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|In: Leadership|Last Updated:

I’m insanely jealous of those who write short and shallow bestselling books that contain simplistic formulas purporting to solve complex problems. Go to any bookstore and you’ll find any number of surefire prescriptions for achieving obscene wealth (hint: They work, for the authors, to the extent people buy their books and attend their seminars). You’ll find, if you’re an unattractive and obnoxious guy, quite a few experts in the art of attracting beautiful women (curiously, if you’re an unattractive and obnoxious woman wanting to return the favor you’ll find fewer choices).

And of course, you’ll find Who Moved My Cheese.

I don’t know that Stephen Covey’s The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People counts. Covey doesn’t pretend any of the habits are easily acquired and practiced. To his credit, he says the exact opposite. They require personal discipline.

What’s annoying about 7 Habits, in addition to its success, is its unrelentingly positive tone. There’s little satisfaction to be had in reading about how you can achieve your own personal success through hard work, compared to the joy of criticizing others, especially when they are prominent.

To that end, here’s an outline for a book I’m sure would be a colossal best-seller: The 7 Habits of Truly Execrable Leaders. They are:

  • Arrogance: Truly awful leaders know, deep in their bones, that they’re better than the people who work for them. It must be true. Otherwise the poor slobs would be their peers or superiors. Arrogance isn’t merely the first bad habit. It’s also a root cause of all the rest, either by driving them or from feeding on them.
  • Willful Ignorance: Visit your local library and you’ll understand that the human skull is too small to contain even a tiny fraction of everything that’s known (ignoring the epistemological vagueness of “known”). So ignorance is unavoidable. Willful ignorance is a different matter. Too many leaders carefully insulate themselves from any information that doesn’t fit their preconceptions, and from people who might provide it.
  • Authoritarian Decisions: Authoritarian decision-making is the best way to operate in a crisis. When time counts and any decision is better than no decision, leaders shouldn’t hesitate to bark out orders. When, on the other hand, you have time to learn and reflect, “any decision” is no longer the best you can aspire to.
  • Privilege: Its Latin roots are the words for “private” and “law.” That’s what it is in practice, too, except for the Latin part. Bad leaders give themselves special privileges. Whether they’re called privileges, perks, or “understandings,” they make it clear: I hold you to higher standards than those I set for myself.
  • Aristocracy: Privilege is bad enough. When a leader extends privilege to an inner circle, the organization now has a club. When membership in the club depends solely on loyalty and the ability to “get along,” and not on, for example, competence, the leader’s awfulness approaches perfection.
  • Celebrity: Most of us understand that every person is the hero of his or her own movie. Awful leaders assume they are the heroes of our movies as well as their own. It is, at the end of the day, all about them.
  • One redeeming virtue: Every bad leader has a redeeming virtue. It’s a requirement, in part because without at least one, the truly awful leader would instead be the truly pathetic failure. You don’t get into a leadership role without something going for you.

In some respects, the redeeming virtue is the worst feature of the truly awful leader. It’s gives their followers an excuse to be followers, and it often gives outside observers the illusion that the leader isn’t that bad after all. After all, someone who loves dogs and horses can’t be all bad, can they?

Even worse than this, the redeeming virtue is what allows even the worst leaders to maintain their inflated self image. Whenever they’re at risk of doubting themselves they can rest easy, surrounded by the comfort of their redeeming virtue.

You might be asking yourself, right about now, how it is that yours truly has such certain knowledge of the psychology of the awful leader. The answer is simple, and unnerving.

The 7 Habits of Truly Execrable Leaders could just as easily be titled The 7 Occupational Hazards of All Leaders at All Times. Each one represents a temptation, and a trap that’s easy for any leader to fall into and very hard to escape — especially for the unwary.

Including me.

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|In: Industry Commentary|Last Updated:

What follows started life as a well-circulated opinion piece, authored by Lee Iacocca as a summary of his and Catherine Whitney’s new book, Where Have All The Leaders Gone? (thanks to Bruce Herrington for bringing it to my attention).

In it, Iacocca provides a useful list of the character traits required of successful leaders. If you’re interested in what the architect of the K-Car, huge government loan guarantees and an ad campaign featuring himself instead of his products has to say about our current political leaders, you’ll find it here: http://www.snopes.com/politics/soapbox/iacocca.asp.

If, instead, you want his framework without a political essay attached, here are Iacocca’s alliterative “Nine Cs of Leadership.”

  • Curiosity: Leaders need to know What’s Going On Out There. Even more important, they need to need to know. No, that isn’t a typo. Curiosity is recognizing the importance of knowing What’s Going On Out There. Here in KJR-ville, we call the skill organizational listening. Those who don’t do it well are easily manipulated by their information sources. Or else they’re just ignorant.
  • Creativity: Leaders, according to Iacocca, must be able to think outside the box — to entertain unconventional notions and develop new and innovative solutions. Opinion: He’s wrong, but not badly wrong. While leaders do have to be able to think in unconventional terms and give new ideas an honest shot, finding those ideas through curiosity is more important than developing them through creativity. The best leaders are brokers of great ideas. Developing them is optional, and risks the Not Invented Here syndrome.
  • Communication: By “communication” Iacocca means telling people what they need to hear rather than what they want to hear. Again, he’s mostly right. Telling people what they need to hear instead of what they want to hear is one of the differences between leading and pandering.Add this: Effective communication is the result of planning, not blurting. It focuses on the audience’s vocabulary and cares, not the leader’s. Anything else is self-indulgence.
  • Character: In Iacocca’s book, character is knowing the difference between right and wrong and having the courage to do what’s right. Regular KJR readers know my position: Leaders must have clear values, and they must recognize that others have equally strong sets of values that differ in important respects. Values, that is, are personal, not universal, subjective rather than objective, and are therefore beliefs rather than facts.Leaders must have the character — the courage — to lead according to their values, not because they are “right” in any absolute sense, but because, as leaders, they take responsibility for their own moral code.

    They draw a clear boundary between what they will and won’t accept, on no authority beyond their own. They also have the courage to know when to allow others to act according to their own values, even when those values are different.

  • Courage: As Iacocca defines courage, it’s pretty much the same thing as character.
  • Conviction: Conviction is the fire in the belly that drives someone to accomplish uncommon and important results through force of will. Leadership is about making intentional change happen. That’s always an unlikely outcome. If you don’t care about achieving something … a lot (passionately, if you’ll excuse the soon-to-be-a-cliche adverb) … it won’t happen at all.
  • Charisma: Iacocca defines charisma as the ability to inspire, not as personal magnetism. But really, when you have conviction and the ability to communicate, the ability to inspire is automatic.
  • Competence: Thank you, thank you, thank you. KJR recently covered the same point (“Join the party,” 5/7/2007). You can lead without being competent or insisting on it in your organization. Accomplishing anything useful or sustainable is a very different matter.
  • Common sense: Oh, dear. Whether you call it common sense, good instincts, or trusting your gut, the notion is a dangerous one. Too often, “common sense” is nothing more than personal bias, and prevents the very openness to new ideas Iacocca values. What’s really necessary is a pair of essential traits that masquerade as common sense: Having the experience to understand a situation in depth, and the ability to recognize when your experience is irrelevant to what you’re facing.

Sadly, after the Nine Cs, Iacocca couldn’t resist. He added Crisis — the popular myth that this is the true test and measure of a leader.

It isn’t. Leadership is easiest in a crisis. Not easy, but easiest, because crisis provides direction, motivation, clarity, and a general willingness in others to accept leadership without all those annoying questions and challenges that arise in more relaxed situations.

It’s why bad leaders so often manufacture crises.

And, I suppose, it’s why Iacocca manufactured the K-Car and bragged about it.

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