(Today continues a conversation initiated last Thursday and added to yesterday.)

Everybody lies about sex. Those who aren’t getting any say they are and those who are getting it where they shouldn’t deny it.

Governor Mark Sanford followed the same path of Newt Gingrich, Bob Livingston, Rudy Giuliani, John Ensign, David Vitter, Larry Craig, Mark Foley, Helen Chenoweth (the first woman) and many more.

But you know what?

I don’t care. At least, not about the sex—or even the lies. Even the lies under oath, because I don’t believe that an oath is going to change someone’s attitude about admitting something they don’t want to admit, it just adds another layer to the lie.

As Becky Robinson pointed out in her comment I could have just as easily used the Evangelical community—Jimmy Swaggart, Marvin Gorman, Jim Bakker, Lonnie Latham, Earl Paulk, Paul Crouch, Douglas Goodman, Frank Houston, etc., etc., etc. and, of course, the Catholic Church.

Dan Erwin made two very salient points.

In his first comment he said, “If you reframe the context from leader to bureaucrat, then the ethical expectations change.”

Amen, Dan. To assume that an elected official or any person-out-front automatically possesses all the sterling qualities of a “leader” as defined by the media, pundits and leadership industry has no basis in fact.

The second point that hit me was, “The notion of “standards” etc. is often a set-up for failure.”

This is getting closer to what angers me so much.

Not the sex, not the lies, but the standards.

Standards that they defined, preached and worked so hard to shove down everyone’s throat—standards that not one of them has even come close to practicing.

Mark Sanford voted for President Bill Clinton’s impeachment citing a need for “moral legitimacy” as his reason. Now he cites the Bible and the story of David and Bathsheba as his reason for not resigning.

As to the apologies, are they for the action or for getting caught? Americans are so focused on the sex and accept the apologies so readily that the hypocrisy becomes mere background noise.

It’s the Richard Nixon mentality all over again. As Nixon said in 1977, “When the president does it, that means it is not illegal,”

The reigning slogan these days for too many “leaders” seems to be “do as I say, not as I do,” which both angers and confuses their followers.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Dan also said, “No question but what they’re hypocrites…of the worst kind. They made claims they didn’t follow through on. However, the issue parents (and grandparents, too) have to deal with is the education of your children.”

We’ll explore Dan’s thoughts and personal example of this in the next Leadership’s Future on Thursday. Please join us.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: Poldavo (Alex) on flickr

Thursday I wrote about today’s excessive hypocrisy using, among other examples, Senator John Ensign.

Like most bloggers, I post ahead, so that I wasn’t able to include South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford.

Today I want to offer up some quotes from him and tomorrow I’m going to address the subjects brought up by Dan Erwin and Becky Robinson in the comments on Thursday’s post.

“The bottom line, though, is I am sure there will be a lot of legalistic explanations pointing out that the president lied under oath. His [Livingston] situation was not under oath. The bottom line, though, is he still lied. He lied under a different oath, and that is the oath to his wife. So it’s got to be taken very, very seriously.”

“I think it would be much better for the country and for him [Livingston] personally (to resign). I come from the business side. If you had a chairman or president in the business world facing these allegations, he’d be gone.”

“What I find interesting is the story of David, and the way in which he fell mightily—fell in very, very significant ways, but then picked up the pieces and built from there.” (King David, who slept with Bathsheba, another man’s wife, had the husband killed, married the widow, but continued to ‘lead’.)

“Too many people in government seem to think they are above regular folks, and I said I would expect humility in the way each member of my team served—that they would recognize that the taxpayer is boss.”

“We as a party want to hold ourselves to high standards, period,”

I hope you’ll come back tomorrow as this conversation continues.

Your comments—priceless

Don’t miss a post, subscribe via RSS or EMAIL

Image credit: moonstarsilverwolf on flickr

Dan Erwin has a great guest post about delegation over at Slacker Manager. I strongly urge you to take a moment and click over, read it, print out his Three Keys to Effective Delegating and use them.

Dan accurately touched on one kind of control issue in his post, but my reference is in terms of politics,  MAP and abuse.

Political power stems from control.

The only two things worth controlling are money (obvious) or information (not so obvious).

Managers frequently control both, whereas non-managers are limited to information.

It’s pretty obvious how controlling of money gives someone power, but what about information? These stories are true—

The new engineering VP didn’t like a top performing manager. He cut the manager’s budget, but didn’t reduce his objectives. The manager was forced to lay-off, couldn’t meet his objectives and was fired for poor performance at his next review.

The damage from controlling information is more insidious and in some ways worse. It’s the ultimate micromanagement and destroys people a little at a time by undermining and tearing them down.

A VP of Marketing forced his marcom manager to come to him each time she needed competitive or marketing information, but worse, he berated her constantly for being over budget—but wouldn’t tell her what the budget was. He also complained to the rest of the senior staff about her “neediness” and how she couldn’t manage her budget to the point that they all lost confidence in her. She finally resigned, but not before a lot of damage had been done.

Although it’s more common for managers to use to on their people, I’ve seen non-managerial people wield it against their colleagues, often with devastating effect.

X has information that Y, or even the whole team, needs to do their share of a project. Y asks for the info, but rather than giving it all X gives as little as possible forcing Y to return over and over. Often when responding X uses the opportunity to make subtle comments about Y’s ability, undermining his confidence; X might even start rumors about Y’s competency to do the work.

Over the years I’ve used these and other examples with managers guilty of their own version of information control; some were horrified and worked hard to change their own action—and usually succeeded, but others saw nothing wrong.

It didn’t happen often, but it happened enough that it made me realize information control isn’t always an overt political move or even subconscious insecurities coming to the fore.

Sometimes information control is based in a malicious attitude that permeates the person’s MAP.

MAP can change, but the individual has to desire it and they don’t.

The fact that they spread pain and destruction every place they work doesn’t preclude them from promotions and if they find a position in a dysfunctional culture they thrive.

I call them destroyers.

Image credit: flickr