LeadersWhoExpecttoBeWorshiped

was talking to a young gentle man last week and we got to talking about the leadership in his place of work. The leaders in his organization are people I have known for a long time as we grew up together in the industry and attained various levels of success and growth in each person’s area of specialization.

In the course of our conversation, he mentioned that one of the leaders in his organization has engendered so much fear, that nobody in the organization enters the elevator with him anytime he wants to go up or down. Irrespective of how pressed people were or how many people are waiting to use the elevator, as soon as they see him coming, they all wait for him to use it alone. I found this very strange and sad for the individual. How can you engender so much fear in the people you lead that everybody is too afraid to share the same space with you?

I then asked, “what does he do when people give him space”?, he said “nothing”. “So, he sees all of you waiting to enter the elevator and enters alone and does nothing to correct that”? He said, “yes”. I was amazed! By all accounts, this individual is now very successful and known in his industry and running a company with revenue and profit turnover in the billions. He has certainly earned his place in the big league. But, is that enough to expect your staff to worship you or avoid being in the same space with you because they fear you or maybe do not like you? As I had also learnt that he speaks harshly and rudely to his staff. I then decided to do a bit of research on leadership and leaders to see whether this unwholesome behavior or variants of it was prevalent amongst leaders and ultrasuccessful people.

I discovered in Darko Lovric and Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic’s article on, “Why Great Success Can Bring Out The Worst Parts of Our Personalities”, that there is a long history of successful entrepreneurs, industrialists, and self-made billionaires who stood out equally for their talents and achievements and their eccentric, difficult, or volatile personalities. Howard Hughes, an innovator, aviator, billionaire, spent most of his later life in complete isolation rather than have to engage with the public and the resulting exposure to the germs he so feared. Tim Armstrong, during his tenure as the CEO of AOL, fired an executive on a live conference call after the exec snapped a photo of him for the internal website. Steve Jobs was known for berating employees and suppliers in unprintable language.

The successful-entrepreneur (leader)-asdifficult-person stereotype is so entrenched that many people assume these difficult traits are what cause their success. Lovric and Premuzic said that, while these “dark side“behaviors don’t cause success, success can definitely exacerbate them. Success often strengthens the undesirable side of people’s personalities, perhaps because power lowers their motivation to positively manage their reputation.

The more power and influence you have, the less interested you will be in pleasing other people and in keeping your dark side in check. Lovric and Premuzic advise leaders to ensure that they work on the following four psychological challenges and weaknesses to ensure they do not fail in their quest to impact the world. These are:

• Exceptional success can lead to deluded self-perception. No matter how much people achieve, there can be a point where their self-views surpass their achievements, making them unaware of their limitations and unjustifiably pleased with themselves. This leads to overconfidence in one’s abilities, or what the ancient Greeks referred to as hubris: pride that offended the gods, and invited a godly punishment in the form of a humbling. • Success creates a flattering image of oneself, which can often be magnified in the media. This can frequently lead to enhanced narcissism, as successful individuals try to protect their flattering image in the face of inevitable tailwinds and drawbacks. • It is hard to speak truth to power, especially when faced with impressive and charismatic individuals whose approval leads to both tangible and intangible benefits for others. Success creates a scarcity of negative feedback and news, and increased flattery and servility. The more status and power you have, the more you will intimidate others and the more you will surround yourself with people who flatter you — turning your inflated self-views into a self-fulfilling prophecy. Executives who react badly to negative news and who consider themselves superior will have little incentive to establish a strong and independent team that can provide muchneeded critical and brutally honest feedback. All of this is exacerbated by increased loneliness and isolation, which can eclipse an individual’s ability to get an accurate picture of what’s going on. • One of the attractions of success is increased insulation from the consequences of failure. Such freedom and independence allow one, at best, to become more relaxed and authentic. However, such behaviors can shade into eccentricity and antisocial rants when left unchecked. A reduced need for self-control in turn leads to lower productivity and lower quality of interpersonal relationships. Lashing out against critics in situations where one is better off remaining silent can often be best understood as a failure of self-control.

How do we overcome these challenges above? There are three specific things leaders in this situation can focus on according to the experts: • Difficult things are difficult — and there should be no shame in admitting it. • Perhaps the most counterintuitive piece of our advice — welcoming some limitations on our own power, and assuming that those limitations are imposed through the good judgment of competent people — creates the right conditions for one to be challenged.. • Many individuals claim they actively solicit negative feedback. But in reality, their resistance to such feedback is subtle but noticeable, fueled as much by personal emotions as by the very real need to project confidence as a leader.

Therefore, the first step toward being coachable is to establish private space and trust with a set of individuals whose feedback one respects. These individuals should have both the knowledge and the day-to-day experience on the matters where you need feedback. Having a trusted executive team is the best way to achieve this.

Exceptional success comes at a cost but being disliked and avoided by your staff and peers should not be one of them. In view of your achievements and how impactful your success has been to the world, you should be loved and cherished. As leaders, we need to constantly examine ourselves to ensure that we do the right thing.