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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

We just finished watching The Borgias. It was, while entertaining, not particularly accurate history.

In the hierarchy of entertainment based on actual human beings, it wasn’t a true story. That would have meant everything depicted in it happened as depicted. Nor was it based on a true story, where the basics happened as shown, but with some plot points and character development enhanced for dramatic impact.

No, The Borgias was, like The Moral Hazard of Lime Daiquiris, the novel Dave Kaiser and I co-authored, inspired by a true story — neither its creators nor Dave and I let mere facts interfere with entertainment value.

It was, in a word, fiction.

But never mind all that. Instead, mind all this: During the time we were enjoying the show, I happened upon an old (2004) KJR that talked about servant leadership, and another that discussed the popular diagnosis of psychopathy among business leaders.

Which led me to wonder how servant and psychopathic leaders would have fared in early renaissance Italy.

My not particularly unpredictable guess: The psychopaths would have fit right in. The servant leaders? Not so much. Not only wouldn’t they have lived to a ripe old age, but in the Middle Ages they probably wouldn’t have lived to a ripe middle age.

Which, sadly, calls into question the whole notion of servant leaders. As Machiavelli (nicely depicted in The Borgias as the Florentine ambassador and Cesar Borgia’s occasional mentor) explained in The Prince, “Any man who tries to be good all the time is bound to come to ruin among the great number who are not good. Hence a prince who wants to keep his authority must learn how not to be good, and use that knowledge, or refrain from using it, as necessity requires.”

In Renaissance Italy this meant having no qualms about engaging in armed conquest and the occasional assassination. In the modern workplace, backstabbing is more often metaphorical, but, I suspect, no less frequent.

If your career is academic you might consider basing your thesis research on this question. The easy part: a survey that asks a random sampling of employees whether they’ve ever been backstabbed. I predict an arithmetic mean of 100% with an error bar of +/- 0.01%.

Just as easy: also asking whether they’ve ever engaged in backstabbing — for this I predict the mean will be below 5% (error bar of +/- 1.0%). If I’m remotely close that would mean five percent of the workforce routinely victimizes everyone else.

Except that what would really mean is that most of us, faced with anything less than adulation by our managers and peers, conclude we must have been victimized while those of us who receive adulation from our managers and peers figure it must be well deserved.

Which gets us back to how the Borgias behaved in The Borgias (sorta plot spoiler alert, but only in general). No matter who they tortured, killed, imprisoned, or inflicted other forms of mayhem on, they just couldn’t seem to figure out that they had so many enemies because they tortured, killed, imprisoned, and inflicted various forms of mayhem.

The Borgias might not be accurate history. But as a metaphorical account of how psychopathic business leaders think and respond, this is, in my experience, a not-unreasonable rendering.

Which leads to this: If you aspire to reach the executive ranks and want servant leadership to shape your actions, be prepared for disappointment.

Whatever else, you’ll have to research potential employers carefully and subtly, and especially consider the affiliations and histories of those on the board of directors. If you don’t like what you know about the companies they come from you probably won’t like the management culture of the organization they govern.

Usually, when discussing the role of fiction vs fact in developing a worldview, the KJR position is that you should rely on facts to make your decisions, with fiction being a useful way to illustrate your thinking.

But in the question of servant vs psychopathic leaders, it’s the idea that those with a servant-style temperament are likely to reach the top echelons of the organizational chart that’s fiction. The Borgias illustrates the point nicely; the Borgias and their enemies and allies demonstrate it.

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|In: Career Management|Last Updated:

“Why can’t a woman,” asked Henry Higgins, “be more like a man?”

The fate of the 2020 election just might hinge on that question. Your evaluation of female management candidates, and their strategies for persuading you to hire or promote them, might hinge on it as well.

Caveat first: Selecting a presidential candidate is, at best, imperfectly analogous to selecting a manager, just as running for office is imperfectly analogous to applying for a management position. Among the differences: Candidates for management jobs won’t debate each other in an open forum, nor will they assemble large organizations to lobby you to hire them.

Filters second: While the original field of Democratic candidates included six women, only three are worth talking about. Kirsten Gillibrand was embarrassing, providing little more than vague generalities, and not many of those. Tulsi Gabbard’s contributions to our political dialog have been puzzling at best. And as a candidate, I’d say Marianne Williamson was a joke, except that jokes are supposed to be funny.

That leaves Kamala Harris, Amy Klobuchar, and Elizabeth Warren. Was sexism the reason none of them made the cut? Do you or should you have similar concerns about your management team?

Opinion: Ascribing the Democratic Party’s results to sexism oversimplifies the situation. After all, in 2016 the Democrats nominated Hillary Clinton, who then received three million more votes than her opponent in the general election. The Democratic Party can and has nominated a woman; American voters were willing to elect one.

So while women, whether in politics or business, still have to contend with the Ginger Rogers syndrome (she had to do everything Fred Astaire did, only backward and in high heels), sexism is not the sole reason Harris, Klobuchar, and Warren lost.

Another reason: Imagine you’re interviewing a management candidate and she makes an impassioned case for why one of the other candidates isn’t fit for the job.

It’s a bad interview move, and roughly equivalent to Harris resurrecting school busing as an issue to flog Joe Biden with, likewise Warren’s verbal assault on Michael Bloomberg. Credit where it’s due: while Klobuchar did go after Buttigieg, her heart didn’t seem to be in it.

Regrettably, her heart didn’t seem to be in her policy proposals either. She seemed more interested in asserting she could do the job than in explaining how she’d go about it.

Warren? Her “I have a plan for that!” tagline made her interesting, but her plethora of plans violated the sponsor-no-more-than-three rule effective leaders follow. Having a detailed plan for each thing meant she had no plan for everything. At least, no plan voters could keep in their heads all at once.

So a non-sexism-based interpretation is that Biden and Sanders haven’t survived because they’re old white guys. It’s that Sanders has focused passionately on what he would do as president; Biden has emphasized how he would lead the country. Neither has wasted time and energy attacking the other candidates.

But Biden and Sanders made plenty of mistakes too. These weren’t exactly ignored, but neither Sanders’ praise for Fidel Castro nor Biden’s non-arrest in South Africa did much damage.

Is it a clear case of Ginger Rogersism?

Maybe. But I think something else has been at work too: Which of the candidates was more “presidential.”

Personally I found Buttigieg, who had, based on his resume, no business even being in the audience, more presidential than anyone else. He was thoughtful, imperturbable, focused, and genuine. And, he left a positive impression that’s hard to describe and articulate.

For me, Biden and Sanders seem more presidential than Warren, even before her strange and pointless Bloomberg take down; likewise Klobuchar and Harris.

But … and this is the point of this column … how I define and gauge presidentiality, and, similarly, how I define and interpret business leadership and management potential, is to a significant extent a matter of conditioning. I have a lifetime of exposure to and working with and for business leaders who were, with few exceptions, male.

That experience has inexorably led to how I evaluate potential leaders and managers.

It’s sexism via immersion. I imagine that, no matter your gender, you’re in the same situation.

And so, whether you’re hiring or looking to be hired for a management role, think hard about how your impressions of what leaders and managers look and sound like have been conditioned by your experience.

Adjust your evaluation accordingly.

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