much of the oft-repeated conventional wisdom about leadership is based more on hope than reality, on wishes rather than data, on beliefs instead of science. (Location 217)
I began the writing of Leadership BS with a simple, albeit ambitious, goal: to cause people to rethink, to reconceptualize, and to reorient their behaviors concerning the important topic of leadership. (Location 227)
But the leadership industry also has its share of quacks and sham artists who sell promises and stories, some true, some not, but all of them inspirational and comfortable, with not much follow-up to see what really does work and what doesn’t. (Location 248)
what speaks the loudest in the leadership industry seems to be money, rather than evidence-based, useful knowledge. The way leadership gurus try to demonstrate their legitimacy is not through their scientific knowledge or accomplishments but rather by achieving public notoriety— (Location 250)
Leaders fail their people, their organizations, the larger society, and even themselves with unacceptable frequency. (Location 261)
This is not a book describing the manifest and many failures of leaders. It is a book to help you understand some of the causes of those failures. (Location 280)
The leadership industry has failed. Good intentions notwithstanding, there is precious little evidence that any of these recommendations have had a positive impact. Indeed, many prescriptions for leaders are often more problematic and invalid than generally acknowledged. (Location 313)
the leadership industry is large and prominent, but, notwithstanding its magnitude and reach, (2) workplaces in the United States and around the world are, for the most part (as there are obviously exceptional places on best-places-to-work lists), filled with dissatisfied, disengaged employees who do not trust their leaders; (3) leaders at all levels lose their jobs at an increasingly fast pace, in part because they are unprepared for the realities of organizational life, and thus, (4) the leadership industry has failed and continues to fail in its task of producing leaders who are effective and successful, and it has even failed to produce sufficient talent to fill leadership vacancies. (Location 332)
the qualities we actually select for and reward in most workplaces are precisely the ones that are unlikely to produce leaders who are good for employees or, for that matter, for long-term organizational performance. (Location 347)
Although it might be cathartic to bemoan the evidence that positive leadership qualities often go unrecognized and unrewarded while their opposite produces career advancement and wealth, such moralizing changes nothing about organizational decision-making and also does little to help you in your own career challenges. (Location 350)
the construct of leadership was invented to account for unusually good— or unusually bad— performance as a way of creating a relatively simplified account of the world that made personal control seem possible. (Location 378)
Robert Sutton wrote a book entitled The No Asshole Rule. (Location 401)
the so-called leaders whom many people work for are either abusive bullies or just out of touch with their subordinates. (Location 406)
the vast majority of employees are unhappy with their work, disengaged, and hoping for a different job. (Location 436)
So whatever other things the leadership research, writing, speaking, blogging, and programs are doing, making workplaces better is clearly not one of them. (Location 442)
If, as scores of studies demonstrate, leadership affects engagement, satisfaction, and turnover, the sorry state of these workplace indicators provides compelling evidence of leadership failure. (Location 449)
Gentry concluded that “one of every two leaders and managers” is “estimated to be ineffective (that is, a disappointment, incompetent, a mis-hire, or a complete failure) in their current roles.” (Location 483)
this leadership expert, working from extensive research, concluded that 50 percent of leaders were failures. Yet another review of the research literature on leadership concluded that “the base rate for managerial incompetence in any organization is quite high,” 28 while still a different summary concluded that about half of the occupants (Location 485)
This divergence in the interests between corporate leaders and the groups in which they are members appears prominently in the growing literature on sociobiology, an evolutionary approach to understanding social behavior that speaks to the discrepancy between what’s good for individuals and the groups in which they are members. (Location 534)
“The problem is that for a social group to function as an adaptive unit, its members must do things for each other. Yet, these group-advantageous behaviors seldom maximize relative fitness [for a given individual] within the social group.” (Location 539)
Social psychologists also have long acknowledged the inherent tension between the need for leaders to help groups function effectively, and the personal interests of group leaders to maximize the power differences they enjoy over others and hold on to and exploit for their own benefits. 39 (Location 541)
Leaders frequently focus, hopes and blandishments notwithstanding, primarily on their own careers and what’s good for them. (Location 544)
thought— there is far from a complete correspondence between what is good for a company, or for that matter, a unit within that company, and what is good for the company’s or unit’s leader. (Location 557)
This neglect of what’s good for the individual interests of leaders might be one reason so many recommendations have so little traction in the real world: while leadership research may not be that interested in leader (as opposed to group or organizational) well-being, leaders almost always are. (Location 564)
The leadership industry is so obsessively focused on the normative— what leaders should do and how things ought to be— that it has largely ignored asking the fundamental question of what actually is true and going on and why. (Location 595)
There are no “barriers to entry” into the leadership industry; no credentials, rigorous research, knowledge of the relevant scientific evidence, or anything else required to pass oneself off as a leadership expert. (Location 601)
many of the people offering leadership advice have (a) either never held a leadership position, or (b) if they have, were notoriously unsuccessful in their leadership role, or (c) often promulgated leadership prescriptions almost completely inconsistent with their own behavior. (Location 605)
the study of charismatic leadership lacks a precise definition of the term and also an understanding of the psychological and behavioral mechanisms that presumably produce results from charisma. (Location 631)
what gets inspected gets affected. (Location 640)
Armstrong concluded that “teacher ratings are detrimental to students.” (Location 664)
any evaluation of leadership development begins and ends with participant feedback.” (Location 674)
measuring entertainment value produces great entertainment, not change; measuring the wrong things crowds out assessing other, more relevant indicators such as improvements in workplaces. (Location 679)
Improvement comes from employing measurements that are appropriate, those that are connected to the areas in which we seek improvement. In the case of leadership, that appropriate measurement would include assessing the frequency of desirable leader behaviors; actual workplace conditions such as engagement, satisfaction, and trust in leadership; and leaders’ careers— measures that are notable by their absence not only in use but even from much of the discussion of leadership-development activity. (Location 680)
when Hewlett-Packard had a positive and strong organizational culture and senior leadership cared about that culture, people were held accountable for the results of anonymous employee surveys conducted throughout the company and reported on a work-unit basis. (Location 685)
evaluates managers by their ability to attract and retain talent, and where people can lose their jobs if their units experience excessive voluntary turnover. (Location 691)
there is lots of talk about the importance of culture and people, but there are not many actions consistent with such talk. (Location 693)
the senior leadership, not liking the results of employee surveys measuring engagement or trust or satisfaction, simply decides to stop doing them. After all, as one CEO reportedly said, “If we’re not going to change things, why raise people’s expectations by asking them their opinions about aspects of the work culture that we really don’t care about.” (Location 694)
Measuring results, measuring leader behaviors, and assessing whether or not prescriptions get implemented would go a long way to both highlighting and then altering the current sad state of affairs in most workplaces. Without baseline measurements of leader and workplace conditions, it is simply impossible to understand what to do to make improvements. (Location 697)
expanding evaluations and measurement to incorporate not just unit performance and even customer or employee satisfaction but also what happens to leaders’ careers, including their jobs, their salaries, and their career progress. And when we see, as we will frequently throughout this book, the different effects of a leader’s traits or behaviors on a company’s performance versus his or her own success, we will see the need to understand why there is the divergence in interests and how to make things work better for both sides. (Location 701)
promulgate professional standards of practice. Such standards include prioritizing systematic evidence over stories or examples, basing practice to the greatest extent possible on the best evidence, and, most important, seeking to ensure that practitioners are knowledgeable and have at least some requirement to keep up with the progress of medical science. (Location 708)
doing the opposite of what the leadership industry advocates is sometimes a much better, more reliable path to individual success. (Location 721)
There are, in this domain as in many others, trade-offs, and the frequently unacknowledged trade-off between what is good for the individual and good for the group needs to be front and center in understanding why there is so much leadership failure over such a long time. (Location 722)
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 (Location 732)
“I have a soul-crushing job. I need hope.” (Location 743)
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. (Location 744)
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. (Location 753)
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. (Location 764)
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. (Location 768)
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. (Location 793)
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. (Location 797)
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 (Location 805)
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. (Location 811)
We often engage in astonishingly little due diligence to assess the accuracy of what we hear. (Location 823)
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 (Location 831)
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. (Location 849)
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. (Location 851)
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. (Location 853)
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. (Location 865)
“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. (Location 869)
People suffer career troubles because they believed what they were told in the books, blogs, and talks. (Location 892)
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. (Location 892)
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. (Location 925)
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.” (Location 946)
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. (Location 955)
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. (Location 957)
“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 (Location 962)
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. (Location 964)
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. (Location 967)
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 (Location 969)
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. (Location 976)
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. (Location 984)
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. (Location 993)
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. (Location 998)
People are profoundly influenced by those with whom they have contact, as these others provide information and also models for their behavior. (Location 1001)
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.” (Location 1009)
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. (Location 1012)
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. (Location 1016)
Standards and measurements, made visible through charts in every unit, were what drove the remarkable performance improvement— not nice words or inspiring stories. (Location 1026)
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. (Location 1029)
reflecting on specific behaviors on a daily basis to accomplish change and to improve behavior (Location 1031)
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. (Location 1040)
“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.” (Location 1051)
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. (Location 1054)
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. (Location 1063)
one ought to be quite skeptical about what actually goes on at places run by people who think they are leadership experts. (Location 1068)
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. (Location 1103)
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. (Location 1106)
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. (Location 1119)
“Leaders should be collaborative, modest, and generous.” 1 Unfortunately, few leaders, particularly leaders of large organizations, seem to have many or even any of those qualities, particularly modesty. (Location 1138)
One of the most important qualities Collins identifies that distinguishes these highly successful leaders from others with executive capability is their extreme personal humility— their modesty. (Location 1161)
Collins notes that Level 5 leaders do not like to talk about themselves, preferring instead to speak about the company and the contributions of other executives. The Level 5 leaders Collins describes are, for the most part, not well known outside their companies and have little to no visibility in the general business press, (Location 1163)
This quality of modesty also entails acknowledging one’s limitations and fallibility, understanding that no one, regardless of how extraordinary his performance, knows everything, and that thus collective wisdom is often superior to the insights of a single individual. Acting on that insight involves including far more people in decision-making, and listening with humility to their advice and feedback. (Location 1166)
Modesty and concomitant respect for the abilities of others appear regularly as a prescription for becoming an effective leader. (Location 1169)
One reason people leave companies is because they do not feel acknowledged or recognized for their contributions, and one behavior that provokes irritation is when others take credit for another’s work. Modest leaders are less likely to claim credit for the accomplishments of others and also are more prone to acknowledge what others have done— so modesty should reduce voluntary turnover. (Location 1177)
people are unlikely to work as hard for “your” project or “the boss’s project” as they are for “our” project or, even better, for their “own” project. (Location 1180)
implicit egotism. This idea refers to the principle that we like things that remind us of or are identified with ourselves. Implicit egotism is premised on the idea that because we like ourselves, we like things that remind us of or are associated with the self. (Location 1182)
endowment effect. This phenomenon describes how and why we more highly value what we have simply because it is ours. (Location 1186)
sharing credit and giving people a sense of ownership would be expected to increase their commitment and identification with a workplace or specific projects or tasks. (Location 1192)
if people see that they never get sufficient recognition for their good work because the leader hogs all the credit, they may reduce their efforts. (Location 1194)
narcissism, correlates negatively with numerous aspects of leader performance as assessed both by the affective reactions of subordinates and also actual group performance. 12 (Location 1197)
Research shows that people who self-promote are perceived negatively by others, 13 and those who are modest about their abilities and performance are better-liked than individuals who boast about their accomplishments. 14 Other research demonstrates that boastful presenters are the least effective, while people who display an intermediate level of modesty receive the most positive evaluations from others. (Location 1200)
Because likeability is an important basis of interpersonal influence, humble people, who are more likeable as a consequence of their humility, will be more influential, other things being equal. (Location 1204)
Leaders who spend lots of time promoting themselves and their accomplishments steal valuable time and attention from working to maintain their companies’ competitive success. (Location 1207)
modesty is a rare, and possibly extremely rare, quality among leaders. (Location 1218)
The evidence suggests that modesty may not be such a good thing for getting to the top or staying there. (Location 1226)
narcissism and narcissistic behaviors are quite common, particularly among leaders. (Location 1235)
Narcissism has been defined in the psychology research literature as a grandiose sense of self-importance; arrogant behavior or attitudes; a lack of empathy for others; a preoccupation with fantasies of unlimited success or power; belief in one’s special or unique status, including a fixation on associating with high-status people or organizations; an unreasonable sense of expectations or entitlement; and a desire for excessive admiration from others, among other characteristics. (Location 1242)
immodesty in all of its manifestations— narcissism, self-promotion, self-aggrandizement, unwarranted self-confidence— helps people attain leadership positions in the first place and then, once in them, positively affects their ability to hold on to those positions, extract more resources (salary), and even helps in some, although not all, aspects of their performance on the (Location 1266)
if you project confidence and claim competence with enough conviction to be credible, observers will tend to assimilate any information about you in ways consistent with the idea that you know what you are doing and are deserving of a position of leadership. (Location 1278)
To engage in self-promotion requires eschewing modesty and engaging in behaviors that draw attention to an individual’s positive qualities, past accomplishments, future plans, and also deservingness of jobs, money, or promotions. (Location 1285)
self-promotion is positively correlated with interviewers’ evaluations of job candidates as well as with hiring recommendations. (Location 1288)
overconfident individuals achieved higher social status, respect, and influence in groups. (Location 1292)
If someone seems confident in his or her abilities, maybe this just reflects his or her actual competence. (Location 1293)
self-deprecation and modest self-presentation work mostly for those who already have such well-established positive reputations that the modesty is seen as charming rather than indicative of some insecurity or incompetence. (Location 1299)
Narcissists typically make judgments with greater confidence than other people … and because their judgments are rendered with such conviction, other people tend to believe them and the narcissists become disproportionately more influential in group situations. (Location 1321)
the self-effacement and modesty emphasized by many Asian cultures is at direct odds with the realities of the contemporary workplace where assertiveness and directness are central. (Location 1361)
although modesty may be valued in the leadership literature, self-promotion and assertiveness seem to produce better career results in the real world. (Location 1367)
narcissistic individuals are often superior performers in at least some dimensions; they are great at selling their ideas and vision, effective in attracting the support of others (particularly outside others), good at getting attention and its attendant benefits, and often effective at getting things done. The many benefits of immodesty help explain why modest CEOs are so rare, (Location 1422)
to become the effective leader that she clearly is, she has had to master an important skill, to behave in ways that, to at least some degree, are inconsistent with her natural inclinations and predispositions. (Location 1460)
Davis-Blake will also talk about her journey of personal development in which she has acquired the behaviors and skills required of a leader. (Location 1463)
In fact, being authentic is pretty much the opposite of what leaders must do. Leaders do not need to be true to themselves. Rather, leaders need to be true to what the situation and what those around them want and need from them. And often what others want and need is the reassurance that things will work out and the confidence that they are on the right track. (Location 1475)
The ability to not succumb to personal feelings or predilections seems like a crucial trait for high performers in many domains. (Location 1486)
Hochschild argues that one of the ways in which social class reproduces itself is by middle-class families doing a better job than lower-class families of preparing their children to manage their emotions, particularly the emotions they display to others. (Location 1500)
None of this is intended to say that learning to manage one’s emotions and self-presentation is always good and that inauthenticity is desirable— only that inauthenticity is incredibly common and seemingly an important requirement for effective leadership. (Location 1502)
the authentic leadership literature is a good example of the lay preaching, (Location 1533)
authentic leadership is apparently a seemingly endless list of positive attributes including ethics and energy and a long list of behaviors including having impact, exercising integrity, exerting influence, demonstrating initiative, 11 dreaming, taking care of yourself, (Location 1554)
your personal feelings are largely irrelevant to your need to make the relationship successful. So one of the things that happens as you move up the organizational ladder, Loveman suggests, is that you lose the freedom to act on your personal beliefs, feelings, and predilections— your “authentic self”— and you have to direct your behavior according much more to what you need to do to be successful, regardless of how you feel at the moment. (Location 1579)
People need to figure out how to be effective, regardless of their wants, needs, upbringing, and so forth. They need to learn how to be successful in the environments they confront, or they must learn how to find different and better environments. (Location 1591)
read Sandberg’s book Lean In14 and similar books as pleas for women to do what it takes to be successful, regardless of how they feel, how they have been trained, or what seems to be comfortable in the moment. (Location 1613)
One of the most important leadership skills is the ability to put on a show, to act like a leader, to act in a way that inspires confidence and garners support— even if the person doing the performance does not actually feel confident or powerful. (Location 1636)
when people enter into leadership roles, they might not see the qualities that reside within them. Instead, she sensibly argued, people develop leadership qualities by practicing them, by acting them out and rehearsing them until they become natural and part of the individual. (Location 1661)
research—“ a person’s role will have an impact on his attitudes”— is a fundamental tenet of role theory and has been tested numerous times over the ensuing years. In one (Location 1679)
Position affects the information people receive, the structure of the rewards and evaluations they face, the social interactions they encounter as part of their work, and their identities. So of course people are affected by job roles. (Location 1684)
reciprocal relationships such that personality affected the type of jobs and occupations people chose, but that once in those jobs, personality was also affected by the job and occupational conditions. 21 (Location 1693)
the idea of behaving authentically as a leader is almost certainly rare, because this is a concept that is at once both psychologically impossible— because of situational effects on personality and behavior— and also not very useful, because of the requirements for acting as a leader regardless of how one may feel at the moment. (Location 1698)
One of the reasons lying persists is that there are few adverse consequences for it; and as we will see, positive results very often come from not telling the truth. (Location 1728)
whenever there is a crucial operational indicator that cannot be produced by the company’s current systems, they put the indicator on the reports anyway, with the notation “not available”— something that encourages people to figure out how to obtain data on crucial measures of performance. (Location 1737)
People will agree with powerful leaders as a strategy of ingratiation, as nothing is as flattering as others’ telling you how right and how smart you are. But even if individuals don’t intend to flatter the powerful, hierarchical position is often assumed to be associated with intelligence and skill. If people think an individual in a senior position is smart and successful, they will bias their evaluations of that person’s behavior and decisions and overestimate their wisdom. (Location 1741)
lying as saying something that you know not to be true at the moment you say it— which is different from something that you believe to be true that subsequently turns out to be false. (Location 1751)
Loveman, Thiry, and other exemplars of transparency and candor are notable not just for their leadership skills but also for their rarity. (Location 1780)
research consistently demonstrates that “powerful people lie more often and with more ease.” Leaders prevaricate with greater aplomb because “power, even when minimally endowed in the laboratory, mitigates the impact of stress associated with dishonesty. (Location 1848)
Trust is more efficient and cost-effective in coordinating and ensuring collaborative behavior than the financial incentives or contracts that, as Oliver Williamson, a Nobel prize– winning economist, first pointed out decades ago, are difficult to write in ways that cover every possible future contingency. 1 (Location 2116)
Trust is the glue of many social relationships, and organizations are essentially all about social relationships. Research in experimental economics consistently shows that when people try to take advantage of others, they get punished by those others or observers, even if administering such punishment is costly, and even if there will be no future interactions among the people involved. 2 People expect trustworthy, honest behavior and react when they don’t see or receive it. (Location 2119)
The social science literature certainly demonstrates that leaders who inspire trust and build workplaces in which employees trust their leaders perform better. (Location 2123)
But I no longer believe that trust is essential to organizational functioning or even to effective leadership. (Location 2127)
First because trust is essential for human survival, it is hardwired into us so that in many cases we are predisposed to trust too much and the wrong people. Second, we are likely to trust those who are similar to us, something that the Edelman surveys also confirm. Third, and most important, our ability to accurately discern who is taking advantage of us is remarkably poor. (Location 2143)
Kramer notes that many studies have found that detecting cheaters is difficult. (Location 2155)
people are motivated to overlook a violation of trust as a onetime thing that won’t occur again, or at least won’t happen to them— because they are, after all, above average in their ability to detect people who shouldn’t be trusted. (Location 2217)
one consequence of the just-world effect (people’s tendency to believe that the world is a just and fair place in which people get what they deserve) is that when someone is taken advantage of, others engage in a “blame the victim” exercise in which they actively seek out information that demonstrates how the victim was complicit in some way in his or her own deception and therefore deserved it. (Location 2219)
the best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. People who have reneged on commitments, stolen intellectual property, sued or forced out their partners, failed to fulfill promises, and moved on to greener pastures in the past will do so again. (Location 2248)
systematically investigate what the people you are going to entrust with important dimensions of your future well-being have actually done. (Location 2254)
People will frequently act in their own interests, and if those interests involve breaching commitments made to you, then you should probably kiss those commitments good-bye. And often there won’t be sanctions for violating trust, the experimental research notwithstanding. (Location 2280)
trust requires constancy and predictability. Because building trust entails, most fundamentally, keeping one’s word and honoring promises, including the promises— either explicit or implicit— that are made to employees and customers, building and maintaining trust necessitates honoring commitments and obligations. (Location 2298)
The acquirer purchased the company for its customer list and customer contracts— it was in the software-as-a-service space with multiyear agreements (although the fundamental logic holds with possibly even more force for licensed software). Buyers of such businesses sometimes do the following calculation: regardless of whether the acquired company would maintain its level of customer service or product innovation, existing customers would confront some level of inertia in moving to a new vendor and platform. Therefore, if the purchase price is right, the acquirer can earn a handsome return on its investment as it essentially slowly drives the existing customer base away, because costs will decrease more rapidly than revenues. (Location 2306)
A similar arbitrage opportunity exists with employees. There are many forms of deferred compensation, ranging from pensions to retiree health benefits to the oft-observed positive age-wage relationship, which labor economists such as Edward Lazear argue are used to reward long-tenured employees and thereby ensure their retention. (Location 2321)
So employees may sign on for a particular basket of wages and benefits, but there is no assurance that those benefits— or even wages— will be maintained. Much like customers, employees also confront inertia, particularly in weak labor markets, but also to the extent that they have developed organization-specific skills that make them comparatively less valuable in the broader labor market than they are to their current employer. And finding a new job takes time and effort. These circumstances present management with the opportunity to change the deal in ways that increase profits. And there is also an opportunity to clean up the balance sheet by shedding future obligations. (Location 2332)
maintaining trust requires honoring commitments, but commitments constrain. To take yet one more context in which this dynamic plays out, consider vendor-supplier relations. (Location 2348)
his advice for building a start-up inside some other, larger company’s ecosystem (like that of LinkedIn or Facebook or YouTube) is simply, don’t. Once you develop and prove a business idea or application, he continues, the larger company is going to do its own version, almost certainly not by purchasing your start-up at some enormous price but by doing it better themselves. (Location 2351)
Sort of like Frankenstein, leaders frequently create monsters. Through hiring and promotions, these new senior executives rather than showing loyalty, become participants in ousting their onetime sponsors. (Location 2365)
violations of obligations must not be perceived as that serious, and second, that people, to avoid being perpetually unhappy and dissatisfied, will figure out ways of coming to terms psychologically with the reality of breaches of trust. Both processes probably operate. (Location 2374)
Breaches of contracts by businesses, however, are viewed more as reflecting a business necessity (or reality), and therefore are seen more as legitimate business decisions with less of a moral transgression aspect. 19 (Location 2379)
Because commitments constrain, people and companies break them, and they do so reasonably regularly. Because there are few sanctions, such trust-violating behavior becomes more frequent. Because the breaking of promises becomes more frequent, it becomes more “normative,” in the sense that more entities do it. And as a more normative way of behaving, it provokes less moral outrage and comes to be seen as how business is done or how people make their way in political battles inside organizations. And the absence of moral outrage then leads to more breaches of agreements and promises, and the cycle continues. (Location 2389)
servant leadership concept define and distinguish it by its heavy focus on the well-being of followers in contrast to the typical emphasis given to organizational well-being. 2 In that sense, the idea gives primacy not so much to followers over leaders as to putting the interests of employees over organizational performance. The underlying logic is that by focusing on people and their needs, including the needs for interesting work and for being treated like adults and therefore for being permitted to make decisions and have some control over what they do, leaders can produce great teams and develop superior company performance (Location 2405)
Servant leadership is characterized by trust, the appreciation of others, and providing empowerment4— letting followers make more decisions— something that is good for both people’s learning and development and also their sense of personal efficacy. (Location 2411)
when companies look after the well-being of their workforce, the workforce turns over less and is more engaged, thereby reducing turnover expenses; employees, in turn, do a better job of looking after the customers and of innovating. And when the customers fare better, so do the shareholders, (Location 2432)
when a work organization encounters difficulties and faces reduced resources, including jobs and money, how does the reduction, the economic stringency, get apportioned between leaders and others? (Location 2448)
Power is positively correlated with hierarchical rank, and senior people mostly use their power to protect both their jobs and their salaries and perquisites. (Location 2456)
when times are good, the number of administrators (and probably everybody else) expands, but when times are bad, administrators, closer to the locus of decision-making and with more power, protect their jobs disproportionately, with the loss of jobs concentrated among the frontline people with less influence over the decisions about where and what to cut. Therefore, as this cycle repeats itself over time, the percentage of people in administration inexorably increases. 7 Their study speaks directly to how power leads to job protection for those in power— for the leaders, but not the led. (Location 2459)
from vast increases in corporate performance. “The growth of earnings for executives has outpaced growth in the stock market or in corporate earnings, by a wide margin.” 13 Indeed, much research suggests that CEO pay is reasonably unaffected by corporate performance. (Location 2491)
leaders just take care of themselves, regardless of what they should do either to adhere to moral strictures or to make their organizations perform better. (Location 2502)
leaders take credit for good company performance and attribute poor performance to environmental factors over which they have no control, (Location 2555)
refrained from asking what executive salaries were in his firm or in finance more generally, and if the United States would be more competitive if those salaries were reduced. (Location 2563)
Leaders who have come up through the ranks and have done many if not most of the organization’s jobs are much more likely to look out for the interests of those they lead because they have been there themselves. (Location 2564)
the problem that agency theory addresses is how to align incentives and develop contracting arrangements, including optimal compensation schemes, so that in the course of pursuing their own narrow interests, agents, the people to whom power has been delegated, will also wind up serving the interests of the principals who have delegated that decision-making authority to them. (Location 2579)
ensuring more psychological identification with and contact between leaders and those they lead, and using measurements and incentives to both assess and reward the desired and desirable behaviors of leaders that demonstrate actual taking care of others, are much more reliable ways to ensure that at least a few more leaders “eat last.” (Location 2614)
You may think your employer owes you something for your past contributions and good work— but most employers don’t agree. (Location 2631)
If you hold the expectation that your hard work and good efforts are invariably going to be appreciated, acknowledged, and rewarded by your employer in perpetuity, it’s time to get over yourself. (Location 2637)
relying on the good behavior and positive sentiments of work organizations for your career well-being is singularly foolish. (Location 2656)
The company does not owe its individual employees a job, regardless of their job performance or, for that matter, any consideration for their past loyalty and service. (Location 2662)
My question to her (which I albeit put much more politely than I do here): “What were you thinking? If you need to work to support yourself, you need to (a) always, and I mean always, be looking for new jobs both within your current employer and ones on the outside so you have options available to you at all times, and (b) be constantly working on your relationship with your new boss. (Location 2687)
the norm of reciprocity operates with less force in the workplace and, as a consequence, implicit agreements are more readily and frequently breached. (Location 2717)
the norm of reciprocity speaks to the moral obligation to repay favors done for you by others. (Location 2718)
workplaces are primarily instrumental, calculative settings largely free of moral sentiments and even normative constraints. (Location 2728)
Autonomy seems great until you have it, and then many people want the reassurance and even guidance that comes from belonging to a larger entity like a workplace that will provide at least some minimal sense of security. (Location 2747)
Cognitive dissonance runs rampant inside workplaces. The idea that I have joined and voluntarily remain in a place, and the idea that the place I am in is run by some incompetent, venal, mean individual, are two highly discordant thoughts. (Location 2760)
Companies sell out, leaders retire or die, and the new people in charge aren’t the same as the old, particularly in how they relate to and treat employees. (Location 2793)
The point is that even in the best cultures, with the most well-intentioned leaders, the working circumstances, including economic security, are not invariably perfect or permanent. So trusting in the kindness of organizational leaders with their own agendas, points of view, and interests is inherently perilous, even if many people do precisely that. (Location 2811)
Such an approach is completely consistent with the principles of the quality movement, which promotes fixing the system rather than relying on the skills of individuals— to produce, in other words, an environment in which ordinary, albeit conscientious, people can reliably produce desirable results. (Location 2825)
The lesson of W. Edwards Deming and his peers in the quality movement is that relying on individual motivation and acts of great competence is a singularly unreliable way to produce consistently high levels of system performance. (Location 2828)
Deming argued that if there are performance problems and quality defects, one needs to understand how those problems arise almost naturally as a consequence of how a system has been designed— and then fix those design flaws. Put simply, attack the problems by fixing the system, not scapegoating the necessarily fallible human beings working in and operating that system— whether or not they deserved it. (Location 2829)
In the absence of any sustained movement to create better management and organizational governance systems that rely more on the “wisdom of crowds” 13 and less on the hope that one’s leader is better than average and not overly self-interested, it seems sensible to look out for oneself. And as I argue next, systems based on people looking out for themselves have performance advantages, at least in some circumstances, not only for the people working in them but for the system itself. (Location 2840)
Take care of yourself and assiduously look out for your own interests in your life inside work organizations. (Location 2849)
Miller noted that the norm of self-interest has substantial explanatory power, in part because people assume self-interest is operating and thereby take actions that make the norm of self-interest self-fulfilling through their very behaviors. (Location 2852)
presume that others are acting on the basis of their self-interest, and you will be better equipped to forecast and understand their actions. (Location 2860)
as Adam Grant noted in his bestselling book Give and Take, people who are “givers,” those who are generous with their time and with their help of others, are often the most successful in building networks of support and therefore in their careers. (Location 2866)
Grant also summarized research, including his own, that found that givers were not only among the most successful individuals, they were also among the least successful, and he provided advice about how to be generous without being a patsy. (Location 2868)
Grant noted that “in the workplace, givers are a relatively rare breed.” (Location 2870)
cooperative cultures are quite fragile, as are cooperation and trust in prisoner’s dilemma games. Once individualistic values come to dominate, 18 or once people defect in prisoner’s dilemma situations, 19 trust and cooperation are difficult if not impossible to rebuild. (Location 2872)
It is interesting, to say the least, that while many people and much social science theory presumes that individual voters, acting at least partly out of their own self-interest, can produce better electoral outcomes than any other system, inside economic entities, which in some cases dwarf the size of at least some governments, a different calculus is advocated. But just maybe self-interest is as sensible a motive inside companies, (Location 2892)
Societies generally seem to celebrate competition as individuals seek their own advantage. That is, once again, until we consider the internal workings of organizations. So once inside a company, people are not only expected to collaborate rather than to compete with each other but, more important, to cooperate with their leaders (or bosses, to use a less noble term), to voluntarily subordinate themselves to their leaders’ interests and commands. (Location 2906)
beyond the better decisions and more efficient results in political and economic systems produced by self-interest seeking, there is a third benefit: encouraging individuals to be responsible for their own well-being helps them come to think of themselves as fully functioning adult human beings. (Location 2912)
Encouraging people to seek and then to follow benevolent leaders— to put their trust and faith in these individuals who, because they are human, will nevertheless be invariably flawed— strikes me as seeking to in some measure infantilize otherwise competent working adults. (Location 2914)
The world is often not a just or fair place, our hopes and desires notwithstanding. Get over it. Take care of yourself and watch out for your interests. If others do as well, all the better. (Location 2921)
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. (Location 2960)
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. (Location 3053)
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. (Location 3056)
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. (Location 3061)
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. (Location 3069)
career setbacks for people who fail to understand the full range of organizational dynamics. (Location 3072)
Stop Confusing the Normative with the Descriptive, and Focus More on What Is (Location 3078)
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 (Location 3080)
Watch Actions, Not Words (Location 3100)
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. (Location 3115)
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. (Location 3129)
Sometimes You Have to Behave Badly to Do Good (Location 3133)
there are occasions when you have to do bad things to achieve good results. (Location 3136)
The point is that sometimes to do good, you have to have the courage and wisdom to perform harmful, painful, actions. (Location 3140)
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. (Location 3145)
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. (Location 3158)
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. (Location 3171)
Advice to Leaders Depends on the Ecosystem in Which They Are Operating (Location 3180)
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. (Location 3184)
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. (Location 3187)
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. (Location 3189)
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. (Location 3192)
Stop the Either-Or Thinking (Location 3200)
thinking of things as black or white makes it much more difficult to deal with the real world and its many complications. (Location 3204)
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. (Location 3224)
“even in the most extreme circumstances— like the financial crisis— directors bore little consequence for their poor decisions.” (Location 3270)
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. (Location 3295)
