The age of conspicuous consumption, the transaction-accumulation age of the deal has culturally birthed the age of the empty suit, lost leaders in search of identities. Our societies and citizens are stuffed full of emptiness, and too many leaders are largely unknowable, distant and unaware. Leaders have become as good as the deal they strike, the payoff they receive, the package they negotiate. Actions, even lives, are crafted on alters of cosmic vending machines in hopes of many happy returns. In all this phenomenal success, meaning is more marginalized, purpose more diminished. Integrity was not on the shelf as often or priced as cheaply before the age of the deal. It is now rare to find someone who has not been infected, a leader who is the proud owner of everything that cannot be bought, a soul who is not for sale. The flawless leader has rejected the seductions that 1) people are objects, 2) control trumps trust, and 3) identity is based in accomplishment. An unfortunate side effect of our quid pro quo culture is the commoditization of our integrity.

Objectification

Studies tell us the shelf life of the average CEO is less than four years. Integrity priced too cheaply and made too widely available is too often the culprit. The primary symptom of bread-and-milk integrity pricing is leaders viewing people as the means to their ends and not ends in and of themselves. Viewing people as means is equivalent to viewing them as objects, not equals. Objectifying people is rampant in our societies and is a projection of low self worth and self-hate. The narcissistic CEO who objectifies others as means to their ends typically suffers from self-hate and low self-esteem. People with high self worth do not prostitute themselves or others so easily.

Control

Between the rooms of fear and faith there is the door of choice. On that door is the doorknob of control. Our affinity for control locks us in fear, separated from the possibility of a powerful life of faith. Control is the enemy of trust. Trust is not the answer to everything, but for relationship to occur it is essential. Leadership is relationship. Leaders who believe control trumps trust tend to be isolated micromanagers, devoid of depth, and lacking powerful relationships. Control is often necessary and effective in organizations and societies, but it’s often misapplied to leadership. Flawless leaders sequester control in favor of trust in relationships.

Identity

We are human-beings not human-doings. If you are what you do, then when you don’t you aren’t. Accomplishment is important – hey, we need to get stuff done, but it is not who we are. Who you are is your answer to the question of life. It is the only appropriate answer to every question we face, especially the tough ones. What you do flows from who you are. The age of the deal has glorified competence over identity. We now have empty suits that can condescendingly execute complex tasks, but have no idea who they are or what is right and what is wrong. Our ethics and morality have been summarily sacrificed on the alters of our missing identities.

Flawless leaders have struggled with the wrenching question, “What will I do in this life with no expectation of a return?” They can discuss the question, “Who am I” without talking about where they work and what they do. The solidity of their identity creates depth in their relationships, synchronized convergent effort by willing followers, emblazoned service to worthy purpose, and a sense of deep-water satisfaction that is lacking in the kiddie pools full of empty suits.

The 76 million baby-boomer Americans born between 1946 and 1964 are poised to flood the retirement market this decade. As they exit stage left, the dramatic drop in birth rates from one generation to the next will create a resounding thud. The 46 million Americans that form generation X not only have big shoes to fill – they have too many shoes to fill. The demographic reality of having about 40% less leaders to fill vacant leadership positions during the next decade is more than just cause for concern. More disconcerting still is the realization that many retiring leaders will unknowingly do everything in their power to cripple their successors.

When the workaholic-boomer leaders who fell in line, toed the line, colored in the lines, and epitomized the long grey line reluctantly hand over the baton to the savvy, pragmatic, nomadic, outside-the-box gen-x-rs who reactively hate everything to do with lines, the resulting clash of the titans could send your business careening.

The boomer generation gave the world some of the best leaders of all time. Most current senior corporate leaders are boomers. While their standards and strengths provided unparalleled growth and success, their generational preferences concerning autocracy and structure will undoubtedly contribute to transition conflict in this coming decade. There are without question many leaders that will navigate the shift in power magnificently, but our observations from working with leaders for over twenty years lead us to conclude that a significant percentage of leaders will unwittingly hamper effective leader transitions. Due to culturally reinforced behaviors, we forecast that a majority of boomer-leaders leaving the job market over the next ten years will reflexively employ at least one of the following Crippling Factors:

1. Scarce Power – viewing power as a scarce resource will cause unnecessary delays in the transfer of that power and subsequently cause organization stutters.
2. Light Switch – assuming the transfer of power must happen all at once – in one moment – will limit successor learning and organization effectiveness.
3. Short Leash –micromanage successors with unnecessary life support and who will manage them when you pull the plug?
4. Sink or Swim – throwing successors in shark tanks without access to your wise counsel is petulant and a breach of trust.
5. Fence Sit – considering gen-x successors on probation until you are emotionally prepared to leave, fosters an indecisive and distrustful relationship that leads to hobbling manipulation.
6. Plastic Perfection – valuing image over honesty will saddle your organization with lackluster leaders that culturally force cosmetic compliance instead of facilitate authentic commitment.
7. Meaningless Motion – the age of putting in your time to make the grade has ended – harnessing your successor with obsolete rules and paradigms may cause them to go elsewhere in a hurry.
8. Tried and True – beleaguering successors in skeptical conversations where you embody the answer and they embody the question contradicts inherent equality.

US corporate leader transitions promise to be one of the biggest economic obstacles in the upcoming decade. Organizational redesign might be a small component of the solution, but the foundational breakthrough resides in managing the relationship and processes between leader and successor. Organizations must act expeditiously to plan and foster productive leader transitions, or find something believable on which to blame their future ineptitude.

Productive transitions for key leaders and officers will only be well facilitated through powerful coaching. Unfortunately, most executive coaching does not empower leaders to self-navigate their own transformation. Structures and processes must be established, but the benefits of well-placed wisdom by a trusted advisor can never be under estimated. The book, Leaving Prisons: Release Your Trapped Value, was designed to serve as a compass for leaders navigating this territory. It details many of the intricate connections between organizational change and personal change while supporting leaders as they assess and shift their thinking and behavior with conscious choice.

W.H. Auden said in The Age of Anxiety, “We would rather be ruined than changed. We would rather die in our dread than climb the cross of the present and let our illusions die.” The impending leader transitions are organization changes, and all organization change begins with personal change. Regardless of the situation, there is always a correlating personal transformation that enables leaders to propel their organizations toward the desired future. When that personal change is ignored, the organization follows the leader into a prison of oblivious rigidity, crippling its ability to achieve dreams and objectives. The immovable reality is that if our existing leaders do not effectively change themselves, the looming transitions of the next decade will cripple organizational potential and possibility.

Scarce Power. Lord Acton’s 1887 dictum still applies to leaders today, “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” The viewpoint that power is a scarce resource is a symptom of the dangerous belief that leaders should be judged by a different standard, that they are above the common folk. Leaders who selfishly stockpile power create disempowered organizations and build weak relationships that are disconnected, disrespectful and dysfunctional. Hierarchical position, coercion and adoration give a false sense of pseudo-power, and collude together to support the lie that power is to be hoarded. The reality is that power comes to those who bring others power. Power comes to those who bring hope. Creating power and hope in others are inherently foundational responsibilities of leadership. Power comes not to those to whom others have surrendered. Power comes to those who have surrendered to a greater purpose.

To successfully transition, leaders must incrementally share power over time with successors. Collaborative leadership is required: a leadership that reflexively partners, shares and cooperates. This is a pronounced shift in thinking and behavior for many leaders, but the payoffs will prevent major hiccups in upcoming transitions.

Light Switch. We worked with a corporate President who was planning on retiring in two years. He had selected his replacement and wanted us to work with him to “get him ready.” He also told us up front that he would not let his successor know about the plan until the last minute – he intended to announce his retirement and his successor simultaneously as he walked out the door. We declined on this leader light switch project and later heard the planned successor became disillusioned and took a top job with a competitor.

Transition, at its best is a complex relationship, and relationships take time – most organizations would do well to jettison the light switch theory. It is founded on a belief that leadership is a position. It is not a position; leadership is a social capacity that is only powerful when shared. Leaders become more powerful when they empower others through realizing that leadership is not about them, it is about the purpose and people they serve. When leadership is about you, you are at risk in defining your life by your defects. Leaders saying things like, “that is just the way I am,” “you’ll have to get used to me,” “it’s just like me to be…” and “give me the benefit of the doubt” are probably inept at leader transition and blinded by their excessive narcissism.

Short Leash. Much of our observations have shown that micromanagers, wielders of the short leash, do so out of distrust and fearful self-protection. The scary downside is that leader self-protection hardly ever aligns with leaders’ ethical mandate as fiduciaries: organization protection. One execution-guru CEO we worked with was so controlled by distrust and self-protection that while he was perfecting results at his mammoth company, his wife of twenty-eight years left him for the landscaper that cut the grass of what is now his former home. Through working with us, this CEO realized that his propensity to develop short leash relationships had infused distrust and betrayal in all his relationships. We found excessive internal theft, anemic innovation, and prevailing adversarial attitudes toward management throughout his company. Of the three people he had earmarked as potential successors, the two most desirable were about to negotiate job offers with other firms. His own short leash effectively hamstrung and hung out to dry this CEO.

Short leashes occur when unplanned organizations collide with dysfunctional transitioning leaders. Effective transitions are the simple sequence of key processes. Responsible organizations plan retirements with leaders in advance while successors are groomed and evaluated constantly. As a result of this planning, successors should be selected, promoted and announced as much as eight to twenty-four months prior to a leader’s leaving depending on the size and nature of the organization. After the planning and selection processes, the transition process takes place during the time when both leader and successor share the job, the power, and learn from each other. It is a mentoring time for the leader and a stretching time for the successor. When these processes are effectively in place and appropriate intervention, monitoring, and coaching are applied, transitions propel institutions to new heights of success.

Sink or Swim. The sink or swim strategy is fundamentally flawed in that it presupposes isolation and individuality. Most corporate leaders talk about collaboration and connectedness as mandates for success, yet they encourage disconnected sink-or-swim tactics with successors. Leadership is inherently lonely stuff, but the red flag of sink or swim signals the trapping of value. Tossing successors in the shark tank is a sign of independence driven relationship avoidance. Without relationship there can be no leadership. The best one can hope for in such a circumstance is the thin productivity of cosmetic compliance.

Leadership is ultimately and consummately a relationship, a connection between people. Leadership does not rest in a position; it rests in followers’ convergence. If people follow you, you are leading. Leadership is dependent on people. Leaders do not lead results, profits, outcomes, property, production, or anything else – they will always and only ever lead people. Leadership is also dependent on voluntary relationship, for followers must actually want to follow. So when leaders use sink or swim succession tactics, we know they are aspiring to lead from a distance, and we know they are trapping value and will cripple their successor.

Fence Sit. Leader indecisiveness is a symptom of the illogical feelings of worthlessness. These emotionally stunted feelings and hesitations form cholesterol-like organization bottlenecks and strangle successor effectiveness. To vacillate and consider successors on probation until you are able to tolerate the emotional discomfort associated with transition constitutes an immature betrayal of your replacement and your organization. Successors that spend time with fence sitting leaders, report that they feel distrusted, confused and demeaned. These are relational projections from leaders fighting the deep tumult of worthlessness and infecting newly appointed leaders. Manipulation and dishonesty typically govern the relationships between leader and successor in situations like this.

Fence sitters don’t realize that abdicating choice is a choice in and of itself. When they fully realize that by avoiding decisions they are adversely decisive, they not only face their fears but also potentially feel free to make alternative choices. It is this courageous freedom that releases trapped value in themselves and their organization. Transition takes time and doubt is the enemy of time. Fence sitters need deadlines, but more importantly they need doubt-coaching throughout the transition process; the selection decision they made previously is usually still valid despite their current feelings.

Plastic Perfection. Successful transitions require authenticity. Your successor and your organization need you to be real in order to harvest the data required for leadership continuity. Valuing image over honesty will saddle your organization with lackluster bosses that culturally coerce instead of facilitate authentic commitment and engagement. The biggest root cause to the plastic leader’s problems is that successors never get to know them; inheritors intuitively sense you are covering up something and they know better than to trust that. The plastic leader’s prison cell is their outer shell. People never get close enough to form relationships, so transition is tenuous at best.

For the transitioning leader, being always transcends that which appears to be: appearance. Successors sense the difference. Transition is the time to clear out the closets of skeletons, discuss the undiscussables, and disclose the secrets. Authenticity is scary because it requires that we speak of our own disingenuousness and hypocrisy. While this is uncomfortable and rare for leaders, do it anyway – it works. Leaders are not without defect, and exposing and discussing your obvious errors authentically shows that you are honest and can be trusted. Being authentic is the embodiment of truth, and truth is indiscriminant to and inconvenient for appearances. Truth invites scrutiny, and for successors, truth is a platform for future success.

Meaningless Motion. A retiring Group President we were coaching was in deep conflict with her gen-x successor over the rewarding of empty effort. The heir-apparent leader was annoyed by how much time was spent making sure people were in certain places at certain times as opposed to managing results and outcomes. The soon to retire leader was patiently and condescendingly extolling to her successor the supposedly self-evident mandate to manage meaningless motion. After talking with them for a while, I asked for a break and took the President aside.

We knew each other well and we talked about how her replacement just wasn’t getting it. We also talked about how the world is much different now and that new perspectives were required to create a better future. We landed together on the thought that as a mentor, it was time for her to hand over even more control and to reflect and offer advise on the fresh thinking she hears. She called me later that month and said she was now living by a new standard of wisdom for herself, “Don’t just do something, stand there!”

It’s easy to say the world has changed, but it is an entirely different thing to live through it. The times have shifted. What worked in the past worked well, but indications are that it might not work that well in the future. The age of putting in your time to make the grade has ended, and unknowingly harnessing your successor with obsolete rules and paradigms could potentially derail them and your institution. Whether leaders are forcing antiquated time and space mandates or they are busy pushing outmoded standards of urgency and meaningless motion, transition is a time to look at life reflectively and harvest the choicest fruits to empower your replacement.

Forgoing adequate observation and reflection, leaders sometimes chose inactionable, purposeless direction. To deflect attention from their ignorance further, they employ urgency. Urgency captures attention through anxiety and creates propped-up popularity, but is often light on substance and staying power. Urgency without purpose is a defense against identity and meaning. Too often leaders appear as empty bobbling heads, urgently whining about the next faddish flurry of asinine commotion. Successful successors and accomplished organizations will be aided by your reflection and generative conversation. Resist the temptation to colonially reinforce outdated ideas that will merely detract from your legacy.

Tried and True. Transitioning leaders must challenge their thinking about people. How we view people matters. The tyrant views people as a means to their ends; conversely, the honorable leader views people as ends in and of themselves. If human equality is holy, then elitist exploitation of people is evil. The way in which you view people inexorably infects your leadership. Beleaguering your successor’s brilliance with skepticism in one-way conversations where you embody the answer and they embody the question contradicts your inherent equality.

That which was tried and true worked for you. You are not your successor. Moreover, they are your equal. Humility will always be the bedrock essence of leadership. However strenuously we strive for importance, leaders themselves are not nearly as relevant as those they serve, and during transition you are called to serve your successor. Countermanding requisite humility is the fact that most leaders remain constantly in search of their own significance, and are thus chained to illogical, unarticulated fantasies of being God. Your past accomplishments are an evanescent support of self-pertinence. In transition, your self-importance is irrelevant. The platform you help create for your successor is of utmost importance.

The next decade in US corporate leadership will see unprecedented tempests and turmoil. The king pin position of world economic power will shift from the US to China. Interest rates will rise. US debt as a percentage of GDP will probably shatter the country’s financial standing in the world. Millions of Americans are now without jobs, and many of those jobs will not return. Technology advancements will most probably make all previous investment obsolete. Green standards, industries, and energies will disrupt business operations. Demographic shifts will crowd the retirement market, create a resounding vacuum in leadership jobs, and strain an already struggling health care system. During all these and many more challenges, most corporations will transition virtually all top leadership positions. If leadership transition is not part of your strategy, it might end up being part of your epitaph.

My company works with groups of all shapes, flavors and sizes. Human behavior in groups fascinates us greatly; we stay up at night thinking about it; we find it intriguing and enlightening. We’re considered experts of sorts regarding group behavior. It was Margaret Mead that said, “Never doubt that a small group of citizens can change the world. Indeed, it is the only thing that ever has.” We would agree. We also think that Margaret’s wisdom applies to organizations as well as societies.

In organizations, there are times when leaders find themselves in a group, feel compelled to accomplish something collaboratively, but struggle and stagnate because for some reason no there is no clearly appointed leader. This situation is often fraught with frustration and bountiful harvests of learning. We can learn a great deal about each other and ourselves from observing “leaderless” groups. Some organizations have even had us design leaderless group interviewing scenarios to be used in junior executive hiring forums.

One of the first things we typically see from an average leaderless group that is tasked to accomplish something, is that they waste the first 50% of their allotted time jockeying for position and obsessing over how they are going to work together. It seems that hens in a barnyard are more adept at establishing pecking order than humans. This is probably because humans function better collectively without too much pecking order involved, so we instinctively fight it. However, we also fear the absence of hierarchy because the lack of its clarity requires trust and relationship. The onset jockeying/obsessing usually stems from personal insecurities, illogical assumptions, and discomfort in the ambiguity of dynamic boundary negotiation. When leaders view power as a scarce resource, they move to hoard it quickly. When leaders have strong habits from operating in firmly established parameters, they sometimes flounder in the land of uncertainty and moving targets where the rapid, lucid articulation of normally “unsaid” stuff is required to succeed or stay alive. When leaders are unable to retain their personal power and are too used to giving it willingly to their appointed superior, they usually either jump for the “power position” in a leaderless group or they freeze in paralyzing hope for someone to collect their forfeited freedom. This usually stems from too much unconscious experience in metastasized patriarchies – hierarchies held together by tyrannical coercion.

Another common phenomenon we observe is what we call “shoot the first leader.” In a leaderless group, typically within the first few minutes, one of the most over-aggressive/control-oriented ones moves to condescendingly take leadership of the group. The group politely tolerates/tests it for a while and then somehow finds some way to shoot them down. That leader almost never makes it back into a position of relative strength or meaningful influence in the group. Sometimes the group marginalizes them completely. If the group remains together long enough, a second leader, usually more democratically-oriented and facilitative, emerges. This second leader almost always retains their power and influence indefinitely, without appointment or position.

The lesson for leaders here is this: 1) don’t be so quick to take that which is not yours, 2) take the time to build relationships and trust so that your leadership emerges in response to the needs of those around you, and 3) followers are loyal to leaders who respect and honor them. Flawless leaders know that you’re not leading unless you have followers, and that a follower choosing to follow a leader is so much more important that a leader choosing a follower to be on their team. Followers do not follow simply because they are there; following is never a foregone conclusion.

Would your followers choose you if they were not in any way constrained to do so?

Cindy was one of two Group Presidents who were leading a large multinational company. Walter, her counterpart, was responsible for Europe, Asia, and Australia while Cindy ran the larger of the two operations in North and South America. Both leaders were responsible for billions of dollars of business, and both were considered outstanding business leaders. In fact, both Walter and Cindy had been offered CEO positions in other companies in their industry, but both had decided to stay with this organization and cultivate their possibility for the top job there. While Cindy ran the larger of the two main groups within the company and was largely considered the logical choice for the next CEO, she reached out for me because she noticed a disturbing difference between herself and Walter, and she was seeing that difference ripple throughout their respective operations.

The unsettling dissimilarity Cindy noticed was that Walter was more decisive than she was, and his entire organization consequently moved faster than hers did. Most leaders rarely see the connection between their trapping of value in their own lives and the trapping of value in the organizations they lead. She had a rare awareness, and she knew that an authentic change of this magnitude and at this stage in her career would require a little help to navigate. Being more decisive or less decisive is neither good nor bad, however, there are leadership situations where these behaviors create distinctive repercussions. If the organization is large, spread out geographically, and requires speed to be competitive, then bottlenecking decisions at the top is not desirable. For Cindy, her major blockers were around illogical assumptions regarding “control” and “being right.” While these are two important things, the needs of the organization did not require the behaviors she was embracing. Essentially, through our work together, Cindy chose to change her thinking and create new behaviors that were more aligned with her vision and awareness. Her organization subsequently became even more nimble than Walter’s and she turned a weakness into a strength – not an easy task, to say the least.

The Latin root of the English word decision means “to kill off, to cut off from all other alternatives.” There is a finality, a commitment, a starkness, a confrontation, beneath the surface of decisions that entails various forms of violence. When we say, “yes” to someone or something, we are at some level simultaneously saying “no” to all other alternatives. If the intrinsic “no” to all other options is not present in our “yes,” than our “yes” is a thinly veiled lie, a political spin, a shallowly disingenuous act of a pithy, unaware and immature, soul – a soul, incidentally, that others intuitively find unappealing to follow.

The act of authentically committing our “yes” in the world is actually a marriage of sorts, in that we now identify with the choice we have made. Often, we even become the choices we make, so our choices dynamically craft and wed themselves to our identity. A decision is a self-creative act in that our lives become the sum total of our choices over time.

There is an inherent forcibleness to choice; but it is not coercion – it is the subtle, more powerful force of freedom. Flawless leaders don’t force choice on anyone; they invite and encourage choice and thus engender full commitment and self-accountability. In this way, they release the force of those making the commitment and unleash power and speed throughout their entire organization. Followers are not machines; flawless leaders never treat them as such. Our most effective decisions will always be about the ways in which we facilitate others releasing their trapped value both inside and outside our organizations.

What choices will release trapped value in your life and the life of the organization you lead?

Answers are strenuously sought after and largely irrelevant when it comes to leadership. Most leaders are in their positions because they were among the most competent and knowledgeable while in their previous positions. Unfortunately, most leaders fail, too. So, even though they were seen as the answer, they became the problem. In fact, the latest studies would indicate that about 70% of leaders are dishonorably discharged in some way. The same group that installed the leader as the answer to their problems ends up removing the leader, perhaps, because that leader did not ask the right questions.

Let’s face it, the best leaders ask the best questions, and their best ideas come from someone else. Flawless leaders know that it is far better to have one questioner and a thousand who answer than a thousand questioners and one who answers. A flawless leaders job is to orchestrate the right conversation that brings about authentic change and energized engagement. Leaders don’t facilitate change and actions by answering someone’s question. It is high time for the archetype of leader as oracle to die in order for leaders to access their flawlessness. Instead of question and answer sessions, the best leaders have question and listening sessions.

There is an important inherent gift that all leaders possess, yet rarely access: irremediable ignorance. Just in case one of your close friends hasn’t told you lately – you don’t know it all and you never will. When leaders approach the world as an answer to its questions, they inevitably fail because they are operating from an unrealistic impossible premise. Alternatively, flawless leaders approach the world as a series of questions designed to release its trapped value. It is only with meaningful conversation around significant questions that leaders can hope to release the trapped value within their organizations. These conversations are only started with great questions.

E.E. Cummings said, “always a more beautiful answer that asks a more beautiful question.” As leaders, when you are tempted to answer everyone’s questions, I urge you to ask another question instead. Followers have the answers, but their answers are trapped within. A leader asking followers the right questions unlocks their value and engages their spirits. As leaders, we can only change ourselves in this way when we embrace our irremediable ignorance. We do not have all the answers, not will we ever, but it is possible to have the right questions. What questions would engage your followers fully? What questions would harvest the best thinking in the group? What conversations are you avoiding? What potentially helpful questions are you afraid to ask?

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In what ruts are you stuck? What choices would set you free?