If you are neutral in situations of injustice you have chosen the side of the oppressor.
Desmond Tutu
Let me be clear at the outset. Leaders should be approachable, friendly even, genuinely warm, unfailingly polite, supportive, protective, driven by integrity, and collaborative. In other words, just plain decent people who lead by building good relationships. Leaders should be nice individuals who lead by supporting their followers, but that is not enough.
What leaders should never be is distant, surly, cold, rude, untrustworthy, undependable, corruptible, and self-centered. In other words, just plain assholes who lead by making it all about themselves.
Another thing leaders should never be, and this may surprise you coming from me, is utterly egoless. Ego is, in fact, the X factor in the mix of qualities that constitute leadership. Again, let me be clear, I still advocate for you to stuff you ego in a sack and throw it in the river on a regular basis, but as I wrote elsewhere your ego will resurrect rather quickly. You had best be prepared to manage it.
Simply put, a total lack of ego is disastrous in a leader. I learned this lesson from an incident early in my days as a college faculty member from which I extracted a good deal of wisdom from the failures of others, a practice I have written about before and which I call learning from a negative paradigm.
Every word has consequences. Every silence, too.
Jean-Paul Sartre
My first year as a faculty member at a young college, I was appalled to discover that they had no policy for dealing with cheaters. Each case was left to the individual faculty member with no guidance or support. I knew from my previous experience at a school where cheating was rampant that we were woefully underprepared — “living in La-la Land,” is the phrase I believe I used. I admit that I was probably a bit vocal about this institutional shortcoming.
Toward the end of that school year, some administrator decided it was high time we had a policy on academic honesty and tapped two senior faculty members to develop it. They in turn, perhaps to shut me up, tapped me as a third committee member. We set about doing our homework, researching other institutions’ policies and studying the recommendations of organizations that sought to promote best practices in academic integrity. I learned a buzzword from the business world: “benchmarking.”
When we had a draft policy, we were told to seek preliminary approval from the top academic administrators before proceeding. The senior faculty members on my team decided I should present the draft to the deans because I was its chief author and because they felt it would reflect well on me. Were they being genuine advocates, or were they really just setting me up? I will never know.
So, there I found myself, a new faculty member sitting in front of a group of senior academic administrators headed by our super-nice college provost, an unselfish man with a soft way about him. I started my presentation of the draft by introducing our benchmarking data and then began describing the draft policy. About twenty minutes in, a woman burst into the room asking what she had missed. It was one of the deans. She sat down, and the provost asked me to bring her up to speed. I was no more than a few minutes along in my review when this same dean stopped me and demanded to know why I had not conducted any benchmarking. She then lectured me on the value of benchmarking and understanding best practices. Each time I tried to explain that I already presented our benchmarking, which was in her packet, she would just interrupt me.
My two faculty colleagues were visibly agitated but remained silent. The same with the administrator who was assigned to oversee our work and who happened to be my own dean. She had contributed nothing to the draft just as she did nothing to protect me from my tormentor. Others at the table looked down, embarrassed. No one had the guts or the decency to bail me out or even look my way.
For help, I turned to the affable provost, the boss of us all. His eyes darted about desperately as I was being berated by his subordinate. He would not make eye contact with me. He kept pursing his lips as if he were about to say something, but all that came out was a sound I can only describe as audibly puffing while trying to pronounce the letters M and B at the same time.
“Hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh.” Like a worn out train on its terminal run.
He was useless. Nearly catatonic. Fortunately, I can tough it out with a bully, and eventually the antagonistic dean wore herself out, allowing us to move on. Probably out of a sense of shame and guilt, the administrators then summarily voted to approve the policy, which would have been great except it was still merely a draft. We were just looking for permission to keep working on it. Although I pointed out the serious holes and clunky writing of our draft, the deans persisted, and that drafty draft became the policy, not to be revised for years to come.
Afterward my head was spinning. Why had all the people in that room allowed one person to hold sway? Why had no one defended me, a new and vulnerable faculty member, against that dean’s unreason and bullying? And, most baffling, why had her boss — the provost, the boss of the whole room — not reined her in?
That provost was a great guy, a genuinely generous soul with a pleasant way about him. He was approachable and made you feel good. But that was all he was, a nice guy. As a leader, he was just a figurehead, an ineffective manager who was too afraid to confront even egregious behavior and bullying right under his nose. His fecklessness permeated the campus, sowing disorder and confusion. During the episode, he looked distressed but said nothing. And what was that sound he was making?
“Hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh, hmbwwhh.”
Victims [of bullying] say that when they’re taunted and demeaned and no one comes to their defense, they start to believe they deserve it. They start to judge themselves and to think that they are inferior.
Carol Dweck
I realized that while the provost was apparently ego-less, which was admirable in its way, he was utterly incompetent as a leader. I took away several lessons about leadership from that day, which would come to guide my actions when it was my turn.
1. When a leader is useless or weak, the worst actors — always the worst — will rush to fill the void. Silence in the face of this onslaught condones and fosters its abuses.
2. The willingness to confront people and address immediate situations without cruelty is critical to effective leadership. The best leaders will not seek confrontation, nor will they shrink from it.
3. The best leaders are heat shields, protecting their people from abuse and destructive behavior. They can do this because the effective leader has a healthy ego.
4. Speaking of healthy egos, it may seem counterintuitive, but every good leader must have a healthy degree of narcissism that serves as a source of self-confidence and integrity, enabling them to withstand undue criticism and attacks. Good leaders keep that narcissism in check, though, by occasionally stuffing it in a sack and throwing it in the river and by welcoming, demanding even, constructive criticism. The rest — let’s face it, the majority — allow their narcissism run amok like bratty children in an Applebees.
Ego, therefore, is the X factor in leadership and commands perhaps the most challenging acrobatic act of all: maintaining the precarious balance of ego and egolessness, a delicate equilibrium that marks the exceptional leader.
That day I learned that there is such a thing as being too nice. Nice leaders finish last. Any leader who is all about being nice is no leader at all and is just setting their people up for abuse, which is merely a marginal improvement over the leader who is an active abuser. The X factor of leadership — the slippery element that sets the best leaders apart — is the willingness and ability to strike and maintain that balance between necessary narcissism and vital selflessness. No one can sustain it all the time, but the true servant leader never gives up trying.
Striking the balance between being a pushover and being too harsh requires constant monitoring and adjustment. Good leadership demands a degree of narcissism, which then must be managed vigilantly.
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