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.

Our religious leaders, our esteemed paragons of virtue, while attempting to lead us into the intimate worship of the Almighty, too often trip up struggling with illogical wishes to be God. To “follow” is to engage, to move toward, to pursue with commitment. To “worship” is to regard with great admiration and devotion, to honor, to revere. In short, to worship is to “honor;” to follow is to “engage.” These two words have powerful implications for leaders, religious or otherwise, and it’s uncannily easy for leaders to confuse these two words. Leadership is simply the result of following. If people follow you, you are leading, regardless of whether you have a leadership position or appointment. Leadership does not respect titles. On the other hand, if people worship you, you become nothing more than another useless deity with a small “d.” The adoration you receive may feel great, but in its intoxication you are deluded into weakness, poor productivity and demise. Leaders’ choices create paths toward others’ following or worshipping. Inspiring followers is the path to productivity; engendering worshippers is the route to disengaged adoration.

I got a call from Nick while I was about to travel home from some client work. I had some time before my flight, so we met for a quick lunch. Nick was the senior pastor of a mega church in one of the largest cities in the southern United States. His multimillion-dollar organization had thrived for years and people just adored him, but Nick was frustrated by the lack of ownership and engagement of the people in his church. It seemed to him that everyone was content with coming to hear him speak and “tipping” him by throwing some money in the collection plate. However, if he really wanted to get anything meaningful done in his organization, he had to hire staff to accomplish it. He used the words “confined” and “trapped” to describe how he felt when trying to get the thousands of people that attended his church to actually collaborate together to do something good in the world.

As I listened to Nick explain his situation and his feelings, it became clear to me that he had created the world in which he lived. He was no victim; he was the architect. He was also gripping tightly to his viewpoint of reality. He had not often embraced disagreement and divergent points of view, even on minor issues. He liked control; he had strong desires to be liked and feel important. When I asked about the things he feared most, rejection was the first thing to come out of his mouth. When I asked him to describe his ultimate definition of love, he talked about giving honor, respect and admiration to the one being loved. Within a few minutes, it was clear: Nick was a paragon locked in a paradox. He was addicted to receiving the glory, honor and power. While he was intending to direct all those sentiments toward God, he somehow unconsciously grabbed a bunch of it for himself. A deep sadness enveloped Nick as I explained that he had been manipulating his entire congregation to revere him as a god without realizing the disenchanting side effect of disengagement. While Nick thought he was pointing people to God, he was mostly pointing them to himself. Nick is an all too poignant example of religious leader paragons stuck in the paradox of confusing worshipping with following.

The reality is that most of us have deep unmet needs and desires for love and acceptance. As a human living with other humans, it usually just works out that way. Many leaders attain leadership positions to fill their deep needs to be regarded in a loving and accepting way, or at least in an honorable way; and, herein the problem begins. These unmet needs really get in the way when influencing people to actually engage, or follow. Thus, the current milieu is that many leaders are unconsciously striving for others to worship them instead of follow them. Compounding this, countless followers enable these leaders because they are looking for surrogate parents or gods they deem worthy to both worship and blame. All too often leaders are too willing to take all the blame in order to receive the elixir of adulation, and followers are all too willing to trade meaningful contribution in order to have someone to blame when things go wrong.

Submitting to the seductions of worship is a weak attempt to fill our unconscious dark-side voids of acceptance, significance, and competence. To flawlessly lead, leaders must first expose, discuss, and navigate their needs to be worshipped, and then embrace their own irrelevance in service of purpose. Once they address and work through these issues, they can powerfully engage their followers in the business of following, and guide followers back to the uncomfortably productive place of personal and mutual accountability. Flawless leadership requires great confidence and optimism, yet it also requires profound humility; humility that respects and honors all human life as equal. When leaders violate this sacred principle by accepting worship as a defense against maturely resolving vacuums of emotional health, they dehumanize others and themselves in the process.

Productivity in the worshipping organization dwindles for two reasons. First, that personal and mutual accountability has been exchanged for obeisance to the leaders, a trade that just naturally sucks the initiative and intensity out of completing meaningful work in a cooperative fashion. The second reason is the time displacement factor: there are only twenty-four hours in every day, and the total time and effort of collectively and collaboratively serving a worthy purpose is diminished by all that manipulative regarding and honoring of the leader.

Flawless leaders resolve to appropriately reject and redirect the unhealthy admiration of others because they serve a worthy purpose from a place of emotional wholeness. The emotionally weak and principally undisciplined accept, encourage, and sometimes force worship. The flawlessly strong, through connection to and understanding of their vulnerabilities, redirect the energies of undue admiration into cooperation, accountability, engagement and service. A flawless leader’s foundational strength is emotional health and maturity. Flawless leaders are simply self-healed flawed leaders, leaders who learned to heal from the wounds of past rejections, broken relationships, dishonorable betrayals, and voids of self-respect. To respect and honor all human life as equal is healthy; to worship one life as if it is above others is eventually destructive.

When is worship most seductive for you? What voids and vacuums does worship promise to fill for you? What shifts must occur to eliminate others worship of you and enhance their following?

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?

A few years ago, I was asked to coach a leader in crisis. Her organization was struggling to survive, and she was fighting to keep her job. The board told her that unless she made drastic improvements they would fire her. Both the board and the leader were convinced that the root cause of the situation was simply the lack of execution throughout her organization. If everyone would just “run the play as it was called” and “do what they were supposed to do,” desired results would flow. These were the fundamental assumptions that the leader and the board believed. After we talked, the leader agreed to challenge these core assumptions with me. After thorough investigation, we found that “execution” was a result, not a root cause. Execution was merely a lagging indicator, a measurement of what happens at the end of a process in business. Once we switched tactics by identifying and fixing key leading indicators, the organization rapidly released trapped value and began to thrive.

Fortunately, I learned this critical lesson early in life. I had a wonderful boss once who taught me that you don’t run a business by reacting to the numbers; you run a business to produce the numbers. Loggers do not cut trees down by first removing leaves and fruit. No leader ever released trapped value within an organization by whining about execution. Unfortunately, most managers are stuck in the weakness of blame; they choose slavery to frenetic meaningless reaction, servitude to self-referential logic. These are the harmful side-effects of subjugation to lagging indicators. To break the cycle and release trapped value, leaders must lead leading indicators. Two critical leading indicators that flawless leaders manage are the hospitability of their organizations and key behaviors of their people.

Recently there has been much-ado-about-nothing regarding “execution”. It is currently the most commoditized, misused, misunderstood, and inaccurate description in business today. The core “execution” argument (that if everyone just “executes” given directions and plans, results occur) is a weak defense against leadership, a platitude of narcissistic and inactionable direction, skillful incompetence, self-referential logic, ridiculous whining, and sophisticated blame. Execution is meant to be the answer to the question “why aren’t things getting done around here?” The problem is that the answer, “because people aren’t getting things done,” sounds so much like the question. It is easily more logical to blame weak leadership. The first thing the direction of “execution” brings to an organization is more meaningless and frenetic motion, which is the last thing most organizations need. It is actually difficult to count the number of erroneous and self-justified assumptions within the “execution” argument. What complicates and confuses the matter further is that execution without organizational hospitability requires enforcement via coercion. Coercion is not leadership. Leaders who invoke coercion do so out of fear and distrust. Followers invoke their own will; they do not require coercion in order to execute.

Leading indicators are predictive and strategically pertinent. Reacting to lagging indicators is weak management at best. Leading the leading indicators is leading flawlessly. Good begets good. Hospitable organizations attract high performers. Leading indicators are grounded in individual and collective capabilities, competencies, meaningfulness, and behaviors. Flawless leaders are anticipatory and predictive due to their focus on leading indicators. Flawless leaders refuse to blame poor organizational results on followers. Flawless leaders run a business to produce the numbers. Flawless leaders are not stuck continually reacting to metrics and measurements. Flawless leaders lead leading indicators.

What measurements are most meaningful and predictive? What behaviors will you articulate and encourage to produce desired results?

My friend was interviewing doctors for his upcoming heart surgery when he met Dr. Smith. Dr. Smith’s practice was quite large, with its own clinic, staff of doctors, technicians, nurses, and support people. My friend met several of the staff, learned more about the medical procedures he would go through, and had what he described as a “good meeting” with Dr. Smith. Although from a technical perspective he had been impressed with the doctors and staff, as he was leaving the clinic he still felt apprehensive about choosing Dr. Smith as the one who would open his chest, temporarily stop his heart, and hopefully save his life. As he got on the elevator to leave, he met yet another of the clinic’s staff who appeared to be the janitor. Being polite, my friend asked the young man what he did at the clinic, and the man replied, without hesitation, “Me and Dr. Smith save lives.” The young man went on to passionately explain that by ensuring the cleanliness of Dr. Smith’s facility he was helping him save lives. The young man asked my friend if Dr. Smith was his doctor. My friend replied thoughtfully, “He is now.”

We choose to be flawed when we attempt to lead others without first creating a shared and resonating purpose. Obviously Dr. Smith’s staff shared a purpose that held motivating meaning for even the janitor. Helping people see that their daily grind powerfully serves a larger purpose is the work of flawless leaders. Witnesses, such as my friend, cannot help but be moved by the ripples that such action creates.

Followers flock to meaning like moths to a flame. So imagine my disappointment when I hear leaders talk of “driving execution”, “getting them on the bus”, “getting them in the boat”, and “drilling down change”. My problem with all these defenses against leadership is that all too often, the leaders do not know how to drive, they are not on the boat or the bus themselves, and since they don’t want anyone drilling anything into them why do they think others would welcome such drilling? These are all examples of manipulative behavior that extinguishes the engagement of followers. It’s no wonder most managers secretly suspect that the spirits of their people have departed while their bodies remain (the definition of disengaged). When leaders have genuine conversations with followers about meaningful possibilities, followers engage. Finding and articulating the meaning in work is the work of leaders. Orchestrating meaningful conversation with followers is the work of flawless leaders. For example, in the pharmaceutical industry, is the message one of cutting costs to make the quarter’s earnings, or is it one of shared continuous struggle to save lives and improve the health of the world? One message coldly shrinks life to a short term goal. The other message fills hearts with warm meaningful purpose and endurance to reach a larger-purpose horizon. As leaders, are we shrinking or are we growing?

There is more to work than meets the wallet. There is more to the quarter than the numbers. There is more to the future than the past can offer.

It is the work of flawless leaders to engage others. Everything enduring begins with purpose. Find and articulate the unifying purpose in work and you are half way to leading. Masterfully engage followers in meaningful conversations around that purpose allowing the emergence of a greater co-created purpose and you start leading. Genuinely build relationships in the process and you are leading flawlessly.

What is closest to your heart? What is most meaningful? What is most worth doing in this life? What purpose is worthy of your unadulterated surrender?

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?

Leaders that create an elite aura disserve followers. The elitist attitude in leadership says to all followers that “I am better than you, hence I should lead you.” It is a mental state of ascendency that leads to domination, control, tyranny, extortion, and abuse of the community and society. History has clearly shown us numerous times that the elite leader has great capacity for tyranny and dehumanizing leadership. Elitism is obsolete and must be eliminated in order for authentic leadership to flourish.

After more than two centuries, the US has created a somewhat free and equal society that is fairly distinct in the world, although still infected with aristocratic domination and elitism in areas and pockets throughout. When America declared its independence from the British Empire and won its liberty and status through war, it separated from a monarchy and would for years strive to live distinctly different from monarchy, ensuring free speech, freedom of religion, right for all citizens to bear arms, etc.

Over two hundred years ago, Thomas Jefferson, one of the founders of the United States of America said, “A government big enough to give you everything you want is strong enough to take away everything you have…I know of no safe depository of the ultimate powers of the society but the people themselves, and if we think them not enlightened enough to exercise their control with a wholesome discretion, the remedy is not to take it from them, but to inform their discretion.” Jefferson was a liberal, secular humanist, however, today, this thinking would be considered fairly right wing.

Through only 200 years, a few generations, Americans have allowed elitism to creep back into leadership and now our free speech has been limited to certain “free speech zones”: areas set aside in public places for the exercise of free speech in the US. The US Constitution states that “Congress shall make no law… abridging… the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.” The US Constitution was circumvented by the US Courts: the existence of free speech zones is based on U.S. court decisions stipulating that the government may regulate the time, place, and manner—but not content—of expression. These free speech zones stem from decisions within the last fifty years, but were not extensively utilized and enforced until the last 2 decades, coincidently and arguably with a noticeably higher rise in elitism in Governmental leadership.

Over the last fifty years Americans have also seen limitations on their religious freedom: mandatory teaching of evolution theory in public schools and the elimination and denigration of creation, elimination of prayer in public schools, and the shift in mindset that the US Constitution guarantees the freedom from religion, where it was always only originally intended to guarantee the freedom to be religious.

The last several decades in America have seen numerous challenges to individual’s rights to own firearms. Rights for Americans in this area have been severely limited by state and local governments and are yet another symptom in a long line of the sickness called elitism in leadership.

Elitism is paternalistic, coercive, extortive, and monarchical. It says, “let me control your life because you are not wise enough to do so.” It is not democratic. If human equality is holy, elitism is evil. Elitism is definitely not an American original. It says that all are not equal. It is the harbinger of tyranny and slavery and human abuse. And after only two centuries, the American congress looks more elite than the British parliament that it rebelled against. The extreme debates and diatribes in which the British parliament and its Prime Minister currently engage make the American congress and President look like the elite, polished puppets that they are. Congressmen cannot even challenge the President out loud when the President lies in a public speech without receiving censure. Thomas Jefferson and his arguing, impolite, brilliant compatriots are reeling in their graves. Freedom no longer rings in America, the elite have silenced the bell. If these comments from an American Democrat irritate you, you have probably been infected with the disease of elitism.

Authentic humility will always be the bedrock essence of a flawless leader. However strenuously we strive for relevance, we are rarely really relevant. It is high time leaders not only accept this but also embrace it. Embracing irrelevance is a holy reverence for the equality of all humans. Most leaders are constantly in search of their own relevance and thus are chained to illogical and unarticulated fantasies of being God. They think they should lead because they are “the best choice for the job;” because they have been “appointed.” When we embody the paradigm of constant relevance we repel followers because they sense our need to be dominant, however covert our condescension may be. Our past accomplishments and accolades shallowly support our self-pertinence. Leading and following are intensely “present-time” sensitive. Followers disregard past track records once they are with you in the moment’s current affliction. In our present anxiety, our past triumphs melt feverishly into triviality. Flawless leaders reject continuous relevance because they have chosen a lifelong submission to authentic service and meaningful purpose.

Immature children think of themselves; mature adults think of others. A tyrant views other people as beneath him; a community member views others as equals; a servant views other people as more esteemed than her. Pretentiousness repels; authenticity attracts. Only the strong become servants because they have mastered the illogical instability of self-supremacy. The servant is merely the mature, periodic and loving master of the ever-present inner-tyrant. Psychologists tell us that we carry with us our inner child. It is the manner in which we carry that child that makes all the difference. It is the flawless leaders that lovingly accept their inner instabilities, yet still guide themselves to a life of significance through surrendering to worthy purpose. Flawless leaders do not major on the minor issues. Flawless leaders are able to create strong bonds with followers through appropriate vulnerability. These relationships of deep strength and connectedness form the invisible infrastructure that propels the flawless leader’s organization toward meaningful success. There are correlations between leadership ability and organization outcomes. The extreme organizational power that is released from leaders’ embracing their irrelevance is another symptom of the necessary and deep work that occurs on the path of the flawless leader.

In what ways does your undercover elitism limit possibilities within the organization you serve?

Truth embraces scrutiny. Truth is not manufactured or manipulated. You do not help truth by protecting it. Truth is open and vulnerable. Truth is not created; your awakening reveals it. Managed truth is hidden truth, more hidden to the one who manages it. Truth cannot be trapped and does lend itself well to be controlled. Truth is not part of your kingdom, not a subject in control. Truth does not live in a box you created, to be removed when convenient. Truth pierces your soul. Truth brings regenerative pain and change. Flawless leaders do not waste time managing truth, they commit to aligning their lives with it. Is truth the fire in which you burn or the waves upon which you sail?

Truth is not easily allowed in organizations. Avoiding truth’s pain and manipulating others to think, “we are who we pretend to be” are strong unspoken values. In organizations, we collude with hidden forces that counter truth. We all nod nonverbally, “Yes” around the table and the leader assumes that agreement is commitment. (Not!) No one speaks up and disagrees so the leader assumes that everyone is on her page. (Think again!) We are not physically absent; we “put in our time” so the leader assumes that we are productive. (Not even close!) We attend the right meetings, listen in on the right conference calls, copy the appropriate people on the right emails, and daily apply a thin coat of cosmetic compliance. Faux-followers do all these things to defend against truth, accountability, independent thought, clearly articulated opinion, emotional maturity, and clarified commitment. Most leaders encourage follower acquiescence, but disguise it with the cloak of “execution”. Thus they trap value within their organizations, accepting disengaged behaviors in the midst of their own meaningless motion.

Flawless leaders would beg to differ, and beg you to differ with them. Flawless leaders value and invite disagreement. They find safety in dispute. They praise and empower resistance. Flawless leaders have learned that dissent is not divisive – it actually engenders commitment. Flawless leaders embrace challenge and opposing opinion as interesting and significant; they feel less accurate without adequate objection and protest. When followers are not comfortable speaking their disruptive opinions and healthy debate is absent, flawless leaders reflexively know that trust is low and effectiveness is in jeopardy. Flawless leaders look at their followers as the first line of defense in protecting themselves and the larger organization from their leadership mistakes and misdirection. In the absence of truth, followers become incompetent drones hopelessly careening near the misbegotten leaders they look to blame when things go awry. Flawless leaders value the fully engaged commitment that can only come from truthful freethinking debate.

What are your reflex reactions to disagreement and dissent? In what ways do you try forcing compliance and execution? How well are you aligned with truth?