Do We Even Recognize Poor Leadership Any More?

A few months ago, I started a series of LinkedIn posts by asking the question, “Do we really know what poor leadership looks like these days?”??

My answer to my own question - Not only no, but no to the point that we have so normalized poor leadership that we no longer even recognize it as such. Poor leadership is exhausting and soul crushing for a motivated workforce!

Why do this exercise? First, a literary agent (thank you Wendy!!) challenged me to create a series of leadership posts using the book proposal she taught me to write. Second, and about that same time, a former junior officer reached out with a mentorship challenge; she was struggling to work for a poor leader, and it broke my heart to hear her story. This last one’s for you LT!

In posts 1-6, I pointed out that poor leaders lack integrity, are indecisive and driven by fear and self-preservation in the decisions they do make, communicate poorly (if at all), don’t genuinely care for their team (they fake it at best), thrive in toxic cultures and fail to understand the value of critical self-assessment, and run from a crisis lest they publicly demonstrate their poor leadership.??

The final post in this series, post 7, should come as no surprise to those I served alongside or know…Poor leaders have no respect for their vulnerability to their own vanity. This goes far beyond mere ego and hubris. Different from the first 6 posts, which I limited to 500 words, I’m publishing this final post as an article. The topic is worthy of such.

Respecting your vulnerability to your own vanity represents the difference between good, and even great leadership, to being a truly illustrious leader.??Poor leaders have no understanding of this, because in their minds, leadership is all about them.

It seems so obvious, right? Not so fast. Don’t think you are susceptible??It’s worth a pause to truly reflect. If you are the leader of your organization, whether you command a warship, coach a team, lead a congregation, own a business, lead a town or lead a nation, think again.?When I consider my previous assignments as a commander at sea and ashore, a Squadron Commodore, and most certainly as a Rear Admiral, I was exceptionally susceptible to vanity.?

My arrival and departure were announced on every warship I visited, anywhere in the world in any navy.?Onboard the ship where I was embarked, in addition to announcing my arrival and departure, a single bell was struck when I first stepped on or off that warship.?When I was embarked, the ship flew my pennant at all times, and I even had my own absentee pennant which let everyone know whether I was onboard the ship or not.?I had the best parking spot.?My authority?was absolute.?Such small things, but I was inescapably susceptible to vanity, particularly as a Flag Officer.?Even if you are the leader of a very different organization from the Navy, consider how the smallest of daily interactions and perks afforded to you as the leader make you susceptible to your own vanity.

The leadership traps of this vulnerability are so easy to identify, and yet I would argue every leader who has ever been fired or relieved of duty suffered a thread of this vulnerability.

So, what can be done??First, and like any addiction, leaders must have awareness of and respect for the power of vanity to lure from core values.??Second, leaders must acknowledge and accept their personal and professional vulnerability to vanity.?Third, leaders must?take action!??

A few?very simple, actionable steps as a sample:

1.?Turn the camera around!?I know this may be challenging for the selfie generation, but point the camera at your workforce, away from you.?To fight my own vanity in command I often carried my camera or phone with me everywhere I went every day.?I did my best to capture pictures of all of my Sailors and team doing great things every day.

2.?Always look for opportunities to recognize your team.?Success belongs to your team, the failures are yours!

3.?Avoid compromising positions.?This is really a much deeper morality discussion, but one of the best ways to be aware of and respect the power of vanity is to always avoid positions of compromise.?Leaders should avoid situations where their vanity is fueled and their ego is stroked. Consider the rocket fuel of vanity for political leaders speaking to their base, athletes succeeding in front of their home crowd, or artists performing in front of an applauding audience. Even for those of us with much smaller audiences, beware of this lure.

4.?Recognize breakpoints in your leadership when you find yourself surrounded by a lack of contrarian advice.?There is a classic Sopranos episode where Carmela Soprano tells her husband Tony that his crew only laughs at his jokes because he’s the boss.?Tony doesn’t believe Carmela until he tests her comment by starting to say things that aren’t?funny at all while as his crew laughs and hangs on his every word.?Trust me, the day you became the leader of your organization you didn’t become funnier overnight, nor did you suddenly become the genesis for all of your organization’s the best ideas.

Further, leaders must also recognize that their followers are going to give them what they think is wanted.?I’ll use my own example.??Exhibit A:

One of the most important lessons every junior officer onboard a Navy ship is taught is to inspect the spaces they own every day.?As Commanding Officer of the warship?Gonzalez, I was responsible for every space onboard the ship so doing a daily tour somewhere onboard the ship was exceptionally important to me.?On my first Sunday at sea, less than a week after I took command, I chose to do my walk around weather decks of the ship in anticipation of conducting a freshwater wash of the ship later in the day.?Not wasting the mentorship opportunity, I took my Repair Division Officer with me.?I pointed out the need for improvement in some of our topside firefighting stations and then went up to the bridge of the ship.?No more than 30 minutes after my tour with the Repair DIVO, I learned that he had assembled all of his Sailors topside to bust rust on every topside fire station.?That wasn’t what I was looking for!?What I wanted was for my young officer to develop a plan and timeline for topside preservation of his equipment, not roust up his entire Division on a Sunday morning.?As the new Captain though, I had just re-learned a very powerful lesson – the power of my word and the desire for my Sailors to want to please the Captain.?

In every organization, no one wants to disappoint the boss, and?like any boss in any organization, being on the receiving end of the desire for subordinates to please can be a very dangerous place.?Warning sign: it’s one of vanity’s best?hiding places!

Leaders must also recognize that there is a reason vanity is considered the deadliest of sins. So, what happens? Good leaders master the basics of good leadership. They excel at critical self-assessment and demonstrate tremendous crisis leadership. Their communication and decision-making skills amaze every day, and then something happens, usually quite slowly. Everything becomes about them. Leaders start to believe they are indispensable, everything revolves around them, success begins and ends with them. Even great leaders forget that leadership is not about self, but those they serve.

I’ll stick with myself again. Exhibit B:

At some point during my command tour of the Nuclear Power Training Unit in Ballston Spa NY, the?Director of Naval Nuclear Propulsion, asked me to talk about my most significant failure during my previous command of the destroyer USS?Gonzalez. I don’t exactly remember how this conversation came up or why he asked me the question, but when Naval Reactors himself asks such a question, clarity of thought and self-assessment of the soul is a must.

I told the Admiral about a failed engineering assessment which occurred near the end of my tour onboard?Gonzalez. So how did I get there? I didn’t respect my vulnerability to my own vanity.??Gonzalez?had been remarkably successful during my tour. My ship and Sailors were doing exceptionally well, and I couldn’t have been prouder of them. When I answered the Admiral’s question, two things clearly crystalized in my mind. First, I took my foot off the throttle of the things that had been most important to me for the first 17 months of my command tour. I eased up at the finish line. I made the failed assumption that the daily shipboard routines I had put so much attention on early were running in automatic and no longer needed my daily attention. I was wrong. Second, I accelerated the date of the engineering assessment to before my change of command so I could turn over a ship with one more assessment successfully completed. We had been successfully knocking out every assessment to prepare for our next deployment, and I thought this engineering assessment would be one more to add to the list of successes. I was wrong. Even though I had been a successful nuclear engineer in previous assignments, I failed to understand the specific standards to which this non-nuclear engineering assessment would be conducted and didn’t properly set my team up for success. I failed my team.

The Admiral thanked me for sharing and then we moved on to another topic. I didn’t put too much thought into his question and my answer right away. Then it hit me. For all of the time I put into training on integrity with respect to leadership, he was mentoring me on what erodes integrity for those of us privileged to lead. Although he didn't use the word, he was teaching me about vanity and my own susceptibility to it.?He forced me to look hard at myself in the mirror. Looking back even further, he was aware of the success I was having leading one of his three training commands, and he was giving me a gentle and subtle reminder not to be too impressed with?myself. What a powerful leadership lesson from a great leader.

Feel free to share, and I hope you are working for a great leader! Thanks for reading.