Infectious Leadership

What kind of infectious agent do you want to be? Infectious like humor or infectious like the plague? For good or ill the senior leadership of every organization is infectious. By this I mean that leaders’ behaviors tend to be transmitted to their direct reports, who pass them on to the next level, and so on down through their organizations. Over time, they permeate the organization from top to bottom, influencing activity at all levels. Eventually they become embodied in the organizational culture, influencing the types of people who get promoted and hired into the organization, creating a self-reinforcing feedback loop – either positive or negative. The idea that senior leader behavior is truly viral became clear to me when I was doing organizational change consulting for the CEO of a manufacturing company in the mid-1990s. Facing aggressive competition, the business was in dire need of adopting a new generation of technology and moving to team-based production methods. Doing so required breaking down barriers between functions in manufacturing, as well as retraining the unionized workforce. Virtually everyone in the company understood that the company’s future was at stake, and that new technology and methods were key to remaining competitive. At the same time, it became evident that the basis of trust necessary to move forward was completely absent. No one trusted anyone and an environment of fear completely permeated the organization. The critically important relationship between union leadership and manufacturing management was as toxic as one could possibly imagine. As I began to delve into the history of the business I found it had not always been this way. The breakdown in trust and the rise of fear-based management had begun close to a decade earlier when a new head of manufacturing had been brought in from the outside. The company, which until then had enjoyed reasonably cordial labor-management relations, had fallen on some hard times, and the founders had decided they needed a “strong hand” to put things right. What they got was a micro-managing bully, let’s call him Carl. Carl was able to turn the situation around, but it came at a great cost to the culture of the company. Charming to his boss and peers, he was ruthlessly controlling in his fiefdom. He made virtually every decision regardless of how small and set up what amounted to a spy network to keep an eye on everyone. He was relentlessly critical of the people working for him, and rapidly moved to promote a supporting cast of henchmen and, yes-men. They in, turn, forced the people working for them into defensive crouches, and so on down the line. Relationships with the union degenerated into bitter acrimony, as the union elected ever more adversarial leaders and pushed aside the moderates. The needed change simply wasn’t possible the CEO figured out what was really going on and ousted Carl and his cronies from the organization. Although arguable less damaging, pyromaniac leaders have the same sort of viral impact on their organizations. As I discussed in a previous post pyromaniacs are leaders who relish fighting fires, sometimes to the point of igniting them. As their attention shifts from crisis to crisis, they force their direct reports into the same mode, forcing them to respond, on short notice, to requests for information or action spawned from the fire-de-jour. Here too, senior leader behavior propagates downward, infecting the entire organization. Lest you think the news is all bad, the infectious nature of leadership applies as much to good behaviors as to bad. I was reminded of this while recently watching a “60 minutes” segment on Herb Kelleher, the Chairman (and formerly CEO) of Southwest Airlines. Everything he did communicated his genuine passion for the business, commitment to excellence, and respect for the company’s employees. And his enthusiasm was truly infectious. Of course, the organization also had to have a great strategy and supporting processes and capabilities, but it was Kelleher who breathed life into the place. And he had surrounded himself with people who felt and acting in the same ways. It was firmly rooted in the culture and in the way that people got promoted and hired. It was hard to imagine Southwest getting poisoned by a bad apple the way that Carl had positioned the manufacturing company I had worked with. To understand just how infectious leaders are, I invite you to try the following experiment on successive days. On the first day enter smiling. Greet everyone cheerfully. Go out of your way to complement people on work well done. Accentuate the positive, even it if hurts. Find the glass to be half-full wherever you go. On the second day enter frowning. Evidence a clear irritability. Go out of your way to focus on the problems and call people to account if they missed even the smallest detail or commitment. Accentuate the negative in every interaction you have. You are likely to be amazed at the difference in the atmospheres that you engender. On the first day, your people are likely to mirror your positive mood and energy levels will rise. On the second day, it will be like you sucked the oxygen out the room. Your people become increasingly anxious and struggle to figure out what’s wrong. Now imagine what it’s like to live constantly with leaders with these characteristics and the impact it would have on their organizations. The implication? Every leader needs to think hard about their viral impact on their organization. What kind of infectious agent do you want to be? Infectious like humor or infectious like the plague? COPYRIGHT 2009 Michael Watkins. Genesis Advisers, PO Box 00083. West Newton, MA 02465. All rights reserved. No part may be reproduced or transmitted in any form, or by any means, without prior permission.