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.
>I've seen lots of instances of people complaining about leadership decisions, thinking the work could be done differently or more efficiently, questioning priorities, etc. They don't have the executive view that is looking across the organization.
There are lots of instances that the leadership decisions are BS, and hamper growth or drive the company to the ground.
Interesting. In my experience, company leaders typically engineer discussions in order to validate what they already believe, and of course it can be a career-limiter to argue too forcefully with one's superior. I think it takes an executive with extraordinary vision to actually create a culture where dissension is encouraged and people with differing views truly engage and are fairly listened to.
I believe I've read somewhere that some high percentage of business leaders are classified as optimists, which probably creates a tendency to downplay the negatives of business situations. In an overall sense, this may be a good thing, as it leads people to attempt things that seem crazy to others, but it can obviously also lead to excessive risk-taking and sundry disasters.
A positive side-effect of this is that it would force leaders to articulate in their minds for themselves, exactly what it is they're trying to accomplish. I've seen the described phenomenon a lot and it has been very demoralizing, but I think the root cause is that a lot of leaders seem to be unaware of what their company is trying to be and do.
Leadership, yes, I agree. It doesn’t make any sense for say, the CEO of Geico to act this way. But for someone that is trying to bring to life a nearly impossible vision, I think there is a time and a place for this. Tough love.
Humans are tragically limited in some literal and obvious ways. For example, most information comes in through 2 very local light senors and a pair of ears, and is then processed by a gooey grey lump that is very, very biased towards the present.
Compare that to the problems that require leadership, which often span large areas of both time and space. Obviously, no human is up to the challenge of comprehending the actual challenge.
A leader who actually believes they understand what is happening is delusional. Not necessarily in a bad way, they just aren't engaging with the reality of the situation. They will hopefully still get buoyed up by their other skills and the work of the people around them, and with a little luck and skill might have a grasp on a couple of the key drivers of a given situation. The true state of things isn't going to stop leaders pretending they have an answer to everything, because leaders are chosen by the people and people prefer to be told that the situation is easy and under control than the messy reality that requires caution, risk management and contingency planning.
I've yet to see the public admit en-mass that they are bad at picking leaders, but they clearly have no idea how to. If we had a better system for choosing political leaders we'd certainly see it used.
> Leadership communicating to workers never seems to work out well
Well the first problem is management calling themselves "leadership." Then there's communicating "to" instead of "with" a separate group of "workers." Someone who tries to convince me to do all the work is not a "leader."
That scenario seems more like a setting for a fable than a healthy work environment.
Why do people insist on not facing Reality? Management/Leadership IS about Power/Conflict/Negotiation/Human Behaviour/Goals.
It is the process which is used to achieve these objectives i.e. whether by Diktat (conventional organizational management) or by Cooperation/Empathy (not easy at all) that varies.
People not being on the same page is a massive problem. It especially constrains the leader herself, because she can't make any strong, clear decisions without second-guessing whether she has the authority to do so.
I get the idea, my problem is that in actuality, the leader is not serving the team. He is leading it and when a hard decision has to be made, the leader is taking it whether the team likes it or not. This isn’t the position of a servant. It’s a fake masking of the real power dynamics at play.
I get the same vibe from “flat” management structures. People can claim that there is no superiority in the org chart and that everyone is equal, but in reality it never works this way.
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.
yes being a decisionmaker in charger of a large organisation must be hard because you are given responsibility for its failings, and you aren't directly in control - you are in that you can make rules and whatnot, but rules are really just guidelines and fall apart when they make contact with reality.
But we all know this is true, but we still act the same way and then get mad when the leader fails to perform magic. It's 21st century scapegoating.
Sadly we do actually have tools for fixing big problems but we seem to prefer scapegoating to actually doing anything.
It is not what those leaders perceive their actions to be, it is what their actions actually are. They are acting to reduce the capacity of people with some viewpoint from being able to communicate that viewpoint.
It is not faulty. It is you who is applying a generalization in your claim.
Completely agree. They don't flub around trying to figure out and contextualize issues. They're able to both categorize the issue and the disagreement and present in ways that everybody can consume.*
We're not all so lucky, though. Many times I've had to tell teams "This is going to sound right. Please forgive me because I'm concerned about X". You can't replace that kind of give-and-take with wordsmithing.
The second skill I've noticed is to be a storytelling master. Great leaders tell engaging stories that emotionally draw you into their way of seeing things.
*A problem occurs when the leader thinks they know what's going on but they are mistaken. In this case better leadership skills can actually lead to poorer overall results. I've seen good people with mission-critical ideas get "facilitated" out of them by well-meaning, nice, and intelligent people who don't know what the hell they're talking about and are unable to accept that fact. Obligatory link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg
"This makes me wonder whether a good way to make needed change as a leader when there is no obvious crisis is to artificially create one so that people get on board…"
Yes.
You cannot fix people who don't admit that they are broken.
As someone who has been called into broken projects often, I've had this conversation often. If you "help" a project that is floundering, it will just continue floundering, wasting money and time. You have to wait until it's completely broken and an admitted crisis, and you can ask, "Would you like me to take it over?" and not have interference.
I've never had to artificially create a problem, though. That sounds like agent provocateur stuff.
I don’t think the story takes a position on who is right at what level (and, in fact, it sounds like the story teller herself concedes that leadership should be digging into why their teams are saying “red light” when it’s a green light).
I think the story should be ingested as “we don’t know why someone else can’t obviously see what we see; that problem itself warrants investigations perhaps before any conversation about what to do next.”
As it turns out, our company is currently having this problem: the market and employees of my company are screaming at the leadership to not follow through on a business plan, but leadership has their head buried in the sand and are bound and determined to move ahead because all they see is green lights.
And sure, there’s enough anecdotes out there about people zagging when everyone else zigs, but I think an unspoken prerequisite to those anecdotes is that you at least made sure you understood why they were zigging.
Hard to answer this without more context as it really depends on the personalities and viewpoints of those you're dealing with. I could see a world where it could work with very technical leadership that had high trust in you, but my gut instinct is it doesn't come off well.
Is the problem you're trying to solve that leadership doesn't feel you're responsive enough? Or is the problem that the team is being pulled in too many directions to maintain focus and momentum?
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.
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