Emotion is not a four-letter word, but it’s treated like one in many businesses and other organizations. Don’t ask me why—I’m an Italian-American, after all. If that seems like an offensive stereotype, I apologize. But I’m not sorry about being emotional or for being proud of my ethnic heritage. I think the two are linked. I laugh, I cry, I cheer, I groan. For better or worse, I express my feelings. It’s made me an effective leader, business executive, parent, and husband.

There’s magic in emotion. Do I really have to convince you of that? I’ll start with Winston Churchill’s emotionally charged speeches during World War II. By all rights, Great Britain should have crumbled before the Nazi blitz. But Churchill used words—fighting and winning words—as a weapon. Martin Luther King gave the civil rights movement an emotional battering ram with his “I Have a Dream” speech. How many sports teams have left the field or court at half-time losing badly and returned invincible fifteen minutes later? Is it something in the locker room drinking water? No, more than likely it was the emotion evoked by the coach in his pep talk. And now I will rest my case for the magic of emotion: Pedro Martinez of the Boston Red Sox is a superb pitcher, but when he struck out a record four batters in a row at the 1999 All-Star game—including Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire—it was talent plus the emotion of watching a frail old man by the name of Ted Williams throw out the first ball. You don’t stand on a pitcher’s mound in front of the Green Monster in Fenway Park wearing a Red Sox uniform and shrug that one off. Every pitch was powered by emotion.

Emotion is not just a feeling. It is a powerful, powerful tool.

Showing emotion and evoking it in others is so natural to me that after all this time in business I have trouble accepting the idea that open displays of emotion and deliberately creating an emotional business environment aren’t standard operating procedures everywhere. Emotion provides the winning edge. It’s the switch the turns on people power.

I know not everyone is as comfortable showing emotion as Italian-Americans. Different cultures have different attitudes toward expressing one’s feelings. There are gender differences too. Some men prefer to bottle it up inside. But come on! We’re talking about a society that rants and raves on radio talk shows, screams itself hoarse for $90 million baseball players, and waters Stephen Spielberg’s hedge fund with its tears. Maybe Spielberg has nothing to do with hedge funds, but its a good line and I’m sticking with it.

The fact is, we are not a culture that is reticent about emotion. The business bias against emotion in the workplace has got to go. Study after study has demonstrated that feelings profoundly and positively influence behavior. It doesn’t mean that intellect, rationality, and free will aren’t involved. And the emotion that I’m referring to has nothing to do with sexual intimacy or sexual harassment in the workplace. I’m talking about caring. I’m talking about trusting. I’m talking about being fed up with losing to the competition.

Giving a damn is a strong emotion. But strong emotions don’t mean that a person will stop doing his or her job professionally. Neither does it imply that if I “feel” a policy or decision is misguided I will fly off the handle. I feel lousy, for instance, whenever I’m forced to pay a traffic ticket—but I write the check. “Feeling” is irrelevant. Rationally, I don’t want my car booted or towed. The same thing applies at work. There are responsibilities and requirements that I don’t relish, yet they’ve got to be faced up to. Feeling emotion and doing the job are entirely compatible.

But many businesses have created an atmosphere that assumes that what we do to make a living is like paying traffic tickets, eight hours a day. Nothing we accomplish to stay gainfully employed, according to this model, is worthy of a smile, let alone a cheer. Emotion is therefore taboo, because it’s assumed that the real operative feeling is irritation, anger, outrage, or whatever. I don’t buy that at all. I like to work. I think most people do too—except when they find themselves spending their precious time incarcerated in a minimum-security facility that requires them to hide normal human feelings—Let it show, and out you go.

Folks, you can’t hide them. It doesn’t work. Feelings come out, for better or worse. It makes more sense to channel the positive feelings of pride and accomplishment that come from a job well done than to let those feelings ferment into resentment. Better to structure a business culture that can make productive use of emotion. We’ve turned a huge part of the workforce—perhaps the vast majority of it—into a legion of zombies. And it’s not fair. As a business practice, it’s also pretty damned stupid. And it is the reason I’m offering a full chapter on the subject of emotion and how to make it work for you.

Competition Taps Emotion

Daniel Goleman, the author of the bestsellers Emotional Intelligence and Working with Emotional Intelligence, helped introduce the concept that success in life is determined by our capacity to effectively manage our emotions. I love his books, but I probably shouldn’t use the word “manage” because it may be misinterpreted as meaning suppress or repress. What Goleman is saying is that we can put ourselves in charge of our emotions and make them work on behalf of our own best interests. If we don’t, though, emotions take charge. Instead of getting angry and deciding to solve an annoying problem, we just explode and smash furniture.¹

By pretending that emotions can be banned from the job, we invite uncontrolled and unchanneled emotional discharges. It may not come in the form of violence. Calling in sick, tuning out, or being argumentative are three other ways to unload anger. Know anybody who behaves that way in your office or company? I’ll bet you do.

What I have done as a leader is to try to give the people who work for me more productive outlets. Don’t kick the desk chair across the room; kick the competition out of the market. Don’t tune out; tune into a high-energy, highly demanding, and fun environment. When I became district manager of Xerox in Cleveland, Kodak was our principal competition for the high-end market. I announced that we weren’t going to rest until we had replaced every Kodak machine in the district. Kodak was the Evil Empire! It really got the juices flowing. Several years later when Danka bought out Kodak, my former adversaries told me that the declaration of war had cost them a tremendous amount of lost business.

As I’ve gotten older and more experienced, I’m less obsessed with creaming the competition as the primary motivating force in my life and in the lives of those I manage. But the old Frank Pacetta still exists alongside the new Frank Pacetta. Old Frank used to hang pictures of the other guy’s sales reps on his apartment walls to remind him that the enemy was out there and never slept. New Frank reads Robert K. Greenleaf’s writings that emphasize leadership as a teaching and servant role. Old/New Frank teaches his people the joys of serving the customer by taking a big order for a terrific product away from the competition and having a party to celebrate.²

The Value of Us Versus Them and Us Versus Us

I’m probably never going to be fully persuaded that conducting business without resorting to the traditional competitive strategies, tactics, and weaponry is either possible or desirable. Every customer who is being served by the competition is one less customer for me. I want that business, and don’t like it when somebody else has it.

“Like” it? Right. Emotion is involved. The customer has been persuaded that the competition’s product or service is superior to mine. I don’t like that. If it’s true, I better get busy improving what I sell and selling what I improve. If it’s not true, that’s even more galling because a superior product or service is being undercut by inferior sales, marketing, and other support efforts. Shame on me!

Competition triggers emotion. There’s nothing like winning or losing to get people up or to knock them down. There must be other incentives as well, but the competitive instinct is too powerful to ignore. That’s why sports are so popular. We win; they lose. An entire process and culture is built around ensuring that it happens. Being a servant—or to use the currently fashionable term, a customer service consultant—doesn’t get adrenaline going in quite the same way. Winning—head to head, them against us—creates a buzz and it’s a great feeling.

Start-up companies or those that are being challenged by adverse market conditions usually can’t take the time and care necessary to build a high performance noncompetitive culture that can get them off the ground or turn the tide soon enough. Going after the “enemy” is fast and effective. People understand what’s happening and what’s expected.

I insist that my teams know who they are competing against.

• What’s their strength?
• What’s their weakness?
• What do the customers say about them?
• How do their products compare to ours?
• What’s our major vulnerability?
• What can we do to fix it?

Intellectually, I can accept the proposition that it’s better to work hard to build such massive market dominance that competition becomes irrelevant. It’s the reasoning behind the so-called “category killers” like Home Depot. However, few businesses ever get to that point. You may be able to ignore the competition for a time, but eventually it starts to make itself felt. When that happens, it’s time consuming to invent or reinvent a culture that thrives on competition. If you’re the New York Knicks, the San Antonio Spurs may clean your clock, but at least you don’t have to learn how to play basketball at the same time. It’s a particular mistake to ignore the competition when your rival is on a roll. Wallow in bad news. Whenever the other team scores, your players should know about it and it should be an occasion for soul-searching. Show me somebody who doesn’t mind losing, and I’ll show you a loser.

• What did we do wrong?
• What did they do right?
• How do we get back in the game?
• Is this the start of a trend?

I want people to sense danger—to feel it. What’s the old line? If you hear footsteps, don’t look back, somebody may be gaining on you. I always look back. How else do you know if it’s time to get your butt moving? And when I don’t hear footsteps—that’s when I really get nervous. At times like that I reach for my security blanket: I notch up customer contact and the overall activity levels, and I throw some logs on the emotional fires.

One more point about lost business: Always ask the customer why he or she chose the rival product. It’s important information that all of your people need to hear. Get them to care enough so that it won’t happen again.

Although it seems like a quick way to stir up emotion, bad mouthing the competition is not something I recommend. For external consumption, it’s better to treat the competition with respect. The customer won’t be impressed by a hatchet job. Acknowledge what they do well and emphasize what you do better. Internally, I prefer to cast the competition as a formidable opponent not to be taken lightly. But of course, if they aren’t a serious threat, don’t invent a straw man. People will see right through that and your credibility will be damaged.

Talk about the competition frequently. Bring their products or promotional literature into meeting. There are few better ways for getting attention than holding up a rival’s product and saying, “This is better than ours.” Or ask a volunteer to sell the group that product based on what he or she knows about its strong points.

At least once or twice a year, launch a direct assault on the competition. The emotional blast is good for morale and it is excellent training to periodically go head-to-head with the competition. Seek to take measurable market share or to persuade customers to replace a rival’s product with your own. Be careful not to get carried away in the rush of adrenaline, though. This can be an expensive and time-consuming venture. Getting to the new business opportunities before the competition is even aware of them is a long-term approach. But taking business away from the enemy is fun and worth crowing about.

It’s worth rewarding, too. Special recognition, extra compensation, or other incentives amount to tangible evidence that beating the competition is important. If a company isn’t willing to pay for it, how crucial can it be? And the honest answer is—not very. Without rewards—and it doesn’t have to be money—the only emotion you’ll evoke is resentment. People value their time, and if you tell them that their time has no value, their response will be to tell you to shove it.

I’d prefer another more productive set of emotional responses, wouldn’t you? I think if an IBM employee in the 1980s or a Xerox employee of the 1970s had been asked who their competition was, the answer would probably have been, “We don’t have any.” And that’s why both corporations had near-death experiences. Competition keeps you sharp and focused. Without it, organizations turn flabby. When the competition does surface, they’re almost defenseless. I’m willing to be a servant or even a customer service consultant, but I’d sure hate to completely lose the thrill—and the practical business value—of winning.

 

As for “us versus us,” friendly competition between an organization’s teams or individuals also generates emotion. Many managers worry that internal rivalry will be counterproductive or lead to bad blood. I haven’t found that to be the case. An attentive leader will know pretty quickly if things are getting out of hand. One sign is lack of cross-talk among teams and a falloff in collaboration. Or lone wolves will break away from their teammates to pursue their own objectives.

The best remedy is a set of clearly stated organization-wide goals that can only be reached if everyone pulls their own weight. If I find that one team is lagging behind and another is far out in front, I’ll assign the hot-shots to work with the underachieves to get them up to speed. This kind of inter-team collaboration and contact is a must anyway. You’ve got to allow your best people to model their behavior for the others. Excellence rubs off—If he can do it, so can I.

By using a variety of internal rankings for teams and individuals, there’s an objective standard to evaluate performance. Go ahead, make a big deal about who’s leading and how they’re racking up such a stellar performance. Ask the stars to share their best practices and also do some mentoring. This alone is a tremendous tonic for many individuals who have been ground down by corporate cultures that are stingy with praise. Sometimes I think the “gratitude misers” actually fear that saying thank you will lead a worker to demand a seat on the board of directors or his or her own parking space.

Ignition by Recognition

I’ve touched on recognition a couple of times already. The subject deserves its own book. Here, it pertains directly to emotion. As we were writing this chapter, my sister-in-law stopped by the house one evening. She was glowing with happiness and enthusiasm. A new job? No, same old job with a vending machine company that, to put it kindly, is a trifle boring. A raise? No, the money’s okay. Jane was on her way back from an annual company meeting in Orlando, Florida. It was a great meeting, then? No, the same old thing—with one exception. Jane unexpectedly got an award for being one of the top five account executives in the country.

It made her year. Hey, Jane! Go girl!

And bravo to her company. People love to be loved, honored, respected. They just like hearing the words—“Thank you. Nice job.”

Researchers into human behavior believe that the need to achieve and the need to affiliate are two primary motivational factors. Basically, affiliators are people persons. They identify with others, the group, or family. Achievers may or may not also be affiliators, but they measure themselves against high standards and strive to meet goals. It seems to me that recognition, therefore, is the ideal way to reach both types. The affiliator is honored for contributing to the family; the achiever wins acclaim for accomplishing difficult tasks.

So, end of subject, right? What more needs to be said? A lot. Because most companies, large and small, simply do not dispense enough recognition.

• When was the last time you recognized your team or organization’s top team and individual?
• Do you recognize annually, quarterly, monthly, weekly, daily?
• Do you even have an objective evaluation standard to allow for meaningful recognition?
• Have you made a special point to thank somebody today?

I’ll take the last point first. When I ran the Danka sales operation, managers were told to supply my administrative assistant, Sandy, with the names of reps and support people who needed to be thanked personally by me for making a special effort. Sandy was my director of queme. I spent the end of every work day, sometimes until ten or eleven o’clock, leaving voice-mail, e-mail, or talking to them in person. Basic stuff like, “Thanks for making that extra call. It really paid off and it means a lot to us.”

When was the last time you got a compliment? I bet it made you feel pretty good—both about yourself and about the person who offered it. Psychologist Richard Carlson advises people to spend a moment every day thinking of someone to thank. He points out that gratitude is worth practicing in that it creates a sense of inner peace by countering resentment and frustration. Those are benefits that accrue to the one who says thank you. I believe it also extends to those who hear it. Don’t just think of someone to thank—go do it.³

Since I’m a die-hard advocate of “management by walking around,” I never miss an opportunity for thanking people for good work within earshot of their colleagues. I’ll just stop at the individual’s desk or cubicle and let it rip. But be careful not to get a reputation for empty flattery or playing favorites. If things are going badly in one of my operations, days will pass by without a word of praise or a thank-you being uttered. It’s a signal that everybody reads loud and clear: I’m dissatisfied and disappointed. At those times, the “walking around” mode turns into a question and answer session: “What do you hear about…?” “How long before…?” “What’s the story with…?”

As far as I’m concerned, insincere recognition is worse than no recognition. It turns people into cynics. Another Jane, this one married to my coauthor Roger Gittines, has a wall of plaques from her former career as a news correspondent for the Voice of America. She regards them as a joke because the VOA handed them out indiscriminately. Jane and Roger laughed uproariously when their car was broken into and a box full of her awards was stolen. The only thing of value was the cardboard carton.

The VOA is an international news service, and it’s nuts to send that kind of a message to its hard-working employees.

The Other Pay Day

Leaders forget how much every word and deed are scrutinized, analyzed, parsed, and gossiped about. People are paying attention to what you do—and don’t do. Failure to recognize extra effort and success is a message that hard work is not all that important. As a result, I rarely open a meeting without some form of recognition. I’ll ask people to come up front or stand at their seats. When I don’t, like my walking around periods when there’s no praise, everybody battens down the hatches.

I expect team leaders to do the same thing. Studies have found that one of the major reasons that people leave a job is that they feel their work is not being appreciated. And you know what? You can ask people if they feel appreciated by their boss. It’s really simple: Do you feel your work and your extra effort is appreciated around here? Yes or no. Why wait to find out that it is no, and too late to save a valuable employee?

If the answer is no, and he or she is a top performer, you better get off your butt and give them a hug. Only the top performers? Come on! They get the biggest hugs, but the others aren’t forgotten. We want to make everyone feel important to the success of the operation. Kristen Miller of Xerox is among the top three best sales reps I have ever worked with. She started in Cleveland at twenty-two, fresh out of college and, of course, needed every bit of encouragement she could find. The year she started, we were on a drive to become number one in the region and I set an “impossible” number for one crucial month—$7 million in sales. That was roughly two and a half times higher than our total for the previous year. I asked everyone to go all out. We made it, just barely. When I researched this book, Kristen told me she remembered that some of her colleagues came through with six-figure deals, and that the best she could do was sell two measly $5,000 copiers. At the meeting, when I announced the results, I asked Kristen to stand up. I told the group that her two machines had put us over the top. And they had.

Kristen says today, “From then on I was ready to run through walls.” And she did.

She single-handedly changed my definition of what to expect from a sales trainee. Before she came along, I figured two or three orders a month from a novice was acceptable performance. She’d write eight or nine. The more I told her how important her work was to the organization, the more she sold. I finally took a chance and put her in an important territory with a heavy budget; within a few months she owned every inch of it.

She loved what she did and couldn’t wait to get to work in the morning.

In the spring of 1999, Kristen was on medical leave from Xerox due to a difficult pregnancy. I’m sounding like Woodward and Bernstein, but sources told me sometime after I left the company that Kristen’s bosses were hands off, in terms of their management styles. They left her alone. This is a woman who doesn’t like that. She needs to be in the thick of things and to be pushed for results.

Kristen was feeling restless and adrift during her leave and wanted to continue her business career, but wondered whether it was worth it. Xerox, I believe, had managed to do the impossible—dampen her spirits. That’s unforgivable.

Partying for Profit

Recognizing achievement is a good excuse to party. I try to arrange one big bash each year, usually in January to kick off the new year’s activities. The affair can be built around a business theme or a message. But don’t overdo it. Let people take the night off and have fun.

Yeah, fun. Isn’t that a subversive idea! One of the most successful formats I’ve used over the years has been a variation on Hollywood’s Academy Awards. Try it. Rent a classy venue, hire a video crew to tape the event, book a band and a good master-of-ceremonies, and go for it: red carpet, black tie, and mink coats. The awards angle lets you pay tribute to your stars. Come up with fifteen or twenty “best” categories to honor individual and team performance. Welcome your newest employees, salute the veterans, and say farewell to those who are about to retire or move on. Don’t forget to honor families too. There will be high school and college grads to congratulate and “net adds” (a copier industry term that I use to tease new parents). Dish up pure, unadulterated emotion. No one will accuse you of being corny.

These celebrations are just as important for spouses as they are for the employees. They should get to hear the applause for their husband or wife and to take part in the business family experience. I believe in integrating our two families—the one at home and the other at the office—as much as possible. I don’t want my people to leave work and forget about it for the next twelve hours. Nor do I want them to leave home and blank out family issues while their on the job. The two should support and compliment each other.

I learned the value and emotional power derived from celebrations at Italian-American weddings, birthdays, and anniversaries—even funerals. In the afternoon you cry your eyes out and that night you’re screaming with laughter remembering the great times you had with the deceased. Celebrations make for traditions, and traditions create a strong family.

And besides, I’m a genuine party animal. I do a mean air guitar. Ask Paul MacKinnon, who has served as my deputy in many assignments over the years. In terms of our personalities, Paul is my exact opposite. He’s steady as a rock. I call him Padre. In 1990, we were having a huge party to celebrate a major victory at a ski resort to the east of Cleveland. The room was packed and the troops were egging me on to accompany the band, which was playing the Ramones’ “What I Like About You.” There I was on top of a table doing my riffs, the crowd clamoring for the band to crank up the volume louder and louder. The tune ended and somebody shouted, “One more time.” I was ready and I let loose with, “Yeah, one more time!” Padre calmly seized the microphone, reached up and took me by the arm, and said with a smile, “No more times.” And the party was over. Thanks, Paul.

The Sound of Business: Turn up the Volume

Time for more interactivity. Take the red notebook and list your top ten favorite songs. I’ll start you off with my numero uno: “Stairway to Heaven” by Led Zeppelin.

When you get the list completed, think back to a moment connected with a particular piece of music. Chances are you’ll rediscover some emotional blasts from the past. Music is pure emotion. It has the capacity to form an almost chemical bond with whatever other stray molecules of emotion that are whirring around to form unforgettable and powerful combinations that heighten energy and excitement.

I rarely make a presentation that does not include music. The ears, not the eyes, are the quickest route to our emotional core. I do, however, draw the line at the theme from Rocky. I’m pretty hokey, but not that hokey. In 1990, when one of my operations was coming off a particularly bad year, I needed an anthem that would rally and inspire. I chose Tom Petty’s “I Won’t Back Down.” That line says it a lot better than any words I could utter. They didn’t need another talk from me. They needed to rock! And that’s how the meeting ended—people on their feet, shaking, rattling, and rolling it. The next day they were rolling the competition again.

I love music. In college, I played “Four-Way Street” so often that one night my roommate Don snapped and threw it out the window. No problem, I went out and bought another copy. In the early eighties, when I was a Xerox product specialist, I traveled with Keith Davis, a terrific sales rep who always planned out great days. We almost always got an order. The two of us had a marvelous time cruising his territory with the stereo blasting out Bob Seger tunes.

What fun!

There is no reason a job can’t be fun. And every reason that a job must be fun; if it isn’t, people will tune out and switch off. Is that because we are frivolous and foolish at heart? No. Work is hard. Fun lightens the load and makes its inevitable routine and repetitious aspects easier to endure. My children’s sports coaches have caught on to this. Basketball practice for the eighth-grade girls’ team is always accompanied by hard driving, upbeat music. There’s a huge boombox sitting in the bench blaring disco tunes. Those who aren’t at the line taking shots or doing lay-ups are on the sidelines skipping rope or dancing. It’s great! With the boys’ team, in contrast, all you hear is the sound of balls hitting the floor. Boring! The girls’ team won their championship in 1998 and, along the way, got a chance to polish their dance steps. The coach of the freshman boys’ baseball team must have been paying attention. At batting practice that spring, his music was even louder. Playing a sport is a blast, but those drills—while absolutely essential—are sheer drudgery. The music keeps the kids focused and pumped up while they are mastering the fundamentals.

We can do the same thing in business. When I ran district sales operations in Cleveland and Columbus, I used music for special events to set an exciting and inspirational mood, but I didn’t use it in the office on a regular basis. I now realize that I should have. There are periods during the day when people can use a lift or a change in the atmosphere. Select a piece of music that becomes the signature for success and play it whenever a key goal is met or a major sale is booked. “Dress down days” have become popular in many offices; how about “music days”? If things generally get off to a slow start on Mondays, launch the week with some hard rock. Or if Wednesdays bog down, hit them with one of my favorites, Harry Chapin’s Taxi.

TV shows have theme songs. Why? The music conveys a message: Stay tuned, here comes fun, drama, excitement, inspiration—whatever. When viewers hear the music, they think of the product. The same goes for advertising jingles, college football fight songs, and love songs that couples adopt as “our song.” We play “Pomp and Circumstance” at graduations, “Ave Maria” at weddings, and the “Star-Spangled Banner” at sporting events in order to raise those moments to a higher plane of significance, to make them memorable, special, and—here’s that word again—fun.

Work is the last bastion of puritanism. We treat work with the reverence that used to be reserved for church. If you’re having fun something’s wrong! Even church is more fun these days than most jobs. The priest, rabbi, or minister has an inspirational message to share, the music is great, some congregations applaud the soloists in appreciation or to celebrate a christening, and there’s genuine fellowship and community. I walked by a United Methodist Church one Sunday recently and Motown was rocking the place instead of Rock of Ages. It sounded like they were having a ball.

How ironic! Religion, which in many traditions was steeped in sacrifice and suffering, has become the domain of joy, while business is a place of darkness and agony. And the double irony is that many companies sell a spirited and spiritual message to their external customers through touchy-feely ads, while smothering their internal customer, the employee, in bleakness.

Come off it!

Doing serious and important work doesn’t mean that we have to suffer. To me, there’s an element of mistrust and distrust at the core of this aversion to fun in the workplace. People who are enjoying themselves, the reasoning goes, aren’t being efficient and productive.

Huh?

Author Daniel Goleman points out that the key to building peak performance during periods of prosperity and the resilience to get through slumps is creating work groups that can joke together and enjoy good times. Without this bond, groups are more likely to lose their effectiveness and fall apart at the seams when the going gets tough.

You know from experience: Good times do not last forever. Business success is a mixed blessing. The good news is that you’re successful; the bad news is that you’re successful. Complacency and caution set in. The competition increases the pressure. The higher the climb, the harder the fall. Companies that have weathered their share of adversity know this and hang on to practices and procedures that helped them survive the last downturn. Once a crisis strikes, it may be too late to build strong work groups, welded together by the enjoyment that they jointly experience. Pay cuts, downsizing, and twelve-hours days aren’t much fun, particularly if the culture is grim and joyless to start. It is a lot easier to go the extra mile in the company of people you’ve laughed with and celebrated with than to be thrown into a life or death struggle depending on people with whom you lack emotional ties and a reservoir of good feelings.

The power of music in this respect comes from its shared nature. From tom-toms to trombones, music is a feature of communal life: lullabies, marching bands, hymns, funeral dirges, rap, and opera. It seems absurd to me that the community that we are immersed in for a minimum of forty hours a week would be one that is devoid of music. Sure, some places have Muzak or other elevator music services. But the purpose is to soothe and tranquilize. Is that because the atmosphere is tense and riddled with conflict?

While I’m not knocking Muzak, my personal choice is for musical selections that generate high energy, excitement, and electricity. That’s what I’m listening for when I walk into a new place of business. The ears are just as perceptive as the eyes. I don’t have to look for trouble, I can hear it.

If I’m not hearing music, what am I hearing?

Silence?

Hushed voices?

Complaints?

Bickering?

Scolding?

Each environment comes with its own soundtrack. What’s yours? What message does it convey?

One of the songs on my top ten list is “American Pie.” Don McClean’s line grabbed me when I first heard it and it still does—“I knew if I had my chance, I could make those people dance.”

That’s what great leaders do—they make ’em dance.

The Uses and Abuses of Fear

We’ve been talking about normal human emotions, so it’s time to consider fear. Is fear a legitimate leadership technique?

No.

Is fear an element in the relationship between leaders and those they lead?

Absolutely.

The biggest fear—and the one that’s justified—is that a leader will fail. All of us have a direct interest in our leader’s success. Naturally, we worry about it, and that’s why leaders are put under the microscope. We want to be the first to know when there’s trouble shaping up. In addition, the assumption most of the time is that the leader will crater. Blessed is the pessimist for he is never disappointed. I suppose this attitude comes from watching unprepared leaders self-destruct and having to deal with the fallout. All of us have pretty good radar for detecting the signs that the hotshot new manager is “CC”: Clearly Clueless.

This kind of fear breeds the cynicism, low expectations, and disengagement (emotional and physical) that contribute to the hapless leader’s predicament and ultimate collapse. This guy’s going to go and take me with him? Not a chance. I believe the only antidote is to give new leaders time to prove themselves. How much time? Oh, a day or two.

I have made best friends and lifelong enemies in less time than that—and you have too. Clearing a day or two “fear-free zone” for a new leader is plenty. You’ll be able to tell quickly whether he or she is bound for glory or the gulag. That means, if you’re the incoming leader, there’s not much leeway for mistakes (I talk about how to get off to a fast and effective start in the next chapter).

Take a swallow of Doctor P’s truth serum and answer this question truthfully: Are you afraid of the boss?

No. That’s what I thought. Hardly anyone is willing to admit it. I hate the boss, disrespect the boss, think the boss is a dork, but I’m not afraid of him.

Another dose of truth serum coming up. The first dose obviously wasn’t strong enough: Are you afraid of the boss?

If the answer is yes, it’s time to take stock. The boss may be a sadistic idiot, but you don’t have anything to fear. Hand in your resignation and walk out the door. No one deserves to live or work in fear of anyone or anything. Don’t tell me that jobs are hard to find or that the money is good. Pack it in. What sinks a bad leader faster than being hit by a nuclear-tipped torpedo is when his best people say, “I’m outta here.” Saying bye-bye is the best revenge.

The other kind of fear—fear as a leadership technique—should have lost its legitimacy at about the time drawing and quartering went out of fashion. I was going to say thumb screws, but they’re still in use in some places. Deliberately creating fear is a crummy technique.

You’ve got thirty days to turn this place around or you’re history. It sounds good if you’re scripting a made-for-TV movie. What happens, though, is thirty days of CYA—Cover Your Ass. Everybody runs off and hides. Seems kind of counterproductive to me. When the troops are dug in and camouflaged, then it’s all up to you. A total do-it-yourself job. But aside from hot-dog stands and a few other enterprises, in today’s business world success means doing-it-with-others. For the truly gifted, enforcing a reign of terror and making a profit can be done, I suppose, but is it worthwhile? The rewards just aren’t commensurate with the effort to burn, loot, and pillage.

Seriously, it is one thing to make hard decisions that people disagree with, to rule for one side against another, to deal firmly with conflict, to tell another person that the time has come to seek opportunities elsewhere—it’s another thing to play fear games. And that brings us to the crossover point between fear and the conscious awareness of consequences. If there is such a thing as good fear and bad fear, the conscious awareness of consequences is the former.

Effective leaders must make us aware of the consequences of our actions and enforce those consequences. Personally, I don’t regard that as fear. It’s discipline, responsibility, and accountability. Without those three essential elements, leaders and all those who depend on them are doomed to fail. Consequences are not a function of random chance; they’re pure cause and effect. The leader’s job is to remind us of that and to oversee a process that results in positive outcomes. If he or she doesn’t do that, everyone—fearful and fearless—is in jeopardy.

Not long ago, my son Frankie went on a Saturday sleepover with his buddies at another family’s home. When I went by to pick him up the next morning, the host’s dad came out to the car and offered me congratulations. “Congratulations for what?” I asked. He said, “For Frankie not getting arrested last night.”

That’s an attention grabber.

He told me the boys had decided to go hang out at the nearby park to see if some girls happened to be around. If that sounds like a stupid teenage boy trick, you’re right. Who happened to be around were the police enforcing the evening curfew for teens under the age of sixteen. Frankie was the only one who wasn’t bagged. When I got him in the car, he explained that he had stayed behind to watch TV.

“Didn’t you want to go with the guys and check out the girls?” I asked.

“Yeah I did, Dad.”

“Why didn’t you go, then?”

“I knew if I got caught you’d kill me.”

Yessss! Is Frankie afraid of me? No, I doubt it. But he definitely has a conscious awareness of the consequences of his actions and, as a result, the outcome was positive—because I’m doing my job as a leader and a father. It isn’t easy for either of us, but I’m too afraid of the consequences not to.

I do my job—and I do get excited. Both of us reap the rewards of emotion: The son stays out of trouble, and the father knows that his lectures and nagging haven’t been for naught.