If you contradict yourself, provide an image that you along with the experts are figuring out the truth, then you could possibly do more to damage your credibility than if you had instead just endlessly projected strength until your successor forcibly took you down in their own endless display of indomitable leadership.
When uncertainty and fear strikes people want strong leadership, not one that is still doing research to figure out what's next (even if that's a strong move).
I quite agree with you. I think this is more the perception of the leadership I'm working with than my own opinion. However, convincing them of your point has been the difficult part. Their fear of undermining their position is high.
I like the message here, but I have noticed as a leader that one of the downsides of this scenario is that you have to rebuild trust with your team. Yes, so you didn't die -- but they begin to wonder at your leadership ability, and it might nag at the edges unless its brought out into the open. Its great for the leader to know it will be alright, but I think you lose credibility if you don't demonstrate somehow that you've learned and are less likely (noticed I didn't say "never will") to make a similar mistake again.
As someone who has made plenty of mistakes leading, this is always the thing I worry most about and work on the most.
> I think the larger lesson here is that confidence is a good thing, but relying on it solely can fail miserably as a substitute for having actual knowledge about something.
Key word here is "can". In many leadership circumstances, it is impossible to know the right answer definitively. In those cases, it is best to choose what appears to be the best answer, and stick with it until you have overwhelming evidence otherwise. You need confidence to do that -- and in many cases, unwarranted confidence.
Leadership is all about putting yourself out there to be wrong. Many people are very risk-averse without someone else giving them permission, so you give them permission. But ultimately, who gave you permission? At some point down the chain, the answer has to be "I give myself the permission".
Like it or not, leadership is 90% confidence, 10% competence (and the 10% competence is largely around how well you learn from failure).
Baseline political paradox - humans demand extraverted confidence from leaders more than they demand competence.
If you're confident you can make mistake after mistake and no one will care unless everything comes crashing down - and even then there's a fair chance you can make it someone else's fault.
If you're merely very competent, taking time to research good solutions looks like indecision, not leadership, even if the results are far better.
It's very hard to lead when you always say what's convenient rather than what you actually believe. I know executives like that - every word out of their mouth is a sales pitch - and their people don't trust them, the rest of the company doesn't trust them, and the public at large doesn't trust them.
That’s more of a reason not to trust anything ever. If leaders change for the worse, your investment in the company gets screwed no matter how well they’d done previously. And that investment can be stocks or it can be data, to give an example which you can’t just pull.
> "Ultimately the purpose is avoiding meaningless filler, not discrediting your knowledge or performance, and avoiding speculating in such a way that you are dodging responsibility ..."
this is a better framing of purpose than the advice provided. as you've laid out, the advice needs too many caveats (i.e., it's too specific) to be so absolute. i generally agree it's better to minimize bullshitting under duress, for reputation, responsibility, or otherwise.
good leadership focuses on laying out purpose, providing examples and intuition, and letting teammates determine the needs and implementation(s). bad leadership tries to distill desires into rules to follow, short-circuiting the creativity needed to adapt to dynamic circumstances.
embracing and adapting to uncertainty is a hallmark of good leadership, and politics (like blaming others), a sign of bad leadership.
I hear you on all of that, I'm just saying that leadership gets complicated. Sometimes the lie is better for all involved, especially the IC. You recognized this with your first instinct on how to communicate it.
As far as the rewards for poorly-motivated actions, we've always got the long term.
Because “If people would assume the worst about someone as competent at communication as $leader, then how much more likely are they to mistrust me when I try to communicate sincerely?” is the story I tell myself. Spending time in low-trust environments does bad things to the psyche.
So much. It's so frustrating to work under someone who fights reality.
Effective leaders may be enormously determined, but they can still factually assess the details of the situation in order to understand what needs to change in order to change reality. Where a "reality distortion field" becomes a problem is when it undermines the leaders ability to observe and orient to the situation.
At the best of times a leader is at risk of setting up a situation where they are told what they want to hear. A CEO can always find someone willing to tell them "yes". It requires self discipline to avoid this pitfall, and it also requires judgement - sometimes your staff do develop tunnel vision and another voice is required.
This is not easy. The article paints a good picture of the problem, but doesn't really offer much in the way of actionable solutions.
It's not 100% truth -- it's that you can't even get 100% detail.
This clip always resonated with me, re: high level leadership: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gguxM8eABP8 (as context, one subordinate he's talking about is presented as a terrible leader, the other as a great one)
Specifically, the point being made that all information is... uncertain. And how a good leader makes good decisions within that uncertainty, instead of picking winners.
It's easy to make the right decision when you have all the facts, but you can't have all the facts when you need to make 15+ decisions in a day.
> Providing counter-arguments that question the decisions of the executive caste is often seen as a threat
The key to have an impact is not to pose critical questions, but to make constructive suggestions. Instead of saying "you are doing this wrong", suggest how to do better. Good leaders appreciate and encourage this, in particular if the request comes in an actionable format, i.e. "I suggest to do X in order to achieve Y" is much better than "decision Z is stupid".
I much prefer leaders who let their anxiety known to me than those that project absolute confidence that whatever problems can be overcome. I can trust the former, I can’t trust the latter at all, and it’s super easy to tell.
I don't think "good leadership" is about fighting a battle you can't win. Energy is best spent on battles that you have a good shot at, in areas you're good at. Not setting yourself up to fail.
In this case, I didn't know I couldn't win, so I fought a losing battle and no good came of it.
On-the-ground I created an ambitious assessment program called "Assess the Past, Inspire the Future" which for the first time, connected participants from the past & present of the future and had them submit evaluations of their experiences... and "from-above", I was ultimately asked to give a report to the cabinet minister in charge of this thing. You can't go higher up than him without reaching the prime minister, and I could hardly have asked for better results and response for my survey. I believe I had the personal support every single active participant above the age of 20 (the younger ones were mainly oblivious), though none of them knew as much as I did about how deep the problems actually went. And my mentors would have supported me to run the damn thing if we'd have been able to get some change in the air.
Unfortunately, hearing the truth didn't help the organization -- they reacted by selecting young, naive people to participate in their programs, shying away from people who were old or mature enough to realize what was going on. Neither did it have the intended impact on those with the power to change things -- no politician, including the cabinet minister, would touch this with a 10 foot pole, because it would be way too risky. Much easier to let it continue as-is, and deny knowledge if anything nasty ever bubbled to the surface in the future.
In the end, the people who had the real power to make things right failed to act, so the only choices I had were to leak the story to the press, which likely would have destroyed the program in an instant, or walk away quietly. And since I believed (and still do) that our country is better off with the program than without, even when taking into account its imperfections, I took my cue and left the scene.
The whole ordeal took way more out of me than I expected. I don't even like the way I sound when describing it here, because it comes across as so negative and pessimistic! There are way better things I should be spending my time thinking about and acting on -- now, just as then.
To accept other people, that I can't change them, that I am always going to wake up and find new forms of nastiness. Then, to move on and think about better things. That's what I believe in these days.
My mistakes were misjudging my chances of making a difference, and misjudging the value of my own time. Life is short -- pick your battles accordingly. Those people are going to be the same tomorrow as they were yesterday. I can either try to fight that reality or I can find something productive to do.
When uncertainty and fear strikes people want strong leadership, not one that is still doing research to figure out what's next (even if that's a strong move).
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