Can I cast it aside, all this loyalty and this pride?
Larry David: Have you ever heard of anything so nutty? Jeff Greene: Never. Larry (excitedly): Why are they doing that? Jeff: It’s really wrong! Larry (more excitedly): It’s very wrong! Jeff: Wow! Larry: It’s so, so wrong.
You’ve certainly heard of the popular comedy Curb your Enthusiasm. Since 2000, the show has featured its creator, Larry David, playing a version of himself with all his personality quirks on full display. In the show, his manager and best friend is Jeff Greene. Their exchange above is typical throughout the run of the show. Larry objects to or complains about some peccadillo, and Jeff instantly agrees with him, egging him on.
Chaos ensues.
Larry takes every small thing with the utmost seriousness and utterly dismisses truly serious things. And, as bad as Larry is on his own, Jeff makes him worse, often reinforcing and instigating his behavior. In the pilot episode, after Larry and Jeff conspire to deceive Larry’s wife over some forgettable matter, Jeff condones Larry’s rudeness to his own wife and parents, taking Larry’s side over his family’s:
Jeff: They’re mad at you. Larry: That’s insane. Jeff: I’ve already told them they’re crazy. They’re crazy!
As typically happens in the show, these unforced errors culminate in trouble for Larry. If Jeff were a better friend and a worse loyalist, perhaps Larry would be more restrained and less apt to obsess over trivia. Then again, what kind of a comedy would that be?
By many measures, Jeff is just the guy Larry should never have around. He rationalizes Larry’s excesses in the moment. And while Jeff’s habit may make Larry feel “pretty, pretty, pretty good,” it always results in disaster. In this sense, Jeff is what we might call a “Plutarchan shadow.”
The Loyalist as Transactionalist
The Ancient Greek philosopher Plutarch may offer some insight here. Plutarch wrote, “I don’t need a friend who changes when I change and who nods when I nod.” Perhaps feeling a little cheeky, he added, “My shadow does that much better.” Plutarch certainly would have rejected an enabling shadow like Jeff Greene as a friend.
As it goes with television characters and Greek philosophers, so it goes with leaders. Everyone needs allies—people who will support and work alongside them—and loyalty is certainly an admirable quality, particularly when directed toward institutions and principles.
Unchecked personal loyalty, though, can be detrimental and even destructive as we see with Larry’s friend Jeff. As Plutarch suggests, such an ally is as useless as a shadow or worse. We see the results strewn across history.
During his administration, former President George W. Bush was known for valuing personal loyalty above all other qualities and even applied this standard as he conducted international policy. As a 2003 article describes it, he considered the loyalty of foreign leaders as “deeply personal,” favoring nations that supported his fateful invasion of Iraq. The invasion itself exemplifies the perils of privileging Plutarchan shadows. A similar dynamic played out with the economy.
Part of the problem is that overvaluing loyalty sets up a transactional relationship—if you’re loyal to me, I’ll be loyal to you—which isolates the leader and invites manipulation. This is what happens when loyalty replaces judgment and trust. It’s an extremely weak form of leadership, and we know what happened in Bush’s case.
Decades of war and the Great Recession ensued.
Workaday Loyalty in the Workplace
The same dynamic plays out in the workplace. The leader’s ally who habitually agrees and rarely pushes back is no friend at all. In some instances, their seeming fealty to the leader may even exist only to serve their personal interests. Or perhaps their motivations are honorable and their intentions honest, but they’re just plain wrong. Making matters worse, as with Bush, a head honcho who blindly trusts blind loyalists may rarely encounter alternative perspectives.
To be sure, loyalists never disturb the leader’s precious comfort zone with icky dissenting views, but real leaders know to distrust comfort and easy answers. They recognize that sometimes truth comes from unexpected and uncomfortable places, including from competitors and adversaries.
True leaders eschew blind loyalists and Plutarchan shadows. They realize that the leader who values loyalty above all else is no leader at all.
One university president I served under understood this lesson. He established a leadership team that consisted of independent thinkers, and then he empowered us to speak our truth to each other and to him. There wasn’t a Plutarchan shadow among us.
Sometimes this situation created contention, but we always knew that our collective decisions were not just the whims of the boss bolstered by a bunch of sycophants. We respected our mutual commitment to the mission and trusted one another. Of course, we made mistakes, but we made them together and honestly and could thereby own, correct, and learn from them.
Contrast that leader with the last college president I served. She was more partial to loyalty than truth and surrounded herself with people who rarely pushed back—Plutarchan shadows. She would solicit our thoughts when formulating plans, but she was hostile to expressions of doubt about the efficacy of the plan itself. We were all expected to just accommodate her whims silently like shadows.
Some of her loyalists leveraged her trust to promote their own agendas, easily manipulating her. Not surprisingly, in private they expressed contempt. Meeting with this team could be disorienting as we were mired in a swamp of constant gaslighting.
Needless to say, we oversaw a college that wallowed in lowered expectations and poor performance. Despite a decent array of resources, the school chronically fell short of its stated mission. Meanwhile, in her mind, mere expressions of concern about our institutional shortcomings or downward trajectory—even when accompanied by solutions—constituted disloyalty.
Mediocrity ensued.
While this was the situation with the president’s team, I had my own team to mind. I valued loyalty too, but a mutual loyalty to the institution, its students, and our mission. Before making decisions, I empowered the faculty and deans to offer suggestions and criticism and ask questions at every turn.
One of my closest lieutenants regularly grilled me to make sure my reasoning was sound and that we were on the right track. Her approach was polite and respectful—rancor is never productive—but still discomfiting to face. Nonetheless, her probing mind, intelligence, and candor provided an invaluable check and restrained me from going off half-cocked.
I don’t mean to suggest that my leadership never succumbed to the allure of the occasional Plutarchan shadow among the ranks. Whenever that happened, though, I had plenty of honest people to set me straight.
As Plutarch suggests, no one needs an enabler friend like Jeff Greene—Larry David’s Plutarchan shadow. Moreover, no leader wants such loyalists around to indulge their worst foibles and endorse their worst ideas. Such blindly loyal allies—wittingly or unwittingly—mislead and deceive. They can’t help it. Instead, great leaders, like that first university president I described, empower those around them to speak truth to power. That way, they keep their own power in check.
Still need convincing? Here’s an illustrative (and classic) exchange from season 2 of Curb. Larry has to replace a doll’s head that he ruined and, with Jeff’s help, steals one from Jeff’s young daughter.
Larry (stroking the hair of a disembodied doll head): So you don’t think Michaelson’s wife—she’s not going to have any problem with this, right? Jeff: She’ll be cool. Larry: With the head, just the head? Jeff (reassuringly): That’s fine. Larry: Huh? Jeff: She’s got the body. You’re fine. Larry: We’ll just attach it. Jeff: Attach the head. Larry: Yeah, good. That’s fine.
Chaos ensues.
How do you weigh loyalty in assessing allies? Do you find expressions of personal loyalty make someone more or less trustworthy?
Great leaders distrust personal loyalists and instead seek out those who are loyal to the organization and its mission, and I can help.
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