The chief executive who desires a higher level of performance from his senior leaders is often unaware of the way in which unspoken thoughts and feelings about him that are obstructing their optimal performance. The idea that senior leaders reporting to the CEO may be rendered more passive because of the aggrandized attitudes that they hold about their boss can seem absurd to the top leader of a company; he often feels only too aware of his faults. But in many cases the unrealized potential of a senior team is due to those reporting to the chief executive quietly holding an inflated assessment of their CEO’s powers and having distorted ideas about his appropriate role. These are not instances where the unrealistic adulation of the CEO reaches the pathological extreme of the cult-like leadership defined by the likes of famous “super-egos” such as Lehman’s Dick Fuld, or Tyco’s Dennis Kozlowski. On the contrary, even a relatively modest or introverted chief executive may unwittingly be contributing to an erosion of his team’s potential by not being vigilant of the fact that his reports will tend to idealize their leader. It’s a situation that is exacerbated by the fact that a top leader can allow his sense of having a “close working relationship” to distract him from cues [see Side Bar II] signaling that the senior leaders reporting to him are not providing what the business needs.
By inadvertently allowing important leaders within the company to burden him with unrealistic ideas about his capacity, the chief executive engenders a more passive culture among his direct reports. It was within such a leadership dynamic that Lee Kun-hee of Samsung or An Wang—a brilliant but distinctly low-key man of modest presentation—failed in their roles as chief executives. The necessary checks and balances that should have been offered by the different sides of a senior leadership team were displaced by an inflated idea about what the CEO could do for the team and the business.
Idealizing—holding unrealistic attitudes about someone’s powers and potential— the CEO can happen in different degrees and can be difficult to recognize, but the symptoms related to this corrosive phenomenon are readily apparent within a senior team. For example, there will tend to be:
In some cases these signs of an idealized chief executive are evident from early in the life of a start up and in others they emerge quietly over time. For example, the CEO of a very large and well-reputed hedge fund was surprised to find that his management committee had slowly become populated with partners who were so distracted by the myth of their boss that they withheld information and opinion out of concern that being frank with him held too much risk. This was despite the fact that the CEO had a long, consistent history of never retaliating against bad news or opposing opinion.
Or, to offer a richer description of the way that idealization evolves, consider the case of Scott, a top executive with a healthy but not extreme self-esteem. Scott founded and served as CEO of Haystack, a successful non-profit dedicated to offering housing solutions to mitigate poverty. His senior team was composed of seasoned veterans, most of whom had worked for him for well over a decade. In private, the Haystack leaders would speak realistically about their CEO, letting me know that “I’ve known him, good and bad, for a long time. I get Scott”. But as they functioned in their roles on the Haystack senior team, these same executives were averse to even the most appropriate challenge to Scott’s opinion. The reverence that Scott’s direct reports had for their boss had grown to the point that it destabilized the leadership team. As Haystack’s success escalated, Scott had risen from a local success to someone who was being recognized at a national level. Private donations to the company skyrocketed, people in exclusive political circles sought Scott out and it soon got to the point where he spent most of his time on the road with rich potential private contributors, politicians and board members. The reaction on the part of Scott’s direct reports was to feel burdened by the increased responsibility while simultaneously attributing Haystack’s success solely to their CEO. Offline, the senior leaders could still speak in a more balanced way about Scott, but as a team they forfeited productive collaboration with their CEO in favor of supporting an aggrandized feeling about the man.
At a time when Haystack most needed an empowered leadership team, the members passively followed Scott’s preferences. With no significant pushback, Scott continued to run his organization, as one of his reports told me, “as if he was the sole proprietor”. Decisions and authorities that were more appropriate to people one and two levels down were being held tightly by Scott. Coming off the road he would, with the best intentions, “dive bomb” back into the organization creating confusion by giving the same directive to multiple people and tasking employees without coordinating with their managers. His reports complained to one another but raised no issues with Scott. The potential of this executive team was further stymied by working in a hub-and-spoke team format that Scott preferred (with himself at the center controlling information and decision-making) rather than opening up the potential of his reports as a team of networked professionals who could better support him by taking up greater authority, responsibilities, decision-making and responsibility for holding one another accountable.
Haystack’s story is an example of a problem that repeats itself to different degrees in the C-suite across countless businesses: due to a host of factors, the CEO becomes aggrandized in the eyes of those around him and in response, senior leaders unwittingly fall into a passive posture within their role. The support that any chief executive needs in terms of productive pushback from his closest colleagues dissolves as these senior leaders relinquish degrees of authority that the business needs them to take up. This sets off an insidious dynamic that can be difficult to recognize because rather than making the CEO uneasy, he buys in to the oversized reverence because it can provide a false sense of relief from the considerable stress inherent in holding his role.
This is an ancient problem. The dramatic and paradoxical Buddhist koan, “If you meet the Buddha on the road, kill him!” was promulgated by the leader to teach followers to guard against their tendency to regress into passive idolatry rather than take responsibility for the potential within themselves. When a business’s top executive is burdened with aggrandized ideas about what he is capable of, then he and those working under him lose sight into the nature of contemporary leadership. The “great man” notions of leadership have expired along with its lists and sets of character attributes; leadership is increasingly a co-active process dependent on the relational confluence between a leader and his followers. For the contemporary CEO, maintaining a productive dynamic with his reports is critical because his charge is to define and support an environment in which collaboration, dialogue, mutual enforcement of accountability, empowerment and distributed leadership can be applied in response to the rapid change and complexity in the current business environment.
Byron Woollen, Ph.D., (https://podiaconsulting.com/press/) is the founder and managing partner of Podia Consulting, a firm that specializes in change management, leadership consultation and advising leaders on organizational effectiveness.
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