Category: Proactive Leaders

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Trucking Along

Sometimes leadership lessons sneak up in unexpected locations. On Tuesday at 1am, that location was Highway 55 between Chicago and St Louis. In preparation for my future career as a nomadic carnival worker, I have decided to take the requisite post-undergraduate road trip out West. My buggy, a 2005 Chevy Cobalt, hobbles down expressways with the weight of four passengers, a spunky cat, two clown dolls, and fountains of energy drinks. On Tuesday, as my friends slumbered and the cat serenaded the car with rhythmic purrs from her nook or cranny, I began studying the lumbering giants sharing the road with me. As I coaxed my Chevy between trucks like a caffeinated ant dodging elephants, I contemplated the life of a truck driver.

Truck drivers, whether transporting water beds or Mexican jumping beans, must mobilize a hefty load toward a defined goal. By virtue of their independence and responsibility, they become highway leaders—executives in the mysterious asphalt jungle that links distance locations. Each driver is an Odysseus who struggles through a hero’s journey while conquering various obstacles along the way. While amateurs like me muddle past in clown cars, truckers maintain a consistent pace that allows them to complete their voyage. They recruit sympathetic coalition partners like dispatchers, service center clerks, meteorologists, and fellow drivers, to assist them as they drive their agenda forward. Through shrewd political capability, they establish their credibility and ensure that these partners will come to the rescue when something blocks their course. Finally, they check their egos at the toll booth; there’s no room in their cab for hefty hubris and vanity doesn’t increase gas mileage.

Truckers also share something intimate and often taboo to discuss with fellow leaders: loneliness. Talk radio and garage funk music offer poor company on a graveyard shift through rural Missouri. Like an executive left alone with a massive merger agenda, truck drivers must carry abundant loads of poise and patience. Leaders struggle with the solitude of decision-making and the pressures of authority while avoiding narcissistic obsession. Ultimately, when your agenda succeeds or fails, coalition partners disappear and you alone receive the accolades or blame. The leader’s journey is inevitably an isolating pursuit and aspiring executives must grapple with this reality. At least, when the going gets tough, you can commiserate with the Highway 55 truckers and wish you were travelling with a cat and clown dolls.

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BLG Leadership Insights Features Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders Social Media

Crusty Public Relations

I cringed when Rupert Murdoch was pied in the face in Britain’s Parliament at the peak of his News of the World scandal. As frosting projectiled toward the media tycoon’s face, jaws dropped in both offended horror and journalistic hunger for a rich news story. The gears of a media landscape Murdoch helped construct began turning against him as reporters baked the event into a delicious tabloid commentary on the mogul’s precipitous fall from grace.

I cringed because I saw a leader’s struggles compounded by the judgmental gaze of media. Leaders often incorporate media training into their management arsenal. Politically savvy executives understand that the internet generation affixes a steady lens on people in positions of power. You may try to establish a contained audience of coalition partners and interested parties, but you must realize your statements and actions reach an alarmingly diverse audience.

Everyone receives the same HR orientation that warns you to seize your internet identity and protect your external image. However, leaders invariably find this lesson conflicting with the impulse to promote accomplishments and campaign your agenda to the past. A leader is a public personality so how does one hide from flying pastries when fortunes go south?

There is no clever maxim that frees the proactive leader from the 24 hour news cycle. Human resources logic suggests that a leader adopts a cautious paranoia that shields them from an antagonistic external world. This caution may work for Willy Wonka but leaders from Richard Nixon to Julian Assange have discovered the perils of mobilizing a paranoid agenda.

The truly proactive leader co-opts the media into its coalition as an active participant in mobilizing an agenda. Like all coalition partners, the media is not always your ally. Journalists and public observers can range from active supporters to weak supporters to committed antagonists. While factions of the public may applaud your agenda, others may actively disparage your efforts. Don’t view the media as a monolithic organism but rather as a diffuse network of critical observers.

You will inevitably confront your pie-in-the-sky moment and there’s no guarantee you’ll be able to duck out of the frosty public spotlight. Just pack some napkins and a sense of humor and you’ll receive your just deserts.

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Creativity Features Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Pragmatic Fun

Some people say I have an unhealthy (but vigorous) obsession with antonyms. While my friends (and enemies, no doubt) whittle away their mornings (and evenings) scanning their Macs and PCs for videos of gullible cats and paranoid puppies, I skim and scrutinize online antonym lists. Many would consider my behavior the opposite of sane, but occasionally I stumble upon some colorful or inspiring pairing. Last night, I stumbled upon a unique coupling: pragmatic fun.

I’m perfectly aware that the average excitement explorer would likely spurn a pragmatist like a steakhouse rejects vegan patrons. Pragmatism and fun certainly share an oil-water complex and, as a unit, would be a strong candidate for oxymoron induction. Yet I reject both of these labels and believe that proactive, politically competent leaders forge an unlikely bond between these discordant words.

Conventional wisdom says that the pragmatist is gripped by a rationalism that spoils any reasonable attempt at fun. Amusement parks are rarely arenas of efficiency and streamlined direct deposit systems are not particularly exciting. The same logic would then follow that an aspiring leader should check their sense of humor at the door and submit to a career of pragmatic monotony; unfortunately there are ample case studies to illustrate this assumption. Few would accuse Mark Zuckerberg of being fun and Rod Blagojevich, in spite of Celebrity Apprentice, was not exactly rational. Yet conventional wisdom foolishly forgets that organizations are full of people and personalities.

A proactive leader understands that organizations don’t function like the alienated machines cast in Modern Times or The Matrix. To sustain a motivated and mobilized coalition you must engage your peers. Consider a skydiving president like George H.W. Bush or an eccentric mogul like Virgin CEO Richard Branson. Even pragmatic leaders like Bob Dole or Arianna Huffington find ways to create entertaining organization without resorting to transparent pageantry.

In your organization, you need to find a sincere way to reconcile competing pragmatic and fun impulses. Don’t resort to a canned Michael Scott style pep session but find ways to infuse pleasure into your workplace. Put down the human resource guide to humanity and actually talk to your peers. Every organization houses unique coalitions with unique interest. One organization’s pizza parties could be another’s Origami Club. The key is to be adaptable and engaged. It’s the first step toward marrying pragmatism and fun in your organization and divorcing yourself from the corporate drone stereotype.

I hope I’m right and pragmatic fun supports your leadership agenda. I’d certainly hate to be left.

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BLG Leadership Insights Leadership On the Edge Managerial Competence Political Competence Proactive Leaders Proactive Stories

Splitting Hairs: A Study in Failed Leadership

I sat, bewildered, sweat dripping from my brow, wondering why I had been called here. Since I began my work with this not-to-be named Real Estate company I had been the paragon of salesmanship.  I climbed to the top of the sales ladder after one week on the floor. I hit my quota of 150 plus outbound calls per day (there was no way my manager could know that at least half of these were instant hang-ups, right?)I had even purchased a brand new business wardrobe, complete with tie-clips and suspenders, an almost Herculean feat for someone who wears sweatpants to restaurants. I was, for all intents and purposes, an A student.

Why, then, was I called into a special meeting to review my performance? Was I getting promoted already? It had only been a month. I was good, but was I that good? I thought back to my training. A Vice President of the company, Les, had personally trained me and a few others on the ways of selling over the phone. He was a fossil of the coke-infused 80’s era; a copy of a copy of Gordon Gecko.  He was short and muscular, with loud and proud silver hair, slicked back with what appeared to be cement. Les was filled to the brim with stories and catch phrases, but light on substance and leadership.   His name was Les. That can’t be a real name. My most vivid memory of our training together was him recounting his time in the Special Forces as an analogy for closing sales.

“I was in a bar in Bangkok. This son of a bitch was starting with me so I beat his face to a bloody pulp then went back to the bar. Out of nowhere I feel a whack on the side of my skull. It was the son of a bitch. I hadn’t closed the sale. He was still breathing” Now go sell Real Estate!

Terrifying relics from Bright Lights Big City notwithstanding, I had done my time in training and proved to be a promising member of the team. So I couldn’t imagine…

Pet, our twenty-seven year old Vice President of Sales, busted into the room like the Kool Aid Man, full of bluster, frat-boy machismo, and spikey hair. Pete’s idea of motivation was to blast Top 40 Hip-Hop drivel throughout the sales floor and take away our chairs.

“No one sits until we book 5 FSBOs”–For Sale By Owner, the meat and potatoes of our business. Our main charge was to harass people who had listed their own homes on the internet into listing with us.  The Call Center employees set up the appointment for the Listing Agent, who would close the deal.  Being the former, my sole purpose was to set appointments. This was most easily done by lying to the FSBO and leading he or she to believe that we were prospective buyers rather than agents.   How standing up helped to speed this process is, as of yet, still hidden in the Foxtons manual. I believe the chapter is seated between “Why you need to wear a suit to a job at which you will literally never see a client in person” and “The benefits of cold calling customers on Sunday morning”.

Where was I? Pete, right. Pete bounded into the room like a six year old.

Pete said, “Jay, Jay, Jay, my MAN. How are you doing? You are the MAN. THE MAN.”

Jay heard: “Jay, Jay, Jay, please, call a doctor, I’ve had 17 red bulls and it’s 11 a.m.”

Pete continued, “Jay you are doing so awesome man. You have a real future at this company”

Jay heard, “You are going to be stuck in this awful job for the rest of your life”

Pete went on, without interruption, “Jay, your sales numbers are through the roof. You are great on the phone, and you show a real spark. You’re just the kind of employee I like to have working for me. But, there is one thing…”

Oh no. What could the one thing be? Are my clients not properly “hearing my suit over the phone?” (direct quote).

“Jay…I don’t know how to say this…but it’s your goatee. There are a few stray hairs and it needs to look more clean. I have some razors for you.”  My mouth agape, I took the razors, went to the bathroom, and did it. Because it was my job. Because my boss told me to. Because my leaders, like Wesley Snipes in White Men Can’t Jump, were more concerned with looking good than they were with winning.

Three months later, I left the company due to “personal reasons” that included receiving a Workers’ Compensation settlement that allowed me to be unemployed for a year. Six months later, the company closed its American doors, leaving me to wonder to no one in particular: If Pete and Les had been less preoccupied with hair gel and gentrified hip-hop music, and more concerned with running an honest business by cultivating their employee’s skill sets, would I still be wearing a suit for no reason today?

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Features Political Competence Proactive Leaders

Nuts & Bolts of Cults

Leadership Lessons from the Moonies (Picture: A Moonie Mass Wedding)

Leadership scholars can’t resist a good study in cult sociology. Academics construct volumes devoted to charismatic cult leaders ranging from Jim Jones to Charles Manson in an effort to dissect these figure’s infectious management strategies. Each of these books work to perpetuate the notion that the charismatic leader is a deified white knight who intoxicates individuals with his or her transformational agenda. Followers are swiftly brought under the spell of charisma and become devoted disciples of a movement.

At first blush, it appears sociologist Eileen Barker has added to this saturated canon of charisma copy with her research on rise of the Unification Church, or “Moonies” in the 1970s and 80s. In The Making of a Moonie: Brainwashing or Choice?, Barker examines the initiation process into Reverend Sun Myung Moon’s infamous religious sect through an immersive participatory observation study.

The book was a response to the widespread public outcry in the United States and Britain provoked by the Church’s accelerated rise and forceful recruitment process. While readers may want or expect a tale of an academic’s transformation into religious zealot, Barker instead delivers a cogent study in pragmatic, tactical leadership. Rather than mythologizing Reverend Moon as a charismatic guru, she focuses on a micro analysis of the leadership strategies executed at the interpersonal level. The result both demystifies the charismatic mystique surrounding cults while reinforcing the centrality of nuts and bolts leadership skills in organizational behavior.

While we’ll leave you to read the book rather than present an exhaustive list of the Moonie leadership strategies Barker describes, here are a few pearls of Moonie leadership wisdom. And one final qualifier—we do not suggest that this is a patented formula for starting a successful cult. There is no doubt Reverend Moon’s charismatic leadership helped buoy Moonie membership. Nevertheless, in the final analysis, the Unification Church operated like any other organization, executing a recruitment agenda built upon the micro-skills of leadership.

4 Monnie Leadership Lessons From Eileen Barker

1. “The Unification Church was concerned not merely with the numbers of people who were to learn of its existence but also with attracting the attention of people with important or influential positions in society” (61)

Increase legitimacy and ability to mobilize agenda by soliciting influential support.

2. “The active involvement of the guests becomes considerably greater [during recruitment workshops] in a number of ways…the participants will contribute more to the day-to-day running of the community” (116)

Mobilize your constituents with participatory leadership that empowers followers.

3. “There can be little doubt that the Moonies are successful in controlling the environment of their workshop…the near-constant presence of enthusiastic Moonies means also that conversations are kept from becoming too critical or from wandering too far off the point” (174)

Keep active supporters close to encourage reluctant/passive support.

4. “[One Moonie] always insisted that those in her charge should reveal…the kinds of things they believed in…because one could waste a great deal of time with people who were not really interested. It was, she said, better to sort out the sheep from the goats as quickly as possible” (178)

Know who you’re talking to and focus on motivating passionate coalition partners first.