what he is good at and where he relies on his team's strengths to round out the capabilities at the top. He recognizes that all executives, like all humans, have an ego. And that the positive accolades that come with career progression are fuel for the ego. He is quick to recognize that effective leaders need to check their ego at the door and be comfortable admitting when they don't know something and delegating to the experts on their team. His perspective is that the role of the leader is to help with resource allocation, answer the questions of what we are going to do, why are we going to do it, and how can we do it. He has seen too many leaders who are afraid to admit their weaknesses. Paradoxically, it's the leaders who admit and embrace their weaknesses and mistakes that create more followers than those who deny or cover them up.
There is a bell curve that highlights the relationship of the charismatic leader and the perils of having too much. We call it the charisma trap. There is a baseline level of charisma necessary for leaders to lead any organization, but correspondingly too much charisma may lead to negative results. In Figure 2.1, we look at leadership effectiveness and level of charisma.
FIGURE 2.1 Charismatic Leader Trap
The good news for the introverted leaders is that charisma can be taught. The bad news, when charisma goes too far, the leader may display a tendency toward narcissistic behavior. Unlike leadership development to flex and develop charisma, narcissism is difficult, if not impossible, to mute. There is a high correlation to overly charismatic personalities—those who thrive on self-aggrandizement- and narcissism. It is important to note that leaders bent on self-interest still emerge in business, though most lead to their own self-serving causes—such as Jeffrey Skilling from Enron or Dennis Kozlowski from Tyco, as well as some prominent political leaders. Although they certainly have followers, these individuals are fooled into supporting this narcissistic leader to serve the leader's self-seeking causes. For these highly charismatic celebrity CEOs, the risk is that they are pursuing their own gratification and pulling followers along for the ride. Once the leader develops a narcissistic reputation, there is little hope to regain trust in the organization. In the Trusted Advisor, Maister, Green, and Galford describe how self-orientation erodes trust.
True Amplifiers are essential when the leader lacks charisma and especially helpful when the leader displays tendencies of narcissism. Effective organizations need visionary motivation, but when the leader lacks this critical skill, true Amplifiers can effectively fill this gap. An effective leader would recognize this gap and proactively lean on a key follower to amplify the vision and strategy.
On the other extreme, when the leader is in the zone of potential narcissism, the Amplifier becomes even more critical. The narcissistic leader finds it difficult to separate their personal brand from the corporate brand. They believe that they are the reason for any successes the company may have. They invest in their personal brand and self-promotion at similar levels to the corporate brand. To offset this style, the true Amplifier can become a necessary sounding board to the organization to help build or enhance trust in leadership by redirecting feelings of resentment. Organizations need to understand that the leaders have their back, and the Amplifier can do this when the leader is unable.
Titled Executives and Bosses
Virtually all organizations have bosses and titled executives. In an ideal world, the people who fill those positions are also leaders. Employees carry out the wishes of these individuals either because of their position power or their influence. Most humans don't want to be told what to do. They want to be led or inspired to take the next right action. It's this basic human instinct that effective leaders need to understand.
Most companies have a formal organizational chart with predefined job titles and promotion criteria. They evaluate employees across a broad spectrum of competencies. However, many capitulate and promote employees because they have been in a particular position for such a long period, or they put pressure on their managers so that they will look elsewhere if they don't get the promotion. Publicly, companies deny they promote based on these real factors, but privately they admit that is what happens. We engage with some of the best and most respected firms, yet we see this practice in action far too frequently. The Peter principle is alive and well. There is a gap between the espoused courage to make disciplined promotion decisions and the capitulation to employee pressure. Each time a company compromises a promotion decision or a crucial performance management discussion, they erode a bit of competitive advantage or slightly increase the odds that their next transformation effort will fail. The compounding effect of these suboptimal decisions is astounding.
Titled executives or bosses lack some or most of the leadership traits necessary to be an effective leader. Therefore, they need different tools to get their subordinates to act. The primary tool they turn to is fear. Fear is an easy human emotion to tap into. Most people are afraid of not achieving something they don't have or losing something they do have. In the business context, this translates to fear of not being promoted to the next level, with the additional recognition and monetary rewards associated with the move. At the extreme, it can mean the fear of losing a job. Another tool these bosses use is a high degree of control, as they rule with an iron fist. These bosses are referred to as micromanagers. They feel the need to be involved in every decision, review every piece of work before it goes out, and other non-empowering and nonproductive behaviors that waste time and resources.
The fascinating reality of titled executives is that in a quiet moment by themselves, they often recognize their lack of leadership. They have a high ego with an inferiority complex. The style becomes one of lashing out to squash an uprising among dissenting voices and reassignment of star performers who might make them look bad. They surround themselves with “yes” people to reinforce their own ideas and positions. To be fair, many executives do not intentionally choose this path. But somehow, their ego and high need for power drive them into this operating style.
Tim Hassinger, introduced in chapter 1, spent three decades with increasing levels of responsibility and leadership within the same company, ultimately becoming the CEO of a major division. This led him to being recruited and accepting the CEO position of a publicly traded company. Joining a new company after such a long tenure at the previous employer provided new opportunities for learning and growth. He no longer knew the large numbers of employees who worked for him, nor had deep institutional knowledge of the culture and how change would need to occur. He knew he needed to learn these dynamics and learn quickly. Likewise, the organization itself needed to come to terms with the fact that a new outside CEO had been brought in to effect change and set a new direction for the company.
In this situation, Hassinger was immediately placed in a position where the answer to the question “are people following me because of my role or my influence?” was clear. For new leaders appointed from the outside, the initial set of followers are following because of position power. The challenge then becomes how to quickly gain influence throughout the organization and how to determine the composition of followers on staff. It's natural in a leadership transition that many alienated follower holdovers will leave. Many pragmatist followers will also leave with a leadership change at the top, especially one where stated change is necessary, which undermines the very safety that pragmatist followers require. The exemplary followers under the previous leadership likely have loyalty to each other, the organization, or the mission. However, these exemplary followers will quickly size up the new leader to determine whether or not they will follow them.
When new CEOs are appointed or promoted, one of the first activities they do is to replace key team members. Jim Collins emphasizes the necessity for great companies to have “the right people on the bus.”3
