Why Tyrants Make Poor Leaders

 

I once worked for a company whose CEO had a philosophy about employee attitudes that was remarkably telling. It was that every employee should come to work every day at least a little bit scared. I remember hearing about it, and at first thinking it was a bit creepy, but the more I thought of it the more I could kind of see his point: it’s easy to imagine a complacent workforce being or becoming a poorly-performing workforce.

But upon further review, I think my initial reaction was the correct one: it is a creepy philosophy, particularly for an upper executive to have. But this blog isn’t about feelings of creepiness in evaluating business models, so I’ll be a bit more precise. The notion that an organization’s employees need to be consistently and acutely aware that their jobs may be in jeopardy in order for them to perform optimally is a sure sign of poor leadership – tyranny, even – and organizations so afflicted will almost always under-perform their confident rivals. Here’s why.

The easiest and most obvious piece of evidence (Exhibit A) has to do with our own experiences. Recall instances where you were enthusiastically pursuing an activity or task. Compare that to an activity that you didn’t want to do, but had to. It’s been my experience that, in the case of the former, I brought my best effort forward; but, in the latter circumstance, I did just enough to get a pass from the person who had forced me to do the chore. Of course there are many gradation levels in-between, but by invoking these extreme examples you see my point. To put it in the lexicon of my cited CEO, the workforce that arrives every morning at least a little bit scared will usually be out-performed by the workforce that shows up every morning at least a little bit enthused.

Exhibit B has to do with Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management #12: The manager-leader must have three characteristics to succeed:

1. He must have the optimal (or near-optimal) technical approach to addressing the problems before the organization. People tend to avoid following the inept.
2. He must genuinely care about the personnel on his team. If the team perceives their leader does not care about them personally, they will tend to not care about him, or his technical agenda, either.
3. The manager-leader must have so much confidence in his technical approach that he is willing to carry it out alone, if necessary. The example I like to give here is, if George S. Patton were to be parachuted in to Europe in 1943 by himself, he would begin attacking Nazis right away, and not wait for everyone (or anyone) else to lend him support.

Notice than invoking fear in one’s own team is not included in the three necessary characteristics. Shorter version: are there successful teams comprised of non-anxious members? Of course there are. Are there failed teams comprised of highly anxious personnel? Of course. Therefore, team anxiousness cannot be the sine qua non of successful performance.

Then why did this CEO believe to the contrary? Consider this definition of “tyrant” from Dictionary.com:

2. any person in a position of authority who uses power oppressively or despotically.[i]

Now consider how much easier it is for “any person in a position of authority who uses power” to ignore Hatfield’s Incontrovertible Rule of Management #12. They don’t have to do due diligence in keeping up with developments in their field of expertise, since their frightened team members will obey direction even if it’s the wrong approach. The tyrant need not care about his team members personally since, again, they will obey the direction given out of fear, if nothing else. And, ironically, tyrants tend to behave in such a pathological manner because they, themselves, are not afraid, having been exempted for various reasons from the negative consequences of their poor decision-making.

And that, ultimately, is why tyrants make such poor leaders. Once their people begin arriving to work afraid, even to a small degree, the tyrant has insulated himself from criticism, even in the instances of the most obvious of errors. Besides making the organization so led miserable, this insulation is a virtual guarantor of management failure.

[i]Retrieved from http://www.dictionary.com/browse/tyrant, December 26, 2016, 11:03 MST.