Leadership Stupidity
by Miki Saxon
Leadership has become a catchword, a panacea, a supposed solution to whatever ails us as a nation and a world. It is what people get degrees in, strive to be and worry that they are failures if they aren’t recognizes as leaders.
There is a fantasy that positive leadership is an integral trait of positional leaders no matter how many times that has proved to be a false assumption.
Another assumption about positional leaders is their ability to see the big picture; also proven to be untrue. Here are two excellent examples of narrow, short-term thinking—one stupidity that just happened in a small biz and the other from a corporate titan 56 years ago.
The former is another stupidity from Subway, the company best know for $5 foot longs and a bullet-ridden foot. The most recent foot shot happened in Dartmouth, NS when a worker was fired for giving her own lunch to two fellow apartment dwellers after a fire left them homeless (she also offered them lodging in her own apartment which wasn’t damaged in the fire); Quiznos, being more publicity-wise, hired her.
The older stupidity was perpetrated by the original Bell Labs, one of the most prolific research organizations that ever existed, and is a story that has been repeated in one way or another by companies large and small ever since.
Executives recognized that many of those moving up the management ladder lacked the broad thinking skills that would enable them to function as leaders in the future, so they set out to provide an intense program to remedy the situation. The remedy succeeded beyond their expectations in that the attendees learned to thing for themselves and those thoughts didn’t dovetail with the slavish corporate mentality the executives desired the program was shut down, … executives came out of the program more confident and more intellectually engaged, they were also less interested in putting the company’s bottom line ahead of their commitments to their families and communities. (I hope you take a moment to read this fascinating story.)
It should be noted that authoritarian leaders, whether of companies or countries, have always known that education and strong positive values are anathema to their continued power.
How do you define leadership?
Join me tomorrow for a look at this question.
Image credit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/hikingartist/4192572927/
