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.

Adolf Hitler was undoubtedly an influencer, but he was emphatically not a leader. He was a manipulator, a coercer, and a consummate extortionist, but he was not a leader. It is high time that we distinguish between tyranny and leadership. To define leadership as mere influence is to emasculate its inherent morality and disrespect the intrinsic willingness of followers.

A leader is a disrupter, a fire-starter, someone who goes around turning things right-side-up. This natural disturbance arises from beneficial internal unrest and anxiety, from an innate need to build purpose and right wrongs in the world.

The notion of leadership is best described in comparison to tyranny. We all struggle against the toxicity of tyranny. We all also participate in the venom of despotism and its many disguises. It started at birth; we are all born tyrants. We are born with an innate desire for unilateral control over everything around us, and if you are a parent, you have witnessed the shadows of tyranny from the front row.

Tyranny takes many forms. Sometimes it is outright forced compliance; sometimes it appears as benevolent dictatorship; sometimes patriarchy; sometimes paternalism; sometimes colonialism. In whatever size or shape it assumes, tyranny is undeniably the manipulative forcible coercion of others’ free will.

Tyranny can be a phone call from the lonely grandmother covertly dripping in guilt, the drill sergeant’s demeaning scream intending to help keep you alive when you face battle, the selling of a human slave to be owned as property by another human, the state government requiring every person to buy health insurance, the boy who buys flowers and dinner hoping to have sex from his date at the end of the night, the business owner who raises commodity prices during a natural catastrophe, the minister using guilt to extort more money from parishioners, or the wife who uses sex with her husband to manipulate his actions or decisions. Regardless of tyranny’s profile, to be an instrument of someone’s will other than your own is dehumanizing. Human exploitation is the hallmark of tyranny.

Leaders are an irritation and an affront to tyrants, representing a more restorative and enduring form of maturation. They stand in strong and subtle opposition to tyranny. Their lives project unforced rhythms of healing and humanization. To be a leader is to be a force of nature, a power to harmonize, a balanced treaty of peace. Hierarchical position, coercion and adoration give a false sense of pseudo-power, and collude together to support the lie that power is a scarce resource to be hoarded. Power comes to those who bring others power. Power comes to those who bring hope. Creating power in others is one of the primary duties of a leader. Power comes not to those to whom others have surrendered. Power comes to those who have surrendered to a greater purpose. At the core, a flawless leader is a living picture of restoration, responsible healing, and lavish service.

The supreme quest of the flawless leader is to surrender to purpose, and worthy purpose is unknowable apart from seeking God on God’s terms. This fact presents a perplexity for many leaders. Searching out a personal God-connection, striving to relate one-on-one with the mystery that is God, appears to fully engage a leader’s deepest, most powerful and most relevant self.

Leadership is foundationally a relationship, not a position. Leadership is more philosophical than scientific, more mysterious than obvious, more complex than simplistic; and unavoidably, yes, leadership is imbued with spiritual aspects. Whether the spiritual is currently culturally acceptable or politically correct is irrelevant regarding its impact in leadership. If the prevailing public opinion dissuades leaders from being spiritually adept, this merely presents additional facets to this perplexity. There will always be times and situations where greater purpose will call leaders to live counter-culturally. The leader who avidly avoids seeking God will most probably and eventually frustrate and denigrate followers into ridicule by giving them, in terms of one of Thomas Paine’s favorite fables, an ass for a lion.

To be sure, just seeking God in no way guarantees purpose. It is the only soil in which the seeds of significance have a chance of growing. Contributing to this conundrum further, there are thousands of shallow religious institutions supporting tyranny, terror, exploitation, and abuse littered across our planet. God in a box is not God at all. When you meet God on God’s terms and no one else’s, the richness of purpose’s soil is enhanced greatly.

History is clear: attempt to bind God to an organization or legislate holiness and you are connected to God no longer. Constrict leadership to an institution’s boundaries or to the confines of one person, and you convulse it to oblivion. Construct leadership in a factory and relationships in a laboratory, and your calculated control mechanisms become your demise. Assemble the god you desire, and you become just another abusive despot plundering possibility and significance with the bile of shallowness. The uncomfortable concrete reality is that leaders “playing god” through extreme command and control are meaningless, toxic tyrants.

How we view people matters. Our relationship to God impacts our view of people. The tyrant views people as a means to their ends. The leader views people as ends in and of themselves. If human equality is holy, the elitist exploitation of other people as less than equal is evil.

In addition to leading others as equals, relating to God enables leaders to love more effectively. In their book, Encouraging the Heart, Kouzes and Posner interviewed Major-General John H. Stanford on his secrets to developing leaders and he said, “The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people…I don’t know of any other fire, any other thing in life that is more exhilarating and is more positive a feeling than love is.”

This type of love is key to leadership relationships. The mature know this instinctively. More importantly, love that is enduring and significant is not a mere feeling; it is an act of the will that just happens to be accompanied by occasionally enjoyable feelings. M. Scott Peck, The Road Less Traveled, brilliantly defined love as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” So mature love is simply a spiritual commitment to yourself or another.

The fruition of the focused commitment to love is a spiritual manifestation of flawlessly leading. Furthermore, love, seeking God, and submission to worthy purpose are inextricably linked to leadership and each other at many levels. Leaders who struggle in these areas struggle proportionately in their leadership. Navigating this perplexity successfully is principally dependent on a personal, healthy relationship with God, as the utmost source of meaningful love and significant purpose.

Even the healthiest of organizations produces toxicity and is debilitated and damaged by a lack of compassion. In general, most organizations and communities are suffering from a lack of leadership, a scarcity of love, and lackluster purpose and meaning. Flawless leaders are unquenchably called to stand in this gap. As Henri Nouwen said, “Beneath all the great accomplishments of our time there is a deep current of despair. While efficiency and control are the great aspirations of our society, the loneliness, lack of friendship and intimacy, broken relationships, boredom, feelings of emptiness and depression, and a deep sense of uselessness fill the hearts of millions of people in our success-oriented world.” In this dark milieu, flawless leaders shine brightly.

Seeking God, worthy purpose, and love is a level of human maturity that creates challenging conundrums and perplexities for leaders. Do it anyway. Don’t ask how; just dive in. You won’t drown. When you feel as though you are drowning, dive deeper. It will take time: fruit matures throughout an entire season, not overnight. It takes a lifetime to mature fully, and only a moment to restart the continual process. Emotional and spiritual maturity are lifetime processes of replacing lies with truths, hate with love, doubt with faith, disingenuousness with authenticity, and closed-off self-protection with trust and vulnerability. Only the strong mature. The weak use their highchair as a platform to whine and blame.

“What exactly is corruption?” was the leader’s uncomfortable question that began the meeting. Although it took a large pry bar to get the conversation moving at first, the presiding leader gently kept the input focused on “purely definition” at first. At the onset, the comments around the room included almost poetic things such as “violation of virtue,” “impairment of integrity,” “corrosion of character,” “perpetration of moral principle,” “ethical decay or decomposition,” “bribery – the tangible payoff for wrong,” and “departure from the good and the right.”

After the group warmed up to the coldness of the topic, they were encouraged to be more personal with the definition, as if it were going to be applied directly to the organization they led and to themselves, the leaders within the organization. The comments then included things such as “the decline of ethical strength,” “the slow spoiling of truth,” “the quiet departure from the originally pure,” “the slow creep away from the initially correct,” “secret festering scandals,” “extortion of blind obedience,” and “self-protective mismanagement.”

I was asked to observe the meeting and periodically offer observations, comments, and advice on the quality of their group processes and interactions. I do this often, and I was generally quite impressed with the honesty and trust I had observed so far, but I noted a large pause and significant discomfort in the room when someone who had been mostly quiet so far said, “corruption is the generally acceptable use of extortion-like power by the elite few seeking to profit at the expense of the unknowing whole.” Since the elite few were the ones in the room, the following stillness was memorably penetrating. After a long silence, and just as a few group members started to get up, I stated my first verbal observation: “I think we have found both the start of a meaningful conversation and the definition of corruption that is most piercingly relevant for this group.”

The group regained composure rather quickly and began a solemn and difficult discussion of the evil in which they had chosen to be entangled, the cancerous corruption both they and society had previously deemed acceptable. Unmasking corruption as an outsider or as a newly positioned leader is heroic and commonplace, although it is often the disguise for disingenuous self-aggrandizement and a host of hidden agendas. However, dealing with our own acceptable corruption is another matter entirely; facing our own evil without flinching is the hallmark of adept personal and organizational transformation.

Leaders can never be perfect regardless of our illogical wishes and expectations, but it is both possible and logical for leaders to know and deal with their dark side appropriately. It is right for leaders to name and heal their own evil; as the ancient proverb states, “Physician heal thyself.” For this self-attentiveness, Flawless leaders gain incremental respect, loyalty, and admiration from followers. Flawless leaders know that being appropriately authentic is the exposure of their own hypocrisy. Consider Hans Christian Anderson’s fairy tale of “The Emperor’s New Clothes,” where the Emperor walks around naked displaying his “new” clothes while everyone around him colludes in agreement with his self-deception. Everyone around the Emperor already knew of his hypocrisy, as it is with leaders. Flawless leaders discuss and deal with their own hypocrisy. Only then can we authentically and honorably deal with the evil in our own organizations.

I was partnering with Paul, a CEO of a large company that was going through significant change. Paul said he wanted help in getting every leader in the organization engaged in the change and becoming a valuable partner in creating the necessary details associated with imbedding this change deep within the massive global organization. We designed a series of work meetings over several years that were vital and dynamic interchanges centered on both a unifying and resonating purpose and on the full engagement of all leaders. The top six hundred leaders in the organization worked together across all hierarchical and organizational boundaries and truly created a rare competitive advantage with high leveragability within their industry. Paul impressed everyone at the series of meetings as an excellent speaker, a master facilitator, a trusted leader, a polished professional, a brilliant strategist, and a management guru. The organization was now positioned well to take advantage of several significant and profitable growth opportunities that no other company in their industry would be able to copy for at least a few years. It would have been wonderful if the story ended here.

Paul then started a new initiative to downsize the leadership staff in his organization and remove many of the “redundant” leaders that had, incidentally, toiled with him to create the advantages he now enjoyed. He did this to meet a special secret bonus incentive that he alone enjoyed as part of his compensation package. Paul was facing a scary fact he had avoided for a long time: he was not at all grounded in who he was. He was not a leader who lived out the values he preached during all those inspirational meetings he had hosted over the last several years. He was actually somewhat deceitful, self-serving, disloyal, and in his own words, corrupt. He immediately lost the trust and loyalty of the remaining leaders, and the best of them took offers from other companies shortly thereafter. Paul’s window to take advantage of his extraordinary positioning within his industry quickly closed around his wily methods and glossy techniques. Paul harmed his organization and those within it by hoarding power and valuing self-protection over principles and purpose.

Let’s face facts. We are all, at least a little, like Paul: deceitful, self-serving, and disloyal to varying degrees and depending on the situation. We are all human. As leaders, we don’t like to admit it or face it all that often, but we are human. Paul was so competent, so perfect, so god-like, that he didn’t face the fact that he was merely human, and that he had a dark side that needed to be navigated in order to lead effectively. Paul had been a “good-boy” for so long that he had over identified with that role, causing him to literally not know himself or even be aware of who he really was. He ignored his dark side; he refused to admit it was there. He was a ship captain who ignored the bad-weather reports and obliviously careened into the perfect storm. Knowing your dark side, facing it, becoming familiar with it, accepting it, and being vulnerable enough to discuss it appropriately takes its power away and enables you to navigate its unavoidable storms.

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?

Most leaders avoid openness and vulnerability like the plague – some even view it like kryptonite. However, for the flawless leader, vulnerability is not optional; it’s oxygen! Without vulnerability and openness, a leader is trapped in a world that is severely limited by her own perceptions and assumptions.

A mandatory vulnerability for flawless leaders is forgiveness. Forgiveness is often the only key that can dislodge a leader stuck in the trap of her own perceptions.

“He knew that our enemies by contrast seem always with us. The greater our hatred the more persistent the memory of them, so that a truly terrible enemy becomes deathless. The man who has done you great injury or injustice makes himself a guest in your house forever. Perhaps only forgiveness can dislodge him” Cormac McCarthy, Cities Of The Plains.

Forgiveness is just too abstract to discuss without making it personal with examples. Forgiveness must be experienced viscerally. Victor Hugo’s Les Misérables illustrates this eloquently. Jean Valjean, the main character, spends nineteen years in prison for stealing. He is released after being hardened and calloused by excruciating cruelty during his long sentence. Now, a former convict, he must carry identification that informs everyone he is lecherous and dangerous. After wandering four days in a merciless world that summarily rejects him, he is shown kindness by Bishop Myriel, who gives him a warm meal and shelter for the night. The tough, indifferent Valjean only knows a world of judgment, threats, and survival, and returns the first gift of love he has received in almost twenty years by stealing the Bishop’s silver and leaving in the night. The next day the authorities return with Valjean in custody to restore the stolen silver to its rightful owner. The Bishop unexpectedly swings open both the door and his arms widely, and warmly greets Valjean as a long lost friend. He exclaims he is overjoyed that Valjean has returned. Myriel then explains to the gendarmes that Jean had evidently forgotten to take the silver candlesticks that he had given him also. The police leave, and Jean Valjean’s hardened heart of stone melts as the Bishop explains that he forgives him. The Bishop’s gift of the silver is to start a new and honest life, a life full of love and power. Hugo’s tale then expounds on the beautiful transformation that occurs in Valjean’s life – a life that essentially becomes an enormous expression of compassion and kindness, a huge enlivening ripple in the sea of humanity from one flawless leader’s act of forgiveness.

From this story we can clearly see the raw anatomy of forgiveness. Forgiveness is a three-part harmony that Myriel evidently knew well. It is 1) a recognition of evil and harm, 2) the willful abandonment of judgment and rightful resentment, and 3) authentic acts of undeserving kindness toward the harmful evildoer. While the evil of Valjean is necessary for forgiveness to occur, the clarity of self-identity and transcendent capability of Myriel is even more necessary. Hugo’s scene of forgiveness occurred more because of whom Myriel was than because of what Valjean had done. Let us also make no mistake, Myriel’s act of forgiveness was not selfless; it was appropriately self-caring and self-honoring. He was grounded in firm submission to a powerful purpose: the healing restoration and transformation of others. For by compassionately freeing himself from his wall of wounds, his vexing victimization, and his addictive prison of resentment, Myriel was able to lead Valjean toward his own freedom. Flawless leaders must first scale their walls of wounds, like Myriel, before they can free others.

The lack of forgiveness is rooted deeply in most all societies. In Hemmingway’s short story The Capital of the World, he writes of a Spanish father who decides to reconcile with his son, Paco. The remorseful father places an ad in a newspaper saying “Paco, Meet Me At Hotel Montana Noon Tuesday. All Is Forgiven, Papa.” Caught up in the emotional desire for reconciliation when making the newspaper ad, the father did not realize that Paco is such a common name in Spain. On Tuesday, eight hundred young Pacos showed up at Hotel Montana, looking for their father’s love.

Flawless leaders are willing to abandon power in favor of love, vacate condemnation in favor of compassion, jettison judgment in favor of acceptance, shuck self-protection in favor of vulnerability, ignore independence in favor of relationship, and forsake fairness in favor of forgiveness. Anger and resentment are appropriately human responses to injustice. Forgiveness is an appropriately super-human intervention of healing and restoration.

What resentments limit your leadership? What forgiveness would set you free?

I’ve worked with three different groups of leaders in conflict within the last several weeks. The groups were in entirely dissimilar industries and situations, and had a completely divergent composition of members – you probably could not create three more distinctive groups of leaders. However, they all shared one thing in common: there was a dramatic shift in relationships and productivity when they collectively started leaning into the discomfort.

Most of the time, the last thing we want to do is to actually cause our own pain. Our brains are hardwired to reflexively pull away from discomfort. This is especially the case in conflict, when our particular defensiveness and unconscious self-protective reactions occur. Even the most aggressive person in conflict is often in pain-avoidance mode. Yet discomfort is frequently just what is needed in order to create a necessary shift in ourselves or those around us. For leaders, it is often career critical that we understand the difference between pain and harm.

The following is a paragraph from chapter eight of my book, Leaving Prisons: Release Your Trapped Value, where I discuss some facets of this phenomenon from a leadership perspective.

Pain is localized suffering, the occurrence and often the endurance of specific and intense discomfort. Harm, on the other hand, is the infliction of injury or damage. Pain is pain and harm is harm; however overly profound that may be, leaders must fully grasp that the two concepts are not the same. Leaders trap value in themselves and all those around them when they confuse the two words. There is a robust difference between the two words, and their contrasting meanings carry enormous import for leaders. Pain is intensely personal and easily assumes prominence in the present reality and in memories. Many of our formative experiences are imbued with pain, and those experiences tend to have great impact on future behavior. We humans tend to formulate and fiercely cling to strong opinions about pain. The French novelist Joris-Karl Huysmans said, “The useless, unjust, incomprehensible, inept abomination that is physical pain” while the American novelist William Faulkner said, “If I were to choose between pain and nothing, I would choose pain.” Neurologist Russell Martin said, “Pain is greedy, boorish, meanly debilitating. It is cruel and calamitous and often constant, and, as its Latin root poena implies, it is the corporeal punishment each of us ultimately suffers for being alive.” In contrast, Dr. Paul Brand, world-renowned hand surgeon and leprosy specialist, regarded pain as “one of the most remarkable design features of the human body, and if I could choose one gift for my leprosy patients it would be the gift of pain.” Regardless of our current opinions and confusions regarding pain and harm, the difference between them is best understood through three short stories: a prison of painlessness, a stunted moth, and an unprotected baby. As leaders, when we confuse the two, we cause both when only one is necessary.

The rest of the chapter illustrates vividly the lackluster alternatives that come from extreme painlessness. In my work lately, the avoidance of discomfort has been picturesquely delineated in group conflict. Inevitably the conflict is anchored in a few of the individuals in the group, and the others present are mostly attempting to be in “observant and supportive mode.” It is important that the conflict actually be permitted to occur – leaders that squelch conflict before it becomes helpful cause harm to the relationships of their groups and organizations by stunting relational maturity. So, if conflict is permitted to be present, the group then starts to share in the discomfort. The critical moment to watch for, is when one of the observant supporters finally has had enough and gives some poignant observations of the conflict. This “leaning into the discomfort” is almost always healing and powerful.

I know a friend who says that dog poop with whipped cream topping is still quite unappealing. He says this to illustrate the truth that uncomfortable situations don’t get better over time or by coating them with cosmetic compliance or coerced commitment. Conflict is present in leadership as on opportunity to deepen relationship. In retail sales, it is often the customer with a problem that becomes the loyal committed customer merely by management handling their problem well. This is the truth for leadership also – leadership is relationship. Flawless leaders encourage and navigate healthy conflicts in order to continually enhance their leadership capacity.

What discomfort do you avoid? What relationship dysfunctions are created by your pain avoidance?

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?

What makes a flawless leader a leader? As water is to fish, what is the equivalent to the leader? What makes a leader a leader; what isn’t just optional – what’s oxygen? Beyond traits, characteristics, behaviors, methods, and all the other things that scientists and academics write about, what is the leadership thing?

In the last chapter of my new book coming out next month, Leaving Prisons: Release Your Trapped Value!, I deal with this burning question. When I have asked this of leaders in the past, I have received lists upon lists of responses – decision-making, vision, encouragement, strategic thinking, communication skills, strong example, collaboration, empowerment, customer focus, change leadership, forging alignment, clarity, dependability, ownership, team building, systems thinker, results-focused, accountability guru, conflict resolver, trust-builder, inspirational motivator, charismatic, listener, intensity, and more, much more. None of these things are bad, but they are not the water-to-fish equivalent – they are not, nor do they collectively comprise the leadership thing. However, as described in their book, Encouraging the Heart, researchers Kouzes and Posner touched on something powerful when they interviewed Major-General John H. Stanford on his secrets to developing leaders and people. This was his reply:

When anyone asks me that question, I tell them I have the secret to success in life. The secret to success is to stay in love. Staying in love gives you the fire to really ignite other people, to see inside other people, to have a greater desire to get things done than other people. A person who is not in love doesn’t really feel the kind of excitement that helps them to get ahead and lead others and to achieve. I don’t know of any other fire, any other thing in life that is more exhilarating and is more positive a feeling than love is.

Love is the leadership thing. Leadership is relationship, so love is not optional – it’s oxygen. Love is the key to leadership relationships. The mature know this instinctively. More importantly, love that is enduring and significant is not a mere feeling; it is an act of the will that just happens to be accompanied by occasionally enjoyable feelings. The late M. Scott Peck brilliantly defined love in his book, The Road Less Traveled, as “the will to extend one’s self for the purpose of nurturing one’s own or another’s spiritual growth.” So mature love is simply a spiritual commitment to yourself or another. The fruition of the focused commitment to love is a spiritual manifestation of flawlessly leading. Furthermore, love, spirituality, and submission to worthy purpose are inextricably linked to leadership and each other at many levels. Leaders who struggle in these areas struggle proportionately in their leadership.

In James Hollis’ book Finding Meaning in the Second Half of Life, he explains that pursuing psychological and spiritual development always requires an increased capacity to tolerate anxiety and ambiguity, and our ability to accept and abide in this troubled state is the moral measure of our maturity. Love, for leaders, is the dynamic and quintessential state of ambiguity and anxiety, making it the consummate path to flawlessness. Love is so problematic – it cannot be controlled and measured. Oh well, lean into the discomfort. Love is such an unpredictable moving target; it’s so uncertain. OK, grow up and do it anyway. Control in a social system (the only system in which leadership resides) is non-existent. To lead flawlessly and to unleash their trapped value, leaders must relinquish their unhelpful dysfunctional needs for illogical control. Control is not part of your kingdom, love is. Embrace love and release your trapped value!

“The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science. He to whom this emotion is a stranger, who can no longer pause to wonder and stand rapt in awe, is as good as dead: his eyes are closed.” -Albert Einstein

What holds you back from love? In what ways will love release your trapped value?

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?