Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)

There’s more learning to this passage than may be readily apparent. In the heat of the moment, it may seem as if there’s absolutely nothing to learn from bosses or peers whom you dismiss as jerks. In fast-paced companies, leaders typically jump to “the bottom line” about someone else. Their behavior is so obstructive to what you are committed to accomplishing that you believe the organization should deal with them immediately. They do something so aggravating and make your life so difficult that you’re convinced they have nothing to teach you. Although they may not be able to teach you directly, indirectly they provide experiences that will serve you well in other leadership positions. Specifically, here’s what you can learn from this passage:

• How to motivate yourself. Up until this point, your motivation has largely been extrinsic. Your boss or team has set goals that you’ve achieved. You’ve worked hard to please your boss or for the good of the team. A bad boss takes away this motivation. The very notion of making him look good through your creativity, productivity, or diligence seems impossible to accept. Nonetheless, you have to push through this negativity and work hard for yourself rather than for anyone else. The best leaders derive an intrinsic satisfaction from a job well done. They possess an inner drive to achieve and excel. This is your chance to develop this drive. The higher up leaders go on the organization chart, the more they must discover inner motivation rather than depend on someone else to motivate them.

  Similarly, people need to learn how to motivate themselves to work with peers they find unsettling. Executives who nurture petty feuds with fellow employees end up squandering vast amounts of energy through in-fighting and sometimes jeopardize their business as a result. Famous feuds at the senior levels of business, such as those that have embroiled Disney and Pixar, Hewlett-Packard, Daimler Chrysler, and many others, are often personal in origin but costly and extensive in their impact. More significantly, executives who regularly feud with others find it difficult if not impossible to motivate themselves to work hard with a bad peer to achieve a common goal and sometimes resort to boardroom brawls, legal fights, or other tactics as a matter of course. Great leaders, however, motivate themselves to work well, even with people they find distasteful, in order to achieve common objectives. They have long ago learned the important lesson that peers and colleagues come in a variety of forms—some to their liking, others not—but that personal preferences cannot obstruct business goals and objectives. Great political leaders are often able to forge alliances with other leaders whose politics and values they disdain but circumstances require it. When a feud erupts, or worse, finds it way into the boss’s office, boardroom, or media, nobody wins.

• How to work in a system where you aren’t protected. When you have a good boss, you’re protected to a certain extent. By protected, we mean that your boss can provide you with information, resources, advice from the next level, and insight when you really need them. Good bosses will intervene if you’re having problems with someone else in the company, advise you on resistance and potential reactions from others, and generally keep you out of harm’s way. This is fortunate, but it can also prevent you from learning how to operate without a protector. As a result, your dependence on your boss may prevent you from learning how to resolve difficult situations on your own or forming your own, independent network without your boss. In fact, we have seen good leaders struggle when a strong boss leaves the scene—because the boss has not only served as mentor but as protector.

  With bad bosses, however, we have often seen the opposite. Leaders are forced to figure out how to plug into the organization. If you have problems, you have to solve them by yourself. Learning, sometimes the hard way, how a company really works, including alliances, resource allocation, political networks, and unspoken rules, is tremendously valuable. CEOs and other senior executives are inherently vulnerable; no one protects them or intervenes on their behalf. To be effective, they must be able to work the system. Being politically savvy and having strong networking skills are essential, and people acquire these skills when they have a bad boss.

• How not to be a boss or a peer. A negative example is a great teacher. If you ask a veteran executive to recall some of the memorable people he’s worked with, he will sometimes name more bad bosses or peers than good ones. When we ask senior leaders to identify a critical development experience in their career as a leader, they often cite a bad boss who taught them what they didn’t want to become as a leader.

These individuals have a tremendous impact on people’s work lives, and over time this impact is often more instructive than destructive. This passage helps leaders become aware of their boss’s derailers, which makes them more conscious of their own potentially fatal flaws. It’s very difficult to perceive how your own arrogance or overly cautious behavior is hurting your performance as a leader unless you observe this negative impact in others, preferably in your own boss. Forewarned is forearmed; you’ve seen how your boss’s derailer hurt his career, and you’re not about to make the same mistake. A bad boss or peer is a reverse role model—one you can use to guide yourself away from counterproductive actions and attitudes.

I was getting a lot of coaching from people who were different kinds of leaders than I was. I felt it was negative coaching. I felt it was coaching as a way to force me into the Honeywell image rather than coaching to help me become a better leader as the person I was.

Bill George, former chairman and CEO, Medtronic

To take advantage of these three learnings, we recommend the following steps:

Step 1: Choose an interpersonal strategy to manage the relationship. If you work with continuous hostility toward your bad boss or peer, you’re not going to learn much of anything. Therefore, you should choose a strategy that helps you cope with a difficult situation. Doing nothing is certainly one option, but we’d like to offer some other alternatives:

Ask yourself, “Why has this particular teacher appeared on my career path at this moment? Viewing your relationship with a negative person as a teachable moment rather than something to be endured or overcome will open you to new possibilities of managing the situation, including changing both your reactions and your responses. “What can I learn here?” can replace “How can I get rid of this person?”

Talk to your boss or peer about the problems you’re having. Consult the continuum before opting for this approach. If your boss is on the far right side of the continuum, talking isn’t going to do much good. If, however, he is on the left side and is a relatively reasonable individual, then it may be worth having a heart-to-heart conversation. It’s difficult to level with a boss whom you find annoying, but it may be worth the discomfort if an honest conversation reduces the annoyance level.

Confront your boss or peer. In other words, push back. Rather than just talk, communicate that you can’t accept the way he’s treating you and that things need to change. This approach is more risky than just talking, but sometimes people need to see that you’re angry or upset before they will be willing to consider changing their behavior.

Go over your boss’s head. Tell your boss’s boss about the problems you’ve having, and ask him to intervene. This action may escalate the tension between yourself and a bad boss to unacceptable levels, and you may even be fired. Remember, organizations are not particularly responsive to complaints about bad bosses. They tend to back the boss rather than the direct report. Still, it may be a risk you need to take to deal with an intolerable situation.

Quitting is also an option, but it’s not always the best one. If you have great market value, and your family situation (or lack thereof) allows you to quit and find another position, this may be the right thing to do, especially if you have an unethical boss. We find that the situation often repeats itself, and some people are surprised to find their new organization filled with the same proportion of negative players as before, often because they have taken their own existing frame of reference along with them.

Step 2: Ask yourself what your reaction to a boss or peer says about you. Too often, people focus on all the bad things that a boss or peer has done to them rather than consider why this boss or peer has evoked such a strong reaction in them. Certainly, there are times when the problem is completely external to you—an underhanded, cruel boss is underhanded and cruel to everyone. Most of the time, though, people’s perceptions of badness vary, and it is often due to the chemistry of a particular relationship. A volatile boss may seriously affect a direct report who is unaccustomed to volatility, whereas another can easily adapt to changing moods. You may have a lot of problems with a hypercompetitive peer, whereas someone else may have no problems with his intense desire to win, or even perceive it. Taking time to reflect on your reaction to a bad boss or peer and talk with a business coach about your reaction can help you learn a lot about yourself.

Specifically, ask yourself the following questions:

Does this individual remind you of someone from your past?

Does this person remind you of something in yourself that you don’t like?

It may be that there’s a particular type of person you have trouble working with. If you have higher leadership aspirations, you can’t afford this blind spot. Or rather, you need to be aware of it and manage it. Think about why you can’t stand arrogant people (perhaps because you have tendencies in that direction yourself) or why indecisive bosses make you crazy (perhaps because you’re an impatient person). Your strong, negative reaction to a boss or peer may tell you something about your own weakness as a leader.

Step 3: Define your values. It’s possible that you can’t stand your boss or coworker because they do things that violate your values and beliefs. They may cut corners to get projects done fast or treat direct reports poorly. Whatever it is, use their actions as a catalyst for determining what you really believe in. Great leaders have strong beliefs, and this is a chance to think about and solidify the principles to which you adhere.