short, these colleagues believe that the job of teachers is to inspire those being educated, and to lift their aspirations and their spirits.
If you believe that this advice and the profusion of other, similar advice will create a different and better organizational world, you need to go back and reread the introduction and chapter 1. For decades, scores, maybe hundreds, possibly thousands, of leadership writers, speakers, and coaches have done exactly what so many recommend: write hagiographies of corporate leaders that bear little relationship to a more complex, nuanced reality, and, even more problematically, study truly rare and unique individuals in the hope that by describing these exceptional people, others will be both inspired by and able to learn from them.
There is not a scintilla of evidence that this approach works, as demonstrated by the numerous declining measures of workplace well-being, the declining length of job tenure for leaders and others, and the increasingly frequent career derailments and leadership failures. Nor is there much if any theoretical logic that supports the effectiveness of such an approach as a recipe for organizational change. There are certainly leaders who are truthful, trustworthy, concerned for the welfare of others, and modest. We should honor and celebrate such people. But by failing to acknowledge their rarity, we underestimate and misunderstand our challenge if we really do want to create the world that now exists mostly just on the pages of leadership books.
I am a fan of David Kelley, the founder, chairman, and managing partner of the much-awarded and highly acclaimed product design firm IDEO, and a founder of the Hasso Plattner Institute of Design (also known as the D.school) at Stanford. Kelley has created a collaborative, innovative, and, most important, healthy culture at IDEO, as evidenced by the fact that talented people stay at the firm even when they could earn more, possibly much more, elsewhere. But what I most admire is his and his colleagues’ ability to instill design thinking into clients and students. One fundamental aspect of design thinking is to get people to “observe people as they deal with life’s messy problems,”18 to have them watch people work in order to design better, more helpful tools, and to observe people interacting with products in order to create more user-oriented designs.
The relevance for the leadership industry, and for you, is clear. About forty years ago, Henry Mintzberg, a business school professor at McGill University, published a book based on his observations of what managers actually do.19 That type of observational study remains rare. Instead of intently, objectively, and clinically watching how leaders operate, we listen to what leaders say about what they do, how they talk about their values, the lovely sentiments they express. This is a reasonable fallback position because in many instances sensible leaders do not permit sustained, close observation of their real behavior. But when people observe what successful managers do, the results often don’t conform to the typical leadership bromides. For example, one study of fifty-two managers in three very different organizations found that “two activities were significantly related to managerial success: interaction with outsiders and socializing/politicking.”20
As the clichéd phrase “walking the talk” makes clear, there is often some degree of disconnection between leaders’ pronouncements and what is written about them, and what leaders actually do and their success doing it, a fact we have seen throughout this book. So there’s the late Warren Bennis, an iconic figure in the leadership industry and a well-known author, speaker, and authority on leadership, who had the temerity to take on the task of being president of the University of Cincinnati for six years in the 1970s after serving as the academic vice president and acting executive vice president at the University at Buffalo. Bennis’s tenure at Cincinnati was not entirely successful, but the important point is that people who were there at the time or knew those who were will tell you that the Warren Bennis who was president and the Warren Bennis who wrote books about transparency and trust were not quite the same people.
Bennis’s behavior, somewhat inconsistent with his espoused beliefs, was undoubtedly provoked by the aggravations and frustrations he confronted in trying to do his job, as a university presidency is a highly political position charged with pleasing or at least coping with multiple constituencies with often incompatible demands. In a book that, among other things, draws on his own experience, Bennis bemoaned the unconscious conspiracy that kept visionary leaders like himself from being successful in their jobs: “I had become the victim of a vast, amorphous, unwitting, unconscious conspiracy to prevent me from doing anything whatever to change the university’s status quo.”21 He got buried under a mountain of trivial decision-making,22 in part because Bennis, like many people, was much more skilled at advocating decentralization than he was in practicing it.
The implication for you: Pay attention to what is really going on and to people’s real behavior and performance. Become a skilled and unbiased observer, and, to the extent you can, eliminate hopes and expectations from your observations. Everyone has to navigate a number of organizations, each with its own leader and culture. You would be well served to pay attention to what you see and not to what people are saying and the lovely values and sentiments they are expressing. Rhetoric and reality are often decoupled in social life, and in leadership it is almost the norm.
The leadership industry mostly advocates behavior consistent with how good parents raise their children and congruent with universal religious and human values. Seldom considered is the possibility that the reason such values and behaviors aren’t more common is that they are at times quite ineffective. Simply put, there are occasions when you have to do bad things to achieve good results.
Most of the drugs currently used to treat cancer are toxic poisons. Radiation, also used to treat cancer, kills if the dose is too high. Many therapeutic advances entail trying to get the chemical substances or the radiation focused more precisely on the cancerous cells, sparing the healthy tissue, in the recognition that you need the poison but want to focus it as much as possible to avoid dangerous side effects. Surgery to treat and possibly cure disease involves first cutting into people. The point is that sometimes to do good, you have to have the courage and wisdom to perform harmful, painful, actions. In his book Complications: A Surgeon’s Notes on an Imperfect Science about his journey into medicine, the author and physician Atul Gawande relates that to become a doctor, medical students need to learn to take action, even if the action will possibly entail error, and even if the action is, at least at first, uncomfortable for the doctor, an action like making an incision or putting in a stitch.23 Although medical students practice cutting cadavers, the first cut or stitch into a live, real human being remains challenging.
Leadership is no different. Making change, improving situations, getting things done, winning in very competitive environments, often requires being willing and able to engage in behaviors and exhibit qualities that some people might find repugnant. Maybe that’s why there is such a leadership shortage and why the leadership industry, with its failure to acknowledge this fundamental truth, continues to fail.
For example, as the United States prepared to compete in the World Cup in 2014, an article about the team and its coach raised a provocative question: “Are the Americans bad at playacting? And if so, should they try to get better?”24 For those not versed in soccer arcana, playacting refers to the practice of falling to the ground and feigning significant injury to draw a penalty against the opposing team and player, even if only gently bumped, nudged, or barely touched. The analysis concluded, “The best attackers in the world . . . regularly fall to the ground, particularly if they feel that they are going to lose possession. And why not? If it works, they get a free kick. If it doesn’t, they were going to give up the ball anyway.”25 This practice runs counter to American ideals—but it also put the team at a disadvantage. Sometimes, maybe even often, the choice comes down to playing the game, whatever that game is, the way others do or losing.
In the fall of 2013, the world celebrated the five-hundred-year anniversary, more or less, of the appearance of Machiavelli’s The Prince. One commentary on this important and still-relevant work noted:
Machiavelli teaches that in a world where so many are not good, you must learn to be able to not be good. The virtues taught in our secular and religious schools are incompatible with the virtues one must practice to safeguard those same institutions. . . . Machiavelli has long been called a teacher of evil. The author of “The Prince” never urged evil for evil’s sake. The proper aim of a leader is to maintain his state (and, not incidentally, his job). Politics is an arena where following virtue often leads to the ruin of a state, whereas pursuing what appears to be vice results in security and well-being. In short, there are never easy choices, and prudence consists of knowing how to recognize . . . the hard decisions you face and choosing the less bad as what is the most good.26
Abraham Lincoln, the U.S. president credited with saving the Union and freeing the slaves, was not above using deception to get his way. As he struggled to get the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution passed, he dissembled about where a Southern negotiating delegation, sent to hammer out the terms that would end the war, actually was. He offered government positions and other emoluments to representatives whose votes he needed, in effect selling votes for government jobs. In many instances during the Civil War, Lincoln overstepped his formal powers, risking impeachment, in his efforts to protect and preserve the United States. Lincoln’s political maneuverings, nicely described in Doris Kearns Goodwin’s book Team of Rivals and illustrated in Steven Spielberg’s movie Lincoln illustrate the truth of Machiavelli—that often to do good things, even great things, people need to be willing to take whatever actions are required, and to not shy away from tough fights, unpopularity, and, yes, even decisions that skirt the edge of illegality.27
Another essay, reviewing books about Machiavelli, not only reinforced the message that “politics is a dirty business, requiring leaders to do things their private conscience might abhor,” but also made an important point about the actual source of bad leader behavior:
A leader guided by public necessity is less likely to be cruel and vicious than one guided by religious moralizing. . . . After all, someone who believes he has God on his side is capable of anything.28
Unless and until the leadership industry both acknowledges and embraces that wisdom, progress in fixing the reality of organizational life will remain imperceptible.
Everyone wants advice, which is why the “how-to” industry, covering topics from losing weight to getting your finances under control to being a better leader, is so large. The advice business is also largely impervious as to whether or not the advice actually gets implemented, since the profit comes from selling the advice. In fact, to the extent that people heed the advice and solve their problems, future profit opportunities from addressing the same issue yet again disappear.
In the case of leadership, much of the advice has been largely noncontingent—leaders should be authentic, truthful, caring for others, inspiring of trust, and so forth, attributes put forward as universal qualities and behaviors to be developed. But the problem is that if you are not a scorpion or a spider in a forest of them, your survival chances may be quite low. A process of differential selection, attraction, and retention, along with the criteria used to determine who advances up a hierarchy, together tend to ensure that workplaces are filled with people who are largely consistent in their leadership style with each other, particularly at the higher ranks. Consistency in behavior also comes from the process of social learning, in which people figure out what to do by looking at what others in their immediate environment are doing and what the results are.
This fact means that answering the question “What should I do to be a better leader?” depends not just on what your personal objectives are and how you define “better,” although those are obviously crucial considerations. The answer to how to be a better leader also depends on knowing the environment you are in, its norms, and, most important, what behaviors will be seen as demonstrating weakness and incompetence and what actions will signal strength, confidence, and skill. To be a better leader you must, at a minimum, display the attributes required to get you into the position in the first place and then be able to hold on to it.
Although there are large regularities in the answers to these questions, it is nonetheless the case that environments do differ. The leadership qualities required to succeed—or maybe even to survive—in the software company Oracle, with its competitive culture, frequent firings of senior executives, and workplace with high levels of turnover, are undoubtedly quite different from those required in the food retailer Trader Joe’s, the former president of which is a leading figure in the Conscious Capitalism movement, an ideology that emphasizes the idea of serving multiple stakeholders and taking customer and employee well-being seriously.
One of the wonderful things about movies is their obvious symbolism. In the Star Wars movies, Luke Skywalker wears white and Darth Vader, black. That’s how we think about things—good or evil, heaven or hell, honest or dishonest, effective or ineffective. But this cognitive reductionism oversimplifies a much more nuanced reality. While it may provide some emotional comfort that comes from feelings of false certainty about how things are, thinking of things as black or white makes it much more difficult to deal with the real world and its many complications. A quick perusal of the scholarly literature reveals the many demonstrable downsides that derive from oversimplification, ranging from harmful diet recommendations based on simplistic ideas about what foods are good or bad for you to overtreatment of various cancers under the assumption that people either have cancer or they don’t.29 The fact that complexity in evaluation and analysis can be helpful may be one reason that a study of decision-making found that higher-status individuals engaged in more complex thinking.30
Stopping the good-bad, oversimplified stories we tell is going to be tough, as they seem to be what most people, even intelligent, well-educated people, seemingly prefer. The Soviet dissident Alexander Solzhenitsyn offered some important wisdom on this topic:
If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?31
In their book Built to Last, Jim Collins and Jerry Porras decried either-or thinking, the belief that things have to be one way or their opposite.32 Take their advice on this issue, even when, and maybe particularly when, analyzing and understanding leaders and leadership. If we acknowledge and even celebrate the complexity, multidimensionality, and multifaceted truth about everyone, including leaders and ourselves, and if we recognize the strengths and the weaknesses that all individuals have, we will possibly develop a more accurate understanding of social dynamics and a more veridical and therefore helpful map of the organizational landscapes we seek to navigate.
This phrase is my adaptation of a similar sentiment from Charles Bosk’s well-regarded book about surgeons in training, Forgive and Remember.33 Forgiving while remembering is a value espoused in medical practice and in medical education for good reasons. Forgive, so that people will be more inclined to admit their mistakes, but remember, so that they and their peers will be less likely to make the same mistakes again.
Virtually all religious traditions advocate forgiveness, if for no other reason than that holding grudges harms the holder of the ill will, not the target. People do deserve second, and maybe third, fourth, and fifth, chances. But not to recognize that the past often predicts the future, and therefore, not to remember people’s histories in their leadership roles and not to use that history in making decisions, and instead somehow presuming better behavior in the future than was exhibited in the past, is just asking for trouble.
There are many examples in business of ignoring past leader behavior, producing decisions that people come later to regret. To work for George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees baseball team, was, as a player or a manager, to experience a micromanager who was prone to vituperative tirades and who regularly fired people—in the case of manager Billy Martin, several times. Nonetheless, players and coaches would join the organization somehow hoping it wouldn’t happen to them or they wouldn’t mind.
No one should have been surprised when the board of Sunbeam fired CEO Al Dunlap on June 15, 1998. The company’s stock price was plummeting because Sunbeam, a manufacturer of outdoor grills and kitchen appliances, had juiced the apparent sales results by stuffing the distribution chain of wholesalers with product. Before coming to Sunbeam just two years prior, Dunlap had sold Scott Paper to Kimberly-Clark, increasing its value mostly if not exclusively by laying off employees and cutting costs, something that had earned him the nickname “Chainsaw.” As the business journalist John Byrne wrote, “Scott became the sixth consecutive company that was sold or dismembered by Dunlap since 1983.”34 Downsizers and cost-cutters do what they do, and a CEO well-known for his temper, hubris, and poor treatment of subordinates isn’t likely to change.
And there are literally hundreds of examples in sports, particularly college sports, where schools will apparently overlook past peccadillos if a coach won, only to have troublesome elements of past behavior create “new” problems—actually just the same old behavior occurring yet again.
Consider the case of Mike Rice, the Rutgers basketball coach fired in 2013 when, according to an article in the New York Times Magazine, “ESPN aired footage of him screaming at and demeaning his players, yanking them by their jerseys, shoving them, kicking them; throwing balls at their heads and groins; taunting them with homophobic slurs.”35 Rutgers had hired Rice from Robert Morris University. He had been the same person there: “Rice might not have crossed the line at Robert Morris, but he also wasn’t a completely different person there from the one he would become at Rutgers. . . . All of the words people [used] to describe him at Robert Morris . . . [were] not that far from ‘out of control’. . . . Rice [developed] a reputation for his success, but also for his temper.”36
The most fundamental principle of learning theory is that behavior is a function of its consequences. When behavior is rewarded, that behavior gets repeated with even greater frequency. When behavior is ignored or punished, the frequency of the behavior diminishes.37 In the world of leadership, and particularly the world of senior leadership, what seems striking is how few consequences there are for all varieties of bad behavior, ranging from underperforming in one’s job role to serious ethical lapses to treating employees badly. Consequently, even as leaders aren’t trusted and workplaces remain toxic, not much changes, because often leaders are able to get away with doing a great deal of harm.
Craig Dubow was Gannett’s CEO at a time when the company’s stock price went from $75 to $10 a share and twenty thousand employees lost their jobs. Not only did Dubow retire (rather than be fired), he left with a package worth about $37 million in health, retirement, and disability benefits, as well as having a salary income of about $16 million in the preceding two years.38
Or consider the case of Stan O’Neal, the CEO of Merrill Lynch who loaded the company up with debt and oversaw the firm’s precipitous decline. As Merrill was sinking into the financial abyss, the company was taken over by Bank of America after O’Neal’s ouster in 2007. No big problem for O’Neal, who left with an enormous severance package estimated at over $150 million. The aluminum giant Alcoa appointed O’Neal to its board of directors in 2008. According to someone at Alcoa, it was O’Neal’s knowledge of financial markets and impending financial problems that made him valuable to Alcoa. I suppose that, having helped cause a financial crisis, he could credibly claim to be an expert on them.39
Charles O. Prince, who formerly led Citigroup until 2007 and the financial crisis that caused the bank huge losses and devastated its stock price, remained on the boards of Xerox and Johnson and Johnson after leaving Citi. In another example of this, “Andrea Jung, who . . . stepped down as the chief executive of Avon amid a bribery investigation and financial struggles . . . is still a director of Apple.”40 And Marshall Cohen, a director of American International Group, the insurance company brought low by its derivative bets and bailed out by the government during the 2007–2009 recession, was subsequently put on the board of a New York investment bank. That same bank also appointed as a director Henry S. Bienen, who had been on the board of Bear Stearns between 2004 and when the company was rescued from collapse by JPMorgan Chase.41
Systematic research supports the message of these cases. As noted in an article in the New York Times, “even in the most extreme circumstances—like the financial crisis—directors bore little consequence for their poor decisions.”42 A study found that director turnover increased less than 1 percent in financial institutions during the financial crisis, and there was little difference in director turnover between good and poorly performing banks, even those that received government bailouts. Nor were things different for the nonfinancial companies in the S&P 1500. The chance of being forced out as a director because of the company’s poor performance was less than 1 percent.43
Steven L. Rattner, a former vice chairman of investment bank Lazard and cofounder of the private equity firm the Quadrangle Group, provides another lesson in the pervasive tendency to not hold leaders very accountable for their behaviors—a practice that virtually ensures that leader behavior will remain unchanged and that, through a process of social learning, other leaders will learn that how one behaves does not matter that much. Rattner, the White House overseer of the automobile industry during the 2007–2009 recession, got into trouble because of his business practices and ethics, or lack thereof:
He was accused of using “pay to play” practices while raising money from a New York state pension fund. . . . In 2010, he paid more than $16 million to Andrew M. Cuomo, who was then New York’s attorney general, and the Securities and Exchange Commission to settle the civil cases. . . . He was “banned from appearing in any capacity before any public pension fund within the State of New York for five years” . . . he stepped down from his position in the Obama administration.44
But as the New York Times writer Andrew Ross Sorkin makes clear, Rattner’s fall from grace and power was quite temporary; two years later, he was managing the fortune of New York’s mayor Michael Bloomberg, serving as a pundit on major cable news channels, writing op-eds for the Times, and even getting back into the Obama administration’s good graces, campaigning for the president’s reelection in 2012. Obama needed to win Ohio, the home of many automobile parts suppliers, who appreciated Rattner’s help to the industry during the recession.
For sure, Rattner’s subsequent success demonstrates the importance of persistence and resilience, but it also shows something else: “His re-emergence may also be a telling commentary about the way the nation’s elite flock to people with power—and those with powerful friends.”45 The elite glom on to powerful people partly because they forgive past transgressions and partly because of the “fear of alienating themselves from other people” who associate with those with power. This continued association occurs almost regardless of what people have done, are doing, or, for that matter, are likely to do in the future.
The problem with leadership is at its core a story of disconnections:
• the disconnect between what leaders say and what they do;
• the disconnect between the leadership industry’s prescriptions and the reality of many leaders’ behaviors and traits;
• the disconnect between the multidimensional nature of leadership performance and the simple, noncontingent answers so many people seek;
• the disconnect between how the leadership industry is evaluated (happy sheets that tap inspiration and satisfaction) and the actual consequences of leader failures (miserable workplaces and career derailments);
• the disconnect between leader performance and behavior and the consequences those leaders face;
• the disconnect between what most people seem to want (good news, nice stories, emotional uplift) and what they need (the truth);
• the disconnect between what would make workplaces better and organizations more effective, and the base rate with which such prescriptions get implemented.
And there are even more disconnects—such as the disconnect between the leadership industry and the leaders whom that industry serves, and the disconnect between the people who bear the consequences of leader behavior and the leadership industry’s manifest and many failings.
Framed in this way, the remedy for the many leadership failures seems simple, and it is: to restore the broken connections, the linkages between behavior and its consequences, words and actions, prescriptions and reality.
But this task will not be easy. The disconnections serve many powerful interests, and they serve those interests extremely well. The leadership industry rolls along, profiting from the disconnect between its prescriptions and what gets done, a disconnection that means not only problems remain but also the business opportunities from speaking, writing, blogging, and so forth about those problems. Leaders love the disconnect that leaves them unaccountable for the workplaces they mess up and their poor performance and bad behavior. And worst of all, lots of people are complicit in the disconnect between the reality that exists and what they would prefer to believe and the stories they want to and often pay to hear.
It is possible to restore at least some of these connections, some of the time. One way to begin might be to reconnect with the real world. One of the important but troubling phenomena that occur in organizations of all types is that the higher you rise, the more that people will tell you how smart and right you are, and the less connection you will have to the realities of organizational life. So good leaders seek to keep themselves grounded in the realities of what they are doing and, more important, why they are doing it.
When Rudy Crew was in the process of being forced from his position as chancellor of New York City’s schools by that other Rudy, Rudy Giuliani—who, no surprise, has also written a book on leadership—Crew decided he needed to reconnect with the essential reality of why he was doing what he was doing, a reality embodied in the one million children in New York’s schools, many of whom could not read at grade level. These children looked like a young version of himself and represented the reason Rudy Crew went into education in the first place. So Crew decided to go to a school.
As Crew told the story to a class I taught, he went into a classroom, maybe it was second or third grade, and there was an African American child working on a math problem. He was not having a lot of success, as after he did the problem, the eraser would come out and the kid would rub out the answer and start over. Crew came up to the boy and asked him what he was doing and how it was going. The child replied that he was doing math and having trouble doing it. “Keep at it, you’ll get it,” said Crew.
As Crew and those accompanying him were preparing to leave that classroom a while later, the child came up to Crew and asked, “Mister, who are you?” Crew replied that he was the chancellor, the person in charge of all of the city’s schools. “Wow,” said the boy, “you’re the man.” And then, in the way that only small children can, with complete openness and lack of malice, the kid asked Crew, “Are you any good at your job?” “Some days I think I am,” Crew replied, “and some days I’m not so sure.” The pupil looked up at Crew, smiled, and said, “Well, just keep at it. You’ll get it.”
I am not sure what will make a difference in the leadership crises that cost leaders their careers and provide too many employees with enervating work environments. But I am quite sure what will not work: more of the same inspiring sentiments based neither in the social science research about human behavior nor in the facts about the state of play in the leadership industry. In the end, people can handle the truth, and the sooner they confront those truths, the better off everyone will be. And until then, everyone, not just leaders, but everyone, will have to keep working away, until we get it.