Just reconnected this week with a former client - a seasoned CFO who had been around the financial world as AIG was falling apart and Wall St. was in meltdown. I was curious to get his impressions of the role in leadership in all that mess – was it a failure in leadership? And, if so, what could we be doing as leadership development professionals to better equip leaders to avoid such pitfalls?
"Absolutely a failure of leadership!” my colleague declared. “It was a case of senior leaders hearing what they wanted to hear,” (e.g., a chance for big revenues) “and not hearing what they didn’t want to hear” (e.g., the weakness of their risk models, the lack of external reviews, the warnings from internal reviews). Classic Driver-style leadership, I observed, which runs the risk of single-point focus, impatience, arrogance and, above all, not listening. If this style dominates for long in a company, it gets reinforced structurally, where only a small subset of “loyalists” get access to the top, and only a trickle of important information gets through. And yet, it’s something of a paradox, in that the non-wishy-washy clarity and determination of the Driver are often exactly what select these alpha leaders for the top jobs. Leadership guru, Marshall Goldsmith advises leaders who would move to the top: "what got you here won't get you there." The corollary I took from this conversation as it applies to the insulated Uber-Drivers at the top is: "what got you here won't keep you here." These leaders are setting themselves and their companies up for failure.
So what can those of us in leadership development do to help? Well, it's a bit of a catch-22, in that the leaders who are most at risk are those who are most arrogant, insulated, and unaware – unlikely to be the learning-oriented leader who soaks up a leadership program or seeks an executive coach. Of the companies and leaders we can reach, it seems to me we could help by showing the consequences of structural insulation and not listening in, say, a simulation where they demolish their simulated company and then have a chance to try again with greater openness. It seems another tack would be to cultivate more adept influencers with the ability to put their message in a way that even Driver bosses see the “win” in hearing. The energy patterns can help in programs and coaching by highlighting the problem and a way to move out of it – both individually and in a corporate culture – by cultivating the listening skills of the Organizer, the influencing capacity of the Collaborator, and the openness of the Visionary. We know that Drive(r) without recovery and balance in the other patterns leads to burnout for the individual leader. Judging from the observations of this savvy insider, it’s also behind a great deal of corporate meltdown.
