Leadership: A Tale of Two Faces
A commonly asked question for leaders in the corporate world is, “What is wrong with this picture -’our’ picture?” And at the same time, employees in these organizations wonder why their superiors say one thing but do another, and why these same individuals seem to get worse as they move up the ranks. Each time I hear it, I’m reminded of a tale.
It was a few years ago when Wendy worked for a famous fashion designer in sales. It was only her third job, and already she was wondering what was wrong with people at work.
She’d seen plenty of dysfunctional people in her first two jobs, but nothing could compare to her boss at the fashion company, who was pretty, but in a scary way - kind of like Elvira. Wendy had been befuddled by various Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde routines before, but this boss made the Tasmanian devil look like a tame soul. She was cunning, witty and mean. Wendy in the meantime was confused. The fact that her boss didn’t realize that she siphoned the life from the people who reported to her was beyond Wendy’s grasp.
Wendy and her coworkers were mystified that no one seemed to notice or care that a crazy woman worked for the same company they did. So when the CEO shipped them off to a commune in the Catskills for a sales meeting, they thought wishfully that someone had caught on.
It was late one Sunday evening, when they boarded the kind of dark chartered bus that childhood field trips are made of.
The following morning, two consultants stood before a room filled with Wendy and her coworkers. On either side of a flip chart stood an upbeat school teacher with a strawberry blonde bun secured at the nape of her neck, and an overly tanned, hairy-chested ex-psychiatrist sporting a loud button-down that really should have been buttoned up.
Wendy thought the consultants were great. They spent two days doing creativity exercises, brain tracing (a spin-off on Freud’s free association), team building and problem solving. They had ropes and mazes and bricks. Sometimes they were even blindfolded and tied to one another. (It’s not what you think.)
Everyone seemed equally as affected and responded with the same enthusiasm Wendy did. Even her barbarian boss seemed transformed.
Wendy headed home looking forward to better days. She expected some sane and civilized behavior back on the job not only from her boss, but from the other superiors around her as well. But instead of getting better, things got worse. It took only about a week for her boss to turn inside out again in a fit of rage.
Wendy wondered, “What could have gone so wrong? What had been the point to take us from our jobs and spend all that money? Was it not to make us a better team, more productive and profitable as a company?”
When Wendy’s boss asked her to write a report while her father was in intensive care and she was on vacation, and warned her that neither of those would be acceptable reasons to say, “No can do,” Wendy quit. Remarkably, her boss insisted that she was not administering a multiple choice quiz and that quitting was not an option either.
Despite the fact that the outing could have been considered a success while on-site, after seeing the actual results Wendy felt that it had been a total waste of her time as well as the company’s.
What she did come to learn though was that her boss’s tyranny was slightly more complicated than a mere matter of being nutso. She also realized that the organization itself enabled the situation by supporting the behavior.
The moral of the story? Accepting a paycheck is not synonymous with a license to bully people, and a title should not permit someone to exhibit a total lack of alignment between his or her words and actions.
Donna Flagg is the Principal of The Krysalis Group, a consulting firm specializing in employee development programs that include management initiatives and branding corporate cultures. Donna’s specialty is aligning organizational goals with business results by devising and implementing people strategies.
