Although he may not realize it, web developer Tim Knight speaks for the vast majority of the global workforce in a post entitled Stop Leading Your Team to The Destination, Give Them The Map.

He eloquently explains why leaders who proclaim their visions and then hoard the details have far less chance of success as opposed to those that are introduced, explained, clarified and then embedded in the corporate culture.

Today’s workforce is damn smart and leadagers forget that at their own peril.

One caveat. “Profit” isn’t a valid vision, especially when building it into a culture creates an overarching need to achieve it that transcends sensible, moral, ethical and even legal bounds as so recently happened.

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A newspaper article 30 years ago talked about the initiation rites of girls who joined gangs. Previously, girls hadn’t been active members of gangs and I remember thinking then that equality was happening in the wrong places.

There was a time when attitudes and actions moved from older to younger.

But it seems that more and more, instead of children learning from their grandparents, the grandparents are adopting the attitudes of the kids and, as with girls in gangs, it’s not the good ones that are moving—it’s the worst.

Entitlement. Instant gratification.

There are thousands who knowingly bought homes they couldn’t afford (as opposed to buying out of financial ignorance and/or mortgage chicanery) because they wanted it now, not in three to five years when they could actually afford it.

When I was young I thought the same way, but there were all kinds of adults who, by example, showed me that that wasn’t the way the world worked.

Now, with these attitudes spread throughout the generations, where are the everyday examples that show a different way? Worse, the examples that are out there are often ridiculed as being out of step with the current world.

I know that some of you reading my Thursday posts wonder what they have to do with leadership, managing and business.

The answer is simple; these are the people who work for and with you; they are the people you hire now and the people you’ll be hiring for decades.

Can you build a successful business or non-profit of any size on attitudes of entitlement and instant gratification?

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Egoship. I doubt that I coined the term, but I did think of it independently. It’s been popping into my head for a number of years now as I read stories of astronomical pay packages for business leaders.

It didn’t take a business guru to start noticing that along with those salaries seemed to come an ermine cloak, although some were sable and others only mink, and the egos that went with them.

And considering what’s happening, things aren’t changing as much as you’d think—or like.

“Six top money managers of Harvard University’s endowment, which has lost $8.1 billion since the summer, earned $26.9 million in compensation in its most recent fiscal year.”

“Banks that are getting taxpayer bailouts awarded their top executives nearly $1.6 billion in salaries, bonuses, and other benefits last year, an Associated Press analysis reveals.”

“Six financial firms that received billions in bailout dollars still own and operate fleets of jets to carry executives to company events and sometimes personal trips, according to an Associated Press review.”

“The highest-ranking executives four firms have agreed under pressure to go without their bonuses, including John A. Thain, who initially wanted a bonus this year since he joined Merrill Lynch as chief executive after its ill-fated mortgage bets were made. And four former executives at one hard-hit bank, UBS of Switzerland, recently volunteered to return some of the bonuses they were paid before the financial crisis. But few think others on Wall Street will follow that lead.”

Of course not. Wall Street egoships aren’t going to give back anything, they had to be forced to forgo what they did. Why should they take a hit for the trouble they caused? It would be almost un-American.

And as Michelle Singletary said today, “Who in their right mind thinks a chief executive earning a $1 a year is actually making a sacrifice?”

Of course, Wall Street sticking to its ways as much as possible should have been expected. The great thing about egoship is that it knows it can do no wrong, so it never needs to apologize or take responsibility.

And if the reformers show up at its door egoship knows exactly what to do:

• Say all the right things;
• make impressive, empty gestures;
• be patient until they forget and go away; and then
• return to business as usual.

Are we going to forget this time? You tell me.

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In a post last spring, I listed Warren Bennis’ leadership skills and in 7 follow-up posts discussed why today’s managers find it hard to do their job without these skills.

But, in fact, everybody needs them in today’s world; they’re the skills that help you live a better life, raise kids and make a better world—no matter who you are or what you do.

Many of my posts touch on the same facts, but we’ll zero in on more how-to information in this series.

Bennis says that “leaders are originals, whereas managers are copies,” but what does that mean to an individual?

Foremost, it means that you think for yourself, instead of buying into an ideology, religion or what parents, friends, colleagues or the commuter who sits next to you every day say.

That doesn’t mean that you always do things differently or ignore everything you hear, but it does mean that you reserve your right to question, modify and partly or totally reject whatever it is.

This isn’t always obvious. Most adults honestly believe that they are originals, but they forget that their MAP (mindset, attitude, philosophy™) has been shaped since childhood by all those outside forces.

This is even truer of business and political leaders who are rarely original; rather they conform to a general pattern laid down by pundits, benchmarks, and expectations.

As an individual, your MAP is still your own. You can reject all or part of the external forces and, as it used to be said, ‘do your own thing’.

Being an original means that you choose what is best and what to do in each given situation; it means taking in all the wisdom, mundane advice and foolishness and synthesize them into the best decision that you’re capable of making.

As you’ve probably figured out, being an original isn’t the easy way to go. It’s far more comfortable to be a copy; to follow without question the ideology, religion, parents, friends—anyone or anything that takes away the fear of making the wrong choice.

I’ve always been an original, much to my family’s consternation when I was growing up, and to many of the bosses I’ve had since; I even adopted Frank Sinatra’s My Way as my personal theme.

I don’t really remember feeling scared as I careened through my early life doing what I thought was right, but I do know that I learned what my thought process was called when I was in my early twenties. From then on I did it consciously and it’s never let me down.

It’s that process that I want to share with you, because it works.

It’s called “worst case analysis.”

What you do is look at what you’re planning and think about the absolute worst thing that could happen if you do it. Then think through whether and how you would deal with that result. If you can handle it, then you go forward; if it’s too much you go back to the planning board. Works every time.

Do this, and at the end of your life you, too, will be able to say,

For what is a man, what has he got?
If not himself, then he has naught.
To say the things he truly feels;
And not the words of one who kneels.
The record shows I took the blows –
And did it my way!

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In celebration of their Centennial this year Harvard Business School added a discussion section to their website.  The current discussion is Leadership in the 21st Century.

“The Conversation is question- or topic-based dialogue between two conversation leads and our Centennial- site visitors.”

One of the current topic leaders is Nitin Nohria, who says, “Leaders (in business and government) have lost the public trust. … What has caused this loss in trust and how can it be best restored?”

The discussion engendered is intelligent, interesting, and well worth reading.

I find, looking at just the first part of the question, why did I lose trust, that my response is relatively simple.

When I see ego as the trump card, influencing and overshadowing all other considerations, then I no longer trust that person to make valid decisions.

This applies whether

• the person is my neighbor, who only thinks about what works for her;
• the President, who turned a blind eye to anything that didn’t agree with his preconceived ideas;
• the corporate heads, who focused on improving their compensation with no consideration for the fallout; or
• Wall Street, which has deified short-term actions that raise stock prices while gutting the long-term viability of companies.

What actions make you lose trust?

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On a post over at Managing Leadership, Wally Bock left a great comment that’s germane to my recent posts and to the notion that the idea of ‘leadership’ has been corrupted by the leadership business and the media.

“…people prefer magical thinking to accountability.”

They sure do. That magical thinking is just great for all those who don’t want the responsibility of making their own decisions. It’s wonderful to have a ‘leader’ tell you what to think and how to act. That way, when things get screwed up, it isn’t your fault; it’s the leader’s fault. You get to say, ‘S/he told me to…’ and poof—instant absolution with no strings attached.

“There’s a joke about a professor who says that a certain idea is “fine in practice but may not work in theory. We didn’t have a problem identifying who was the leader before we had leadership theory. Nobody worried about whether that Caesar fellow was a true or real or authentic leader. They just followed him.”

Caesar didn’t worry about it, either. He just did [whatever] and assumed that everyone would follow along. And follow they did, at least until he decided to make his leadership official. At that point their response was direct and very final.

We followers need to do something similar to the leadership movement; not necessarily as final, because it does have its uses.

We need to reform its thinking; recognize that leadership skills are for everyone—not just a select few—and stop it from appointing/anointing those selective few as ‘leaders’.

So, new mantra—everybody is a leader; lead yourself first and don’t worry abut the rest.

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I’ve come to the conclusion that the road to hell isn’t paved with good intentions; it’s paved with ”leaders with intentions”—good, bad or indifferent.

I figured this out based on media coverage of leaders. After all, have you ever seen a media treatment of a follower?

Media co-opted ‘leader’ and ‘leadership’ decades ago and increasingly diluted the meaning until it disappeared.

Along with dilution, the media gave those they termed leaders the same treatment that was previously reserved for extraordinary athletes, celebrities and rock stars.

In doing so they created the monstrous, indestructible, uncontrollable ego found in every leader who bought into their hype; and reflected in compensation packages more fit for royalty than for business people.

And in case you haven’t noticed, you can find many of those massive egos in (surprise, surprise) investment banking, hedge funds, insurance and other sectors of financial services. But you knew that.

In fact, ego-mania has percolated throughout all industries, with little consideration for the size of the organization or its mission.

Further, in throwing the leader term around so loosely the media helped enlarge politicians’ already super-sized egos still more and extended the ego franchise to religious heads.

Not only are those egos super-sized, they also seem to be bulletproof.

How many of these ‘leaders’ have actually taken responsibility for what they’ve caused?

Have you seen them apologizing for their share of bringing down the global economy? Did I miss it? Boy, I hope you Tivoed it for posterity.

But the media’s gone pretty silent on the subject; lauding corporate heads seems to have gone the way of the dodo bird. But dodos aren’t the only extinct bird, the phoenix is, too. And like the phoenix, media leadership hype will rise again just as soon as we all forget—which, unfortunately, we will and that’s a historically proven fact.

By the way, I’m not the only one; Jim Stroup noticed the silence, too, only from a different perspective.

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By CandidProf, who teaches physics and astronomy at a state university. He shares his thoughts and experiences teaching today’s students anonymously every Thursday—anonymously because that’s the only way he can be truly candid. Read all of CandidProf here.

Today’s generation of college students grew up with things handed to them.  Granted, that is not true for all of them, but it seems to be true for the bulk of my students.

Parents don’t want things to be as tough on their kids as growing up was for themselves.  Schools don’t want parents complaining.  So, the kids get everything just handed to them.

If they don’t work hard, then that’s OK.  They’ll still pass classes.

Do bad grades make them feel bad?  Well, then the solution is to simply do away with bad grades. A local school district several years ago did away with the grade of D because it had negative connotations.  So, now the lowest grade that a student can get is a C.  Other school districts quickly followed suit, since they looked bad for having lower grade point averages.

The Dallas School District even went so far as to revamp its grading policies to make it practically impossible for students to fail or to get low grades.

So, it is no wonder that students come to college without any work ethic.

Last week, we had a speaker come to campus who works as an engineer designing the Orion Crew Exploration Vehicle, the spacecraft that is going to replace the Space Shuttle.  She was amazing.  She was energetic, enthusiastic, and was very excited to be working with real spacecraft.

She gave a presentation where she emphasized how important learning is to succeeding.  She pointed out that all those classes that you think that you will never use have a tendency to teach you things that eventually turn out to be useful.  She is quite young, only a few years older than most of my students.

She has two bachelors degrees, and she is working on two masters degrees.  She is working full time and going to school nearly full time.  She is excited about what she does. She absolutely loves the space program and finds working with NASA to be a dream job.  It is FUN for her.  As she sees it, she is getting paid to have fun. So, she doesn’t mind working extra hours, taking on extra tasks, and working weekends, evenings, holidays, etc., if needed.

I was hoping that her enthusiasm would rub off.  So, this week, I asked my students what they thought of her talk.

One student said that she sounds really boring. Huh?  Boring?  She gets to work with spacecraft.  She gets paid to do things that she finds exciting and fun.  She gets to watch Space Shuttles launch.  She gets to use the simulators that the astronauts use.  She travels all over the country for her job.  She’s boring?

Another student said that she didn’t seem to understand that some classes are hard. Huh?  She has degrees in aeronautical engineering and astronautics.  She is working on degrees in spacecraft systems and human physiology (she is interested in how the human body works in space).  Hey, those are not easy subjects.  She has taken classes far more difficult than anything that my students have ever taken.

Another person said that she can’t understand how anyone could stay in school for so long, commenting that the speaker would probably have six degrees by the time that she is thirty.  So?  What’s wrong with that?

You get ahead by hard work. Many of my students come from fairly affluent upper middle class families, and they have had life just handed to them.

The speaker came from a family where her parents had to work hard and she didn’t have things just handed to her.  She learned to work for things.  That is why she is where she is.  Not everyone is going to get a job working with spacecraft.  She is, indeed, quite young.  But she has a very important job, with lots of responsibility, because of her hard work.

Someone like my students would not get her job.

I told my students that they don’t really have to work as hard as the speaker.  After all, we need people to be assistant managers at fast food restaurants.  They will rise to the appropriate level.

If they work hard, they will become leaders.  If they refuse to work hard, they will be followers all of their lives. I don’t think that they were very happy with me or what I told them, but that’s OK.

If only one of them listens and decides to work hard to get ahead, then I’ve done my job.

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Image credit: NASA

As most frequent readers know, I have a passionate DISbelief in the cult of individual leadership and don’t see leadership as positional.

I’ve said over and over that it’s when people take initiative, no matter their position, that they are proclaimed leaders after the fact by those around them.

I think that the cult of individual leadership encourages people to abdicate their responsibilities, ethics and actions to the positional leader even when that ‘leader’ reports to them (think CEO, Board and Lehman).

But leadership is also an industry, a way that thousands of people, directly and indirectly, earn the money to feed their families and pay their mortgages.

These aren’t scam artists, but sincere, intelligent, educated people who truly believe that by choosing certain people and teaching them ‘leadership skills’ they can create a kind of super person with clearer vision and an innate sense that assures they will stick to a high moral code and always do the right thing.

But people don’t work that way.

Peter Drucker got it right when he said “Leadership is all hype. We’ve had three great leaders in this century – Hitler, Stalin, and Mao.”

‘Leader’ and ‘leadership’ lost their meaning when the media latched on and started using them as shorthand for what the guy at the front (leader) thinks should be done to move forward (leadership).

None of this is to say that the skills taught by the industry are worthless—they’re anything but.

The reality is that they should be taught to everyone.

The result would be various levels of incremental improvement that benefited both individuals and the organization and fewer god complexes in the corner office.

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Two questions

Why, when people don’t want war, do they go along; what secret ingredients do their ‘leaders’ use to convert them from nay-sayers to supporters?

More and more, people all over the world are being lied to by their ‘leaders’; why do people follow?

Two answers

“Naturally the common people don’t want war; neither in Russia, nor in England, nor in America, nor in Germany. That is understood. But after all, it is the leaders of the country who determine policy, and it is always a simple matter to drag the people along, whether it is a democracy, or a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is to tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism and exposing the country to danger. It works the same in any country.” –Hermann Goering

“If you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it. The lie can be maintained only for such time as the State can shield the people from the political, economic and/or military consequences of the lie. It thus becomes vitally important for the State to use all of its powers to repress dissent, for the truth is the mortal enemy of the lie, and thus by extension, the truth is the greatest enemy of the State.” –Joseph Goebbels

A half a century and we (the human race) still seem to be in the same place.

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