Leadership Should Create Meaning, Not Destroy It
Most of us have learned to suspect the motives of management because we’ve been fooled before.All the fine words about valuing people and wanting to preserve employment aren’t matched by actions when things get tough. The first action of those same executives is too often to save their own fat salaries and bonuses by laying off thousands of ordinary people. No one likes to feel duped—still less to be duped repeatedly.
Leadership creates meaning—or should do. It should act in ways that bring a sense of shared purpose and direction to the whole organization. You cannot do that when those beneath you know they will be sacrificed the minute their presence begins to threaten the earnings of the top guys. When that happens, what you get is meaninglessness: the feeling that neither you, nor the job you do, count for anything; that you are totally expendable at any moment.
Integrity can be seen
When leaders the time to work out the right thing to do, then do it with courage and honesty, people will trust them. Integrity isn’t some vague abstraction; you can see it wherever words and actions match up and honesty is chosen over deceit without hesitation.
It is a matter of values. If you truly value integrity, you will accept losing rather than compromise your honesty. If you value winning at any cost—as we have been taught to do by the unscrupulous and macho pseudo-leaders of the recent past—how you play the game wonʼt matter, so long as you win. If dishonesty works and costs less, why choose any other path?
So can manipulation
Manipulation is rampant today. People just about always interpret it as dishonesty and react accordingly. It’s said there are three statements in this world that are never true:
- My check is in the mail.
- Of course I’m not simply trying to get you into bed with me.
- As your manager, I’m here to help you.
Too many management fads and fashionable techniques are just thinly-disguised ways of manipulating people to do what you want, when it’s not in their personal interests to do so.
Macho management, of course, is highly manipulative, as well as brutal and bullying. Its rhetoric may be full of appeals to heroic sentiments, but it is always about getting people to work harder and faster to benefit others—mostly the executives of the business and the shareholders: those who main source of income comes either directly from returns on share capital, or indirectly from the same source via incentives linked to increases in share valuation.
The destruction of meaning
We all crave something to believe in. Yet it isn’t the case that any meaning will do. Meaning needs to be based on values we can trust; on stories that inspire, not tales of trickery and deceit or examples of outright bullying. Integrity produces meaning because it is transparent and can be trusted. Manipulation destroys it, because it relies on deceit and hidden agendas.
Too many of the leaders and managers of the recent past have built their careers on acting tough, critical, and intimidating, seeking the quickest way make the biggest profits, regardless of who gets hurt. When a manager threatens people or makes it clear they will suffer if they don’t do this or that, employees usually do what is asked—even if it isn’t anything they believe in, or it makes no sense to them. Some of today’s organizations are such horrible places to work that brute force is probably the only way to get anything done.
Without meaning, there can be no motivation other than fear. Employees become little better than slaves, doing what their masters demand without question. Resentment rises. People leave as soon as they can. Work becomes nothing more than a financial necessity —something that should have died out along with steam-powered factories, smog-laden air, and all the similar signs of early industrialization.
There is a way out
The cure for manipulative management is simple to state, but harder to achieve. You must do the right thing for one reason only: because it’s the right thing to do. Leaders have ethical duties as well as all the others, and many management decisions are as much moral as economic. Many managers ignore this and try to absolve themselves from their ethical responsibilities by portraying every business decision as merely pragmatic. This cannot be done honestly. Life is a series of ethical choices, no less in business than anywhere else.
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November 6th, 2008 at 7:57 am
I learned in my law class these simple facts of ethics.
1) What if it were on the local headline news?
2) What would your family think? Your mother? Your spouse?
3) What if it happened to you?
4) What if WSJ printed it on the front page?
5) Is it legal? Moral? Ethical?
I must agree that this is rampant. I have been reading Leadership secrets of Attila the Hun and find some of the advice/warnings pertinent to where I work … Just replace with a few names, company, personnel, etc and you get a clear picture!
From “Leadership Secrets of Attila The Hun”
“Responsibilities of a Chieftain” – The corruption of the empire is largely a result of the glamorous yet empty life its leaders seek to lead. They have lost their sense of national purpose and employ foreign armies to carry out the responsibilities incumbent to the Roman Legion.
They seek to gain office and stature by political maneuvering, casting aside personal standards of excellence in achievement and high expectations for unity. Their leadership is, therefore, based on weakened foundations and shallow loyalties.
November 6th, 2008 at 8:26 am
@CK: Thanks for your comment, CK. I agree that this type of bad behavior is far too common. That seems to be inevitable in corporate and national cultures based on the notion that winning is all that matters. Ethical behavior often demands that you don’t take the path most likely to produce a quick win, because it will also require behavior that you wouldn’t want to become widely known.
It’s also true, as you suggest, that the idea of aiming towards some wider purpose than personal gain (such as a national purpose or the common good) is out of fashion. Blame the ‘me first’ society again—plus the (now discredited) economic orthodoxy that an unfettered market works because of some magical process that depends on each individual strictly following his or her personal interest. We know where that has taken us.
Maybe it’s time to get back to thinking about what happens when no one feels restrained by ethics or the needs of others. I think it’s called ‘anarchy’ or ‘chaos’.
November 6th, 2008 at 11:11 am
In graduate school we had ethics taught as part of every class! This, I think, is due to the recent corporate scandals like Enron, World Com, Adelphia, and others.
This is also coupled with greed – like Arthur Andersen (greed in getting consulting contracts) and recently greed in the banking industry and even politics (Stevens – R-AK).
November 6th, 2008 at 12:36 pm
People must have a purpose to choose to work and it could be either for self or for common good. When you are working for common good a cohesive community concept comes to fore and you inevitably do good to your self as you work for benefit of the group in which you are a stake older. But when you work only for yourself everybody and everything else is expendable as long as it gives you some benefit. In such an unit you are part of the raw material and not an individual. It is bound to breed fear, distrust and animosity.
November 6th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
@sambit: I agree, Sambit. Sadly, we have been living in a period when selfishness has been both encouraged and rewarded. Corporations always get what they reward. They rewarded people who were interested only in themselves and the size of their bonuses and stock options, hence the financial meltdown we’re experiencing.
If they had rewarded genuine performance and concern for long-term prosperity, none of this would have happened. Keep reading, my friend.
November 7th, 2008 at 9:06 am
Carmine et al
I have little argument with anything you have said here. However, unlike most of your other postings this one has left me with a sense of despair and futility.
I have been trying to analyse why, and can only think that it is because, despite the strength of your words and the obvious feeling that lies behind them, they are ultimately unlikely to make any difference to anything. Even if they strike a chord with some of those whose leadership has been hollow, the roots lie far deeper than that.
The corrupt behaviour that you refer to has become ingrained but not just by “me-thinking” but the loss of a sense of community, which is why there is so little shame and even now the talk is about paying some of the failed bankers their bonuses. Aaargh!! The problem is systemic and that means that we have to do something to change the system. But rhetoric, no matter how sound is not going to do that.
Writing this brought to mind something I heard about someone (I think it might have been Mother Teresa) who would never give their name or get involved to anything negative. Thus they would join a peace rally, but not an anti-war rally or a pro-life but not an anti-abortion rally. So we need to find something positive to do that will get right-minded and righteous people to take action. I am endeavouring to do that but it is a tough haul and the need to take care of the fundamental needs like paying the mortgage and putting food on the table makes it even more difficult. A lot of the me-thinking you describe stems from little more than that. It was Einstein who said, “The world is a dangerous place to live; not because of the people who are evil, but because of the people who don’t do anything about it.”
What can we DO?
November 7th, 2008 at 10:18 am
@Bay – I can understand your feeling regarding “loss of community.” As you think about it, drive through an old area and take a close look at the homes. What are the first things you notice? Porches! You know the type where you’d see people sittng in front watching trafic drive by, waving at people! Do you see them in todays housing? NO! We lock ourselves behind doors to shut the world out!
November 7th, 2008 at 10:20 am
@Bay Jordan: Don’t despair, Bay. While what you say is right about many people (who either don’t get the problem to don’t want to get it), persuading people just to think about what is going on is the first step in changing the system. Remember the saying: “Nothing is so powerful as an idea whose time has come.”
In fact, your own reaction is a great example of this process working. Reading the post may have made you feel a sense of futility, but it also moved you to take action to express your ideas. Apathy is much more the enemy than actual resistance.
Yes, it will take time. No, it won’t be a smooth road. But the more people who are moved to think about and recognize the problem, the harder it will be for the ‘me thinkers’ to dismiss opposition as irrelevant and futile. Those of us who believe the whole approach to management over the past few decades has been misguided may not be able to change things instantly; but we can go on making a noise and acting as thorns in the side of the pompous and self-opinionated until enough others get the idea too. That will set things in play for significant change. It only takes few pebbles to start a rock slide.
Keep reading, my friend.
November 7th, 2008 at 10:26 am
@CK: Building community demands that people do something together. It also demands trust. I think one of the main reasons why people hide inside their homes is fear. We’re all constantly battered by media stories about muggings and murders and children being molested, to the point where children are not allowed to play outside and people are afraid to even greet one another.
Like all types of trust, someone has to start the ball rolling by trusting. Until that happens, things will go on as they are. Maybe the best way to start a movement towards building community, and a belief in the importance of the common good, is to act as if both are there already.
Keep reading, my friend.
November 10th, 2008 at 4:37 am
Reminds me about the line (I think from the Godfather) as to which is better (in regards to power) – to be loved or to be feared …