8

Leading

Human beings may be a cooperative species, but to get everyone working together toward a common goal, organizations have to know where they want to go and how to get there. That is the job of leadership.

I had the opportunity to work on a leadership education plan for the University of Texas. Our goal was not to train every one of our students to be a leader, though we certainly hope that many of them will take leadership roles in their careers. Instead, we wanted students to understand what good leadership is so that they can practice it and can recognize when they are working with an effective leader.

A lot of ink has been spilled trying to distinguish between leadership and its cousin management. People use the words in varying ways, which makes providing a strict definition difficult. But it’s clear that people in leadership roles need to engage in both strategic and operational tasks. The strategic component involves determining the vision and direction of an organization, making decisions about how to pursue that vision, and motivating people to join in. The operational component implements that vision by allocating resources, evaluating progress toward the goal, and correcting the plan when a goal isn’t being reached.

From this perspective, if your job involves a higher ratio of strategic to operational tasks, you’re in a leadership role, whereas if the reverse is true, you’re in a management role. That said, both roles require at least some strategic and some operational work.

Research by Jasmine Vergauwe and colleagues suggests that charismatic leaders—who have a high degree of self-confidence, communicate well with others, and are open to creative problem solving—are excellent at the strategic component of leadership but often overestimate the importance of strategy over operations in running an organization. The most successful leaders can motivate people to engage in a shared vision and also put specific plans and procedures in place that will allow the organization to realize that vision. No single person needs to be highly skilled both strategically and operationally, but everyone should recognize the importance of these components.

We often confuse leadership with leadership roles. That is, we assume that to be a leader, someone must occupy a particular position of authority in the organizational hierarchy. If you are someone’s supervisor, for example, you have the authority to evaluate their performance and (perhaps) their pay. But leading other people involves more than having the authority to make a request or give an order. After all, since you were a child you’ve known that “Because I said so” is a poor reason to do what someone asks.

Leaders find ways to create shared goals among a group. That means that even people low on the organizational chart can lead. No matter what authority you have, you can influence someone else’s actions by your example, your encouragement, your expertise, and your feedback. That’s why everyone in an organization knows who the real leaders are, regardless of the titles they hold.

When we set out to define how to teach leadership at the University of Texas, we focused on certain skills that people can develop and recognize in others, including:

•  Being able to delegate tasks

•  Thinking critically and possessing decision-making skills

•  Taking personal responsibility for actions

•  Communicating effectively and speaking in public

•  Fostering collaboration

•  Engaging in ethical leadership

I organize this chapter around those elements.

Delegating

A core leadership skill is delegating work. When you delegate a task to someone, you have to trust that the person knows what has to be done, will do it well, and will ask for help if necessary. Leaders can do several things to achieve this level of trust: Endeavor to develop other people’s talents. Treat errors appropriately. Ensure that you align rewards in the organization with desired outcomes.

Developing Others

A significant component of leadership is helping the people around you improve and grow into their roles. Just as you shouldn’t expect to have mastered every aspect of a new job when you take it, you shouldn’t expect the people working for and with you to know how to do everything the first time they’re asked to do it. Helping them hone their skills is crucial.

That may be harder than it sounds, because the first time you ask someone to do an unfamiliar task, having them do it and then giving them feedback will take longer than doing it yourself would. But you won’t be able to turn over tasks to people until you’re sure they can do a reasonable job on their own, so you have to sacrifice time now in order to save it later.

Time spent training the people around you is not wasted. It’s common to think about productivity primarily in terms of what you accomplish yourself. But as you progress in your career—particularly when you take on leadership roles—you’re also judged by whether the people working for you are productive.

Errors as Learning Experiences

The path to creating a culture in which people want to develop emerges from how you treat mistakes. I discussed the importance of mistakes in chapter 5 when talking about learning. Now I explore how you treat mistakes from a leadership standpoint. You may think that the more costly a potential mistake, the more the threat of punishment should surround it, so that people will be vigilant for errors. This approach is 180 degrees wrong, however.

Consider aviation. Mistakes in air travel can have devastating consequences. But aviation catastrophes are not generally caused by a single error. Rather, they result from a cascade of errors. Consequently, the US Federal Aviation Administration has implemented the Aviation Safety Action Program (ASAP), whereby members of the industry who report errors they make within twenty-four hours won’t be punished for their mistakes—provided they did nothing illegal, such as drinking alcohol on the job. The program is administered by a separate agency (NASA) to create confidence that error reporting won’t have negative career consequences.

This program recognizes that people don’t make mistakes because they lack incentives to avoid them. They make them because humans are fallible. The way to ensure air-traffic safety is not to design procedures that will eliminate any possibility of error; it is to design them so that the errors people make don’t have devastating results. That can be done only by cataloguing all the errors made and studying them to find patterns. Aviation is safe because it embraces mistakes and learns from them.

After all, if you punish mistakes, people’s primary incentive will be to hide them. People don’t go out of their way to invite punishment. But a hidden problem cannot be fixed; and if it stays hidden long enough, it may turn into a catastrophe. Aim to punish negligence rather than mistakes. If someone working normally makes a mistake, treat it as a learning opportunity—even if it has significant consequences. Only someone who doesn’t prepare, doesn’t try, and doesn’t attempt to learn from prior mistakes should be punished.

Reward Structures

Asking people to do something is only part of what informs the actions they take. A core principle that reflects the operation of the motivational brain is: there is what you say, what you do, and what you reward, and people listen to those elements in reverse order. What you say (or what you request) has the smallest influence on their daily behavior. People who work for you are also watching what you and others in the organization are doing and modeling their behavior accordingly. Most important, they are observing the behavior that gets rewarded. Rewards come in a variety of forms, including promotions, opportunities, access to resources, and attention.

When you’re a leader, it can be frustrating to ask consistently for a particular behavior and not get it. If that happens, it’s highly likely that what you say you want doesn’t align with what people are obviously doing and being rewarded for. You need to be vigilant for such misalignment.

A common example involves innovation. Companies talk frequently about how important it is for them to innovate. Indeed, at many companies where I have spoken, the mission statement is proudly displayed near the entrance, and more often than not it says something about the importance of innovation. Yet few companies are truly innovative.

Part of the problem is that very little of the work people are doing is focused on finding new approaches to products and processes. Instead, most activities are in support of the status quo (and incremental improvements). You’re not likely to start taking time out of your day to work on an innovative project if you don’t see anyone else engaged in that sort of work.

Furthermore, many companies, particularly large organizations, have reward structures that are biased against innovation. Managers may be given bonuses based on the quarterly or yearly profitability of their units, while innovation is expensive in the short term and typically doesn’t produce benefits for a while. And innovations that fail (which many do) will never produce a payoff. In a bonus environment like this, managers have little incentive to support innovative projects. Furthermore, the people who are getting promoted in an organization are often those who are making steady progress. Innovative projects don’t display consistent growth. For a long time, they generate no revenues, and then suddenly (if they succeed) they take off. Organizations that want more innovation must reset their reward structures to promote innovative projects.

Pay attention to all these factors driving behavior. Look at how they influence people to do things that aren’t what you asked for. A key observation about the social brain is that when we evaluate the behavior of other people, we focus on their traits and deemphasize their goals and the situational factors that might also be driving them. This happens even though we often pay a lot of attention to the situation and to our goals when explaining our own behavior.

Practically speaking, when colleagues don’t do what they’re supposed to, you’re probably inclined to wonder what’s wrong with them. You may assume they have traits that prevent them from performing as expected. Perhaps they’re incompetent or unmotivated. Before ascribing their behavior to some personal aspect, examine the work situation to determine its influence on behavior. It may be that any competent person in that situation would act in the same way.

Critical Thinking, Problem Solving, and Decision Making

The strategic and operational parts of leadership both require clear decisions that are made with as much knowledge as possible. A great deal has been written about decision biases that can lead people to make poor choices. In this section, I want to focus on a few elements of decision making that are important in leadership contexts.

Learning to Say Yes and No

Think about the requests people make of you. How do you generally respond? If you’re like most of us, you have a dominant response. Some people are prone to assent to requests. Greg told me about an old boss who thought every idea was a great one. He truly wanted to see people achieve their goals, so he would say yes to almost everything. As a result, his resources were stretched so thin that few of the projects he agreed to support actually succeeded. In contrast, some people tend to turn down almost everything. I was once chatting with a colleague from another university who jokingly referred to his dean (who controlled the resources for his college) as Dr. No, because the dean almost never agreed to move any projects forward. Eventually, people just stopped going to the dean with new ideas.

As a leader, you need to be comfortable saying both yes and no. In the section on difficult conversations in chapter 6, I discussed how an agreeable person finds it hard to give someone bad news. If you’re agreeable, you have to practice turning people down when they ask for something. Two ways of saying no are important here. One is that if you’d really like to support a project but can’t do it right away or as it has been presented, suggest a few alternatives you might be able to support. Encourage continued discussion even when you can’t grant a specific request.

The other is for when someone approaches you with a project that you think is simply a nonstarter. Agreeable people are tempted to be encouraging by saying something such as “I’d like to help, but …” and then blaming some circumstance for their inability to support the request. The problem with this approach is that whoever made the request will probably keep working on the project in the hope of finding some way to address the reason you gave for saying no. If you think a project shouldn’t move forward, take responsibility for that decision. Say you’re deciding not to pursue the project. Give supervisees constructive feedback to help them understand what kinds of requests you might support in the future. But don’t say things that give people false hope.

When saying no, it’s important to be clear about why, because you might be turning down something you should consider more seriously. As I mentioned in chapter 2, the personality characteristic openness to experience reflects the orientation that people take to new things and new ideas. People high in openness will embrace a new idea, even if they ultimately decide it’s not something they want to pursue, while those low in openness will reject new ideas just because they’re new. Leaders who are low in openness may miss out on valuable opportunities. That is, they have trouble saying “yes.”

Pat worked for a company that invented but didn’t pursue a number of technologies that are now common in people’s daily experience with computers. He told me about a messaging system the company had developed in the early days of the internet which allowed employees to set up interest groups to discuss topics. Most of the interest groups focused on work problems, though some inevitably focused on entertainment and hobbies. Employees loved the groups, which were useful for allowing people around the world to weigh in on problems being worked on. But the company shut down the system out of concern that people were wasting too much time on things unrelated to work. It didn’t do a real cost-benefit analysis, nor did it attempt to find ways to adapt the system to the work flow. Instead, it pulled the plug on a technology that could have significantly boosted productivity decades before nearly everyone on planet Earth was using social networks.

When you hear a new idea and you have a negative reaction, think carefully about why you have concerns. In the absence of a reason for your reaction, you may be rejecting it primarily because it’s new. And even if you have a reason, it may not be a good one. Many companies, for example, have neglected to pursue innovative projects because they were afraid to disrupt their current business. They are failing to consider that if a new technology is going to disrupt their business, they should be the ones to bring it to market.

Kodak, the leading producer of photographic film, is a classic example. Kodak originally developed digital imaging technology but chose not to bring it to market for fear that it would cannibalize the film business. The company was correct that digital imaging would disrupt the photography industry, but because of its strategic decision, it failed to benefit from the disruption.

Not every firm is afraid of industry-disrupting changes. For example, in the late 1990s, Netflix came to prominence with a business that enabled people to rent movies on DVD via the postal service. This model was so successful that Netflix contributed to the downfall of the giant brick-and-mortar movie rental company Blockbuster. But when high-speed internet became common in people’s homes, Netflix shifted from DVD rentals to streaming movies over the internet. It could easily have elected not to shift to streaming because that would undermine its core business. But given the limitations of the postal service for transferring computer files, it recognized that its original business model would not be successful in the long term.

A willingness to disrupt the core business is related to what economists call sunk costs. A sunk cost is any resource (such as time, money, or effort) that has already been spent on a particular project. Economists argue that you shouldn’t consider sunk costs when you’re making decisions, because the resources you have already spent are gone and can’t be recovered. Just because you’ve worked on a project for a long time doesn’t mean you can’t walk away from it now. You should decide whether a project ought to continue on the basis of how likely it is to succeed from this point forward.

Research by Hal Arkes and colleagues demonstrates that people typically overvalue sunk costs. It’s hard to walk away from a project on which they’ve already put in a lot of effort. This issue is particularly important in light of the popularity of grit. Angela Duckworth defines grit as a passionate persistence in an area of study, and some have argued that it’s a significant determinant of success in school and business. Further research suggests that persistence reflects a high level of the core personality characteristic conscientiousness (which I discussed in chapter 5). Conscientious people often succeed at difficult tasks.

But studies by Richard Nisbett and colleagues suggest that the most successful people are good at determining when projects should be abandoned rather than continued. These individuals focus on the potential of a project as it currently stands rather than on how much effort has already been put into it. Good leaders help their teams step away from projects that are unlikely to succeed.

This reflects a related aspect of good leadership. Many organizations will put together groups to start projects, but have trouble ending one that has served its useful life. That’s because some number of people devoted themselves to that project and have a strong allegiance to it. When you start a project, establish an end date for it. When that date is reached, people interested in continuing the project should have to make an argument for why further investment in it would be more valuable than putting those resources toward other things.

Big Decisions Are Not Like Small Ones

You make a lot of decisions every day. You choose what clothes to wear, what route to take to the office, and which tasks to tackle during the day. Most of your decisions fit squarely within the types of choices the cognitive brain is adapted to make. People are quite good at making decisions when they have experience with the options and can envision the consequences.

When you choose what to wear, you know your clothes pretty well. You can imagine how other people will evaluate them, and you get social feedback on what you’re wearing over the course of the day, which can affect future decisions.

As you take on leadership roles, though, many choices you’re asked to make will deviate from this ideal. You’ll have to evaluate large-scale projects such as hiring new people, taking on a new product line, or structuring a deal in a novel way. These situations often go beyond what you’ve experienced directly. Envisioning the consequences can be hard—in part because of a lack of experience, in part because of the complexity of the environment itself, and in part because of uncertainty about outcomes. Furthermore, such large-scale projects will play out over a long time, so it will be difficult to track progress or to figure out which elements of the situation account for the success or failure of the venture.

You may be tempted to treat choices like this as you do all the other decisions in your life. If you’ve been successful with many small choices, you may believe you’ll also be good at these more significant ones. But you need to find tools to help you make decisions in these settings. Learn to use financial projections and forecasting models. Learn to integrate opinions from experts who can interpret various kinds of data relevant to the decisions you’re making.

You also need to become more comfortable with uncertainty. In the Star Wars movies, there’s a recurring joke in which the ’droid C3PO gives the odds of success for particular actions, which Han Solo then ignores. (Spock and Kirk have a similar dynamic in Star Trek.) In many real-world situations, though, probabilities are the best tool we have for judging the likelihood of outcomes. Nevertheless, quite a bit of research, much of it done by Gerd Gigerenzer and colleagues, demonstrates that people aren’t particularly good at reasoning from probabilities. If you’re working in an environment in which many future projections are going to be expressed in terms of likelihood, you’ll need to develop more comfort with choices that are expressed in degrees of uncertainty.

To prepare for these large-scale decisions, you need to do three things. First, look at the decisions that you and the leaders you admire have to make. Examine the degree to which they deviate from the kinds of choices that people make well, and begin to catalog the ones for which you’ll need additional tools. Second, before you take on a leadership role, ask to observe important large-scale decisions being made so that you can learn what skills you’ll need to become a better decision maker. Then find classes or seminars in which you can improve your abilities. Third, when you engage in large-scale decisions, make specific predictions about expected outcomes that will help you judge later whether the choice seems to be working well. The more indications you have that your decision is or isn’t going well, the easier it will be to course-correct a big project and the better your future decisions will be.

Communicating as a Leader

Chapter 6 focused exclusively on communication. I want to pick up two related topics here, though. The first is communicating effectively about uncertainty. The second is public speaking—particularly using speeches to motivate others.

Communicating about Uncertainty

One of the most difficult issues in any organization is uncertainty about the future. In 2008, the worldwide economy took a downturn following the collapse of the housing market in the United States and the ensuing credit crunch. This event affected a number of organizations, including the University of Texas, where I work. The staff at the university was bracing for job cuts. People were trying to decide whether to look for other jobs or wait it out. Supervisors weren’t sure what to say to their employees, because the upper administration was providing very little information. Its lack of communication stemmed from uncertainty about the outcome of the Texas legislature’s budget debate, which made it hard to predict what cuts (if any) would need to be made.

When faced with this kind of uncertainty, it’s tempting to say nothing at all. You don’t have anything valuable to add to the conversation, so it might seem like a good strategy to wait until you have more information before talking with people.

However, people think a lot about stressful situations. In the absence of information from you, they’ll generate all kinds of scenarios for the future, and they’ll talk about those scenarios with one another. As the stories spread, they’ll begin to take on their own reality. Once a story takes root—even if it isn’t based on any facts—it’s hard to dislodge it from people’s memories. Research by Hollyn Johnson and Colleen Seifert on the continued influence effect demonstrates that it’s quite difficult to get people to stop using information they’ve heard in the past, even when they know the information is false. So a communication vacuum will be filled by the stories people tell one another, and those stories will persist.

That means you need to communicate about uncertain events, even if all you can say is that you don’t yet have any information that will help predict what’s going to happen. If the people you work with trust that you’re transparent, they may still speculate about the future, but they’re less likely to generate an elaborate web of beliefs about what’s actually going on.

Speaking to Groups

When you take on a leadership role, you often have to get up in front of groups to speak. Public speaking is one of the top social stressors. It is so difficult for so many people that it’s routinely used to create stress in psychology experiments. Participants are told, for example, that they have ten minutes to prepare a speech they’ll present to experts who will evaluate their performance. These instructions reliably lead to an increase in people’s stress levels and to the release of stress hormones.

The best way to reduce your stress around public speaking is to give talks. This is a version of exposure therapy, pioneered by Michael Telch and colleagues, that is used to reduce stress, anxiety, and fear around many phobias. The principle of exposure therapy is to face the thing you fear without doing anything designed to “protect” you from bad outcomes, such as taking a pill or wearing your lucky shoes. Over time, your motivational brain learns that the experience doesn’t lead to a bad outcome, so your anxiety is reduced.

To ensure that you don’t have a bad outcome when giving a public speech, you need to practice. It may seem silly, but public speaking is a performance, and every performer needs to rehearse. After your speech is written (or outlined, depending on your preference for giving remarks), find a quiet place and deliver it to a wall a few times. Use the same volume and the same intensity you would for the actual occasion. Practice speaking clearly, enunciating your words, and pause in the right places to give the desired impact. If you need feedback, find a trusted colleague or consider hiring a speech coach to listen to you and recommend ways to improve.

You might take a lesson from the world of stand-up comedy. Comedians use a lot of metaphors about death when talking about their craft. Having a great set means killing the audience. Having a terrible set involves dying onstage. As bad as it must feel to tell jokes that fall flat in front of a crowd that wants to laugh, great comedians are willing to take the chance again and again that they will die onstage. With all that practice, they realize that dying isn’t so bad after all. And they use the bad experiences to improve their performance in the future rather than allowing setbacks to keep them from trying again.

For leaders, an important function of public speaking is to build engagement for a project. Research by Jack Brehm and Elizabeth Self on the intensity of motivation suggests that people are most highly motivated to achieve goals when they’re aware of a gap between the present and a desired future and they have a plan they believe will bridge that gap. That is, when there is a bridgeable gap. A good motivational speech highlights those elements. You have to help your audience recognize where they are right now and what the future can look like. Then you need to describe how their actions can bring the desired future into being. It’s also valuable to acknowledge the obstacles they may face and recognize that those barriers can be overcome.

You don’t need to be an energetic speaker to share a vision of the future with the people you work with. You just need to speak with confidence about how the group can succeed by working together. To see a wonderful example of a motivational speech, watch the first scene of the movie Patton, in which George C. Scott portrays the general in an Oscar-winning performance. You can watch it on YouTube. In that scene, General Patton is speaking to the Third Army just before it invades France. He does an excellent job of highlighting the situation and reminding the troops of the strength of the US Army tradition. What makes the speech particularly powerful, though, is that Patton tells the men that they’re likely to be afraid when under enemy fire and seeing their fellow soldiers being killed. He exhorts them to keep fighting despite that fear. By laying out a vision and a plan along with potential obstacles, he is preparing the young soldiers for battle.

Personal Responsibility

People in leadership positions have an outsize influence on their organizations. They can set a vision and galvanize people to work toward it. As a result, they often get disproportionate credit for an organization’s successes.

It can be challenging to adjust to this. Early in your career, you have to do a lot to ensure that your contributions will be noticed and that you’ll be considered for new opportunities. Once you’re in a leadership role, though, the spotlight is already on you. Even if you hope to continue advancing in the organization, you don’t need to bring attention to yourself. Instead, you need to focus on developing the people who work for you.

That means that when something goes wrong in your group, you must be willing to accept the blame and shield your people from consequences they might face from those higher up in the organization. You can work to fix the problem within your group, and you may choose to punish someone for negligence. But that doesn’t need to be broadcast beyond the group. Your team’s performance is your responsibility, and you need to own that. You should protect your employees, because someone who makes a mistake today may develop into a star tomorrow. You don’t want to ruin that person’s reputation with other leaders in the organization.

The opposite holds true for credit. As the leader of the team, you’ll get a lot of credit when things go well. You rarely need to toot your own horn. You should highlight the work of people who were instrumental in the success of a venture.

Consider two reasons to broadcast your team’s accomplishments. First, the higher up you move in an organization’s food chain, the more your performance will be judged according to your ability to develop the talents of others. If you can demonstrate that you have a positive impact on the people who work for you, others will notice, and you’ll be given more opportunities to lead.

Second, as you rise in an organization, you’ll need allies to help you implement projects that interest you. A great way to develop loyalty within an organization is to aid people on your team in advancing their careers. Those who can attribute some of their success to you are likely to support your future efforts.

In the context of developing future leaders, think about how to promote diversity in a leadership team. As discussed in chapter 7, diverse teams often generate creative solutions to problems. Yet in many organizations, the higher up you go, the less diverse the leadership is. Part of the problem—at least in studies of people from the United States and Western Europe—is that leadership behaviors are evaluated more positively in men than in women and in white people than in people of color. So the people selected for additional leadership training and opportunities tend to be white males.

Every leader should look for chances to provide leadership opportunities and training to all an organization’s employees and to promote people on the basis of their performance rather than on judgments of leadership potential. Organizations should recognize that the people who are best qualified for positions later in their careers often had significant opportunities to develop those qualifications early on.

Quiet Leadership

Because leaders are expected to set an organization’s strategic agenda, people often focus on their broad pronouncements about the future. As a result, leaders are often judged on the basis of those statements. But an organization’s success is strongly driven by operational factors. Vision is important for setting direction, but vision alone won’t make the organization reach its goals.

Quiet leadership, in which people work behind the scenes to uphold the quality of the organization’s endeavors, is commonly undervalued. Quiet leadership involves teaching colleagues how to improve their performance. It involves holding everyone to a high standard. It involves paying attention to the details of how things are done.

I’ve been to a number of meetings over the years in which people have discussed projects and solicited feedback from the group. Even when the group is lukewarm about an idea, a few people make comments, and the team moves forward with the project. In private discussions, people talk about their misgivings, but nobody actually raises those issues when there’s a chance to do something about them.

Not long ago, though, I was in a meeting with many high-level administrators at my university. Someone presented a plan for identifying potential future risks for the university. The plan was OK, but it seemed to omit a number of key opportunities to identify new risks. One administrator, who was hearing this proposal for the first time, immediately made a number of specific recommendations for improving the plan. Those at the meeting could easily have let the plan move forward, and the person who spoke up was doing so in a small forum away from most of the university. But that moment of quiet leadership was a great demonstration of holding high standards for work within an organization.

You don’t need to be in a position of authority to engage in quiet leadership. If you believe a project can be improved, say so. Early in your career, you may be uncomfortable criticizing something in a public meeting, but you can always engage someone later by email or in a private conversation.

The central element of quiet leadership is being constructive. It’s not enough just to look for a proposal’s limitations; you must work with others to develop alternatives. Quiet leaders find ways to teach others what they know to enhance the capabilities of everyone in an organization.

People who routinely work constructively to improve projects and to develop the skills of people around them are noticed. They’re the ones everyone ultimately wants on the team for an important project. And when someone is on many different teams whose projects succeed, people notice what those teams have in common.

Fostering Collaboration

As discussed in chapter 7, workplaces function best when colleagues treat one another like neighbors. That is, they develop trust and settle up the debts in the long run. That means colleagues will do favors for one another without expecting immediate reciprocity.

Leaders should look for signs that the neighborhood isn’t functioning well and identify ways to improve it. The neighborhood may break down in two ways. One possibility—the most common—is that the workplace becomes less trusting, and colleagues become more like strangers. The other is that it becomes more like a family, with no checks and balances on whether particular individuals are being productive.

When employees start focusing solely on carrying out the duties they’ve been asked to accomplish, rather than looking for ways to contribute more broadly to the mission of the organization, you can feel that the workplace is becoming a collection of strangers. When people wait to be asked to work on a project rather than engaging, they are demonstrating that they view their work as a series of fee-for-service transactions. Such workplaces have a high level of turnover, because people are looking for a better environment.

Chances are, when people treat their colleagues as a collection of strangers, it’s because they don’t believe that the organization is fulfilling its end of the bargain to create a neighborhood. It’s important to sit down with them and discuss their frustrations with colleagues, management, or even your own leadership. They may feel they’re not being fairly compensated for their work, or that their contributions aren’t being recognized. Differences between their compensation and that of upper management may create a sense of unfairness. One reaction to unfairness is to pull out of the neighborhood.

After you’ve identified what makes people feel like strangers, you need to respond. If aspects of your own leadership behavior are pushing them away, seek mentorship and coaching to help you regain their trust. If other things about the organization are driving people away from the neighborhood, you need to advocate visibly for your direct reports. You also need to make them aware of your interest in their careers. Your efforts to develop their knowledge and skills will make them feel like valued members of the community.

Some organizations want everyone to feel part of a family. The problem with that is that it makes people less likely to be held accountable for shoddy work or missed assignments. The family model works well when an organization needs to take care of an employee who is sick or going through a difficult time; but in the workplace itself, people should maintain the attitude that everyone has to contribute and that those who take more than they give will not succeed. As a leader, you must be serious about regular performance reviews and make it clear that people will be recognized for good performance, but everyone is expected to be a significant contributor.

Much of this rests on a sense of honor in the workplace. My colleague Paul Woodruff, in his wonderful book The Ajax Dilemma, points out that disparities in pay or observations that some people work hard while others are loafing take an emotional toll on employees. When people feel that their contributions aren’t respected, they question the organization’s commitment to them. This leads to frustration and anger, which will ultimately weaken their commitment to the organization.

The Dual-Relationship Principle

In chapter 1, I mentioned a woman who had difficulty maintaining her friendships with colleagues after she was promoted to a supervisory role. Such a transition is hard on relationships because of what’s called the dual-relationship principle.

Clinical psychologists have a therapeutic relationship with their clients and are ethically barred from having any other kind. They cannot be friends with their patients or be in romantic relationships with them, and they cannot treat family members or business partners. This principle stems from the recognition that each relationship you have with someone has different goals. A therapeutic relationship requires trust so that the patient can disclose information, but it also requires that the therapist be able to give feedback that the patient may find difficult to hear. To ensure that nothing takes primacy over the therapeutic relationship, therapists must avoid any other kind of relationship with their patients.

In the workplace, however, the dual-relationship principle is not an ironclad ethical rule. It’s reasonable for supervisors to have social relationships with their reports, and lots of workplace romances work out just fine. But when you become a supervisor for the first time, you should recognize that the goals of your new position may conflict with some of the goals related to being friends with your peer group when you started work. Your new role may create some tension or complications that you need to navigate. You may want to set ground rules about the conversations you have in social settings so that office gripes don’t become interpersonal battles when you’re out having fun.

Have explicit conversations with people you work with if you’re concerned about how your work relationship is affecting your personal relationships. Initiating these conversations may be awkward, because people don’t generally talk about boundaries in their social lives. But when work and social life collide, as they often do, it can be useful to ensure that everyone is comfortable with the constraints that may come from potentially conflicting goals.

Ethical Behavior

A final aspect of leadership involves ethics. The tools of leadership are value-neutral. Over the course of history, we have celebrated leaders for doing things that made the world a better place and reviled leaders who caused suffering and harm to others.

The trade-off between options that have short-term benefits and those that do good in the long term has ethical implications for leaders. The shareholder value ideology for running publicly traded corporations, for example, often pits short-term decisions that affect the quarterly stock price against long-term benefits to the company and its employees. There is no “correct” answer to dilemmas that involve these trade-offs. Instead, leaders must turn to values to guide how they approach them.

This leads to another wonderful distinction Woodruff makes in The Ajax Dilemma—between ideals and their doubles. An ideal is some standard that you want to live up to. For example, you might want to lead in a just manner that allows people to be recognized for their achievements and rewards them accordingly. A value’s double is a procedure that’s applied uncritically in an attempt to create that ideal. The typical double for justice is fairness. When you treat everyone in the same way, you don’t have to think critically about each situation; instead, you can apply a rule. Even if the outcome is bad, it’s easy to justify, because it follows a preset rule that was based on an easily articulated principle.

For most organizations, it wouldn’t be feasible to have every manager think through solutions to potential ethical dilemmas in the workplace. For one thing, individual-level decision making can be time-consuming. For another, it can lead to inconsistencies across the organization that may hamper productivity. So organizations design procedures for approaching these ideals to ensure a consistency of outcomes across organizational units. Unfortunately, these procedures often lead to suboptimal outcomes.

If you find yourself in a leadership position in which you must enforce policies whose outcomes conflict with your values or have consequences that violate the organization’s ideals, you should speak up. In many cases, policies were initially implemented with good intentions but nevertheless cause problems. You may have to enforce a bad policy in the short term, but that’s not sustainable in the long term.

It’s important to point out the negative consequences of policies to higher-level leaders in the organization. Often they don’t have direct experience with how procedures are being implemented and what effect they are having. By speaking up, you can spur policy revisions that will do a better job of upholding the organization’s ideal. In addition, if you let the people you supervise know that you’re working to change policies that have unjust outcomes, you can maintain trust with them while still adhering to the workplace rules your position requires you to implement.

Of course, if a bad policy remains in place even after you’ve tried to get it changed, you should question whether you want to continue working for that organization. I return to this issue in chapter 9.