How to tell a Flatterer from a Friend
Filipe Morais, PhD
Governance, Strategy, & Sustainability. Academic, researcher, columnist, consultant and board member.
To all the flatterers and those that love being flattered, this extract from Plutarch's Moralia, "How to Tell a Flatterer from a Friend" is extremely well put and should make good food for thought. Particularly, #boards and #ceos must be able to tell the difference between "Flatterer and Friend" - Your best friend on the board and on the executive team is not the one who flatters, but the one who faces the issues head on and speaks in plain and direct terms, sharing his/her thinking in full with no rhetorical devices.
"Plato says, my dear Antiochus Philopappus, that everyone grants forgiveness to the man who avows that he dearly loves himself, but he also says that along with many other faults which are engendered thereby the most serious is that which makes it impossible for such a man to be an honest and unbiased judge of himself. “For Love is blind as regards the beloved,”b unless one, through study, has acquired the habit of respecting and pursuing what is honourable rather than what is inbred and familiar. This fact affords to the flatterer a very wide field within the realm of friendship,c since in our love of self he has an excellent base of operations against us. It is because of this self-love that everybody is himself his own foremost and greatest flatterer, and hence finds no difficulty in admitting the outsider to witness with him and to confirm his own conceits and desires. For the man who is spoken of with opprobrium as a lover of flatterers is in high degree a lover of self, and, because of his kindly feeling toward himself, he desires and conceives himself to be endowed with all manner of good qualities; but although the desire for these is not unnatural, yet the conceit that one possesses them is dangerous and must be carefully avoided". In: Plutarch's Moralia, Vol I, LOEB Edition, page 264-265.
Great leaders hate flattery and surround themselves with the best possible people that will challenge them and tell them when they disagree! What kind of #board and #top team do you operate in?
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4 年Tell the truth unvarnished. It sounds easy but who does this even when their own career or livelihood is on the line? In my experience, this is what leadership needs, even if it means a leader hearing what they least want to hear and facing what they least want to face. Thanks Filipe, also for reaching back into history and reminding us that some ancient wisdom is still with us for good reason!