Why Leadership Is The Most Dangerous Idea in American Business

Goodman recommends that business owners ask -- and act on the answers to -- four basic questions: What do I need and want out of life? How can my company help me accomplish that? What would such a company look like? And how do we get it to look like that?

But aren't company owners already better than most of us at taking care of their own interests? "Absolutely not," Goodman says. "They're horrible at it. Listen to what they say even if they do think they have conscious plans and goals: 'I want to grow 10% a year.' 'I want to take the company to the next level.' By the time a company establishes it can survive, most founders are so used to being reactive that it doesn't occur to them to reflect on their own. Plus, we're taught the company has a life of its own and we're all there to serve it. We're taught to be good soldiers -- to sacrifice ourselves.

"When your company doesn't fulfill your needs first, everything unravels. Either the business will just fall apart or you'll wind up with this sick, co-dependent, very toxic environment. The company won't support your life on any level. And if it's not life-supporting, why bother? There are so many other ways to make a living in this world."

Unembarrassed honesty about one's own personal needs, wants, and -- as we'll see -- capabilities is the bedrock that antiheroic leadership is built on. It promotes in its practitioner three surprising and powerful qualities: authenticity, generosity, and a nascent potential for creating a sense of meaning.

"The opportunity that exists for entrepreneurs more than anything else is to create really human environments," Goodman explains. "Because a sense of meaning is so much more important than money. Ultimately, it puts us in a position where we are better able to serve. Because when we're emotionally bankrupt by virtue of having burned ourselves out, then we have nothing to give. On the other hand, when our hearts are full, and our lives are full, and we've learned to exercise our own highest capabilities, then we give at such bigger, more powerful levels."

So the antiheroic leader begins by taking stock -- by understanding his or her own dreams and imagining the kind of company that can help realize them, by assessing and accepting his or her own strengths and weaknesses, by respecting his or her own needs. Note how little this sounds like the charismatic leaders described by the sociologist Max Weber, people "endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least exceptional powers ... [people] regarded as divine." The antiheroic stance, far from the one that the Jan Pringles of the entrepreneurial world thought they had to maintain, has nothing to do with being infallible or superhuman or invulnerable or dauntless. It has to do with being true, the root of trust.

Antihero's Rule No. 2:
Don't ask "How?" Ask "Who?" Assume you're not the answer.

Once visited by an idea, what most of us do next is ask "How?" How can I (or we) get this thing done? We begin assessing what it would take to turn the idea into something real. We refer to the informal stage of that process as thinking and to the formal stage as planning. Many times we get overwhelmed. (All those details to handle! All that know-how required!) And we conclude, not unreasonably, that our idea can't be done. Or if it can be done, then usually the personal price paid by the leader -- the knower of the answers -- will be high.

But what if, instead, the leader presumes he or she can't do anything, at least not as well as someone else, and definitely not on one's own. The antiheroic leader, instead of considering for a moment that he or she might be the person to execute the plans or projects that arise in the course of business, always assumes there's a better option. Instead of asking, "How can I do that?" the antiheroic leader asks "Who can do that?" "Who knows how to do that?" "Who can help me get that done?"

Management analyst Jim Collins (author of Built to Last and Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap ... and Others Don't) approaches the idea slightly differently. Likening the leader of an organization to the driver of a bus, Collins says that the bus driver's job is not to decide where the bus should go or how to drive it there, but to get the right people on the bus in the first place -- as well as to get the wrong people off the bus, and ultimately to get the right people into the right seats. The right people then will help the leader figure out where to drive and how to drive there. What's more, the right people will attract other right people and inspire them to stick around, diminishing the burden and anxiety felt by leaders who are in the position of having to beguile their flock by themselves.

By observing the who-not-how rule, the antiheroic leader is liberated to imagine. Since you don't assume you're the one who's going to have to do things -- or even that you're the one who has to know how to do things -- you're not limited to considering only the things you know you can do. Start thinking Who?, and the results are exponentially reinforcing: Once you find you can make things happen that you couldn't dream of doing yourself, you believe you can do anything.

 PREV  1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5  NEXT