Disintegrated Leadership

You always have to have that one boss in your career. I wish it happens fast to you so you can move on and put it behind. It happened to me and I'm in still the process of letting go. I'm writing another post called 'Shitty Bosses' (not ready yet) where I want to highlight things our boss say or do that prevents your growth as a professional or person, at a individual level. In this post I want to select behaviors that lousy bosses do to stop growing the company at team level.

A good friend of mine called it Disintegrated Leadership, and the concept fits very well when you briefly explain. Whenever I'm in a meeting, dinner or even interview and people ask me the dreaded question: "so what happened at X company that you are no longer there", I always answer these 2 short words: Disintegrated Leadership. This is usually followed by a nod and some hazing from the questioner, to which I immediately give ideas about what it means and people rapidly get it.

Disintegrated leadership is like cancer. It tears apart the teams, effort is wasted and energy is executed inefficiently, time is wasted, people get exhausted and in the end all you have a is high rotation and morale down the floor. These are some of the things that cause this, taken from real life experience, from a senior C-level manager we had as a leader, but of course it didn't work and the cancer won.

Coherence

In more coloquial terms, walk the talk. Preach what you pray. There is nothing more demoralizing than a incoherent leader that says one thing and does another. It is very easy to set golden rules and say that you will lead this way or the other, but when reality bites, the actions are what count and they can talk different than what your mouth is saying. Actually, the main reason I created The Top Floor is to avoid falling into this behavior, as stated in the first post. The bottom line is: you should align mind, body and soul, and cut the crap.

Vertical Structure

'I don't want to be bothered by your problems or sit down and understand what your whole department is doing, so from now on you report to this manager'... After saying (in an indirect manner, making the incoherence stronger) variations of this quote to different mid-level managers, you can turn a 10+ direct reports to a vertical structure of 4, with managers piled up one below another, and shoulder to shoulder with specialists and analysts. So what happens next? Power is dissipated, people don't know who to follow: your new report? your old boss? where is your strategy? After this, meetings are next to guys with 1/3 of your salary, which is not a good sign for you. Get ready to get restructured.

Holy Wars with half the company

All companies have a core business. For example in a law firm, it's the lawyers, in an airline it's the pilots. The main leader of the company (CEO, note C is for Chief, not Crappy) simply cannot forever be in a "Holy War" with the core business talent. In some companies this will account for half the headcount or more. Regardless of size, the leader must have a conciliatory attitude, and the main goal is to get everyone aboard the same train, not pretend to leave people behind or don't care if some teams, even the core of the company, hop on, or do zero effort to mend that situation. It's easy to yield the excuse "P&L first", but for 21st century, it is "People First".

Zero involvement

The perfect team working for you is like this: wake up, get to work and find all the reports on the desk, in the mobile phone, email and middle managers coming in to your office in synchronized order to brief you on each department. Everything works perfect. Reality: people get caught up in meetings, information and reports are delayed, problems arise that can delay things, managers get caught in day-to-day basis, and might need help solving stuff. The problem: Leader is too busy, or dealing with more important stuff to not go through his whole team every 1,2,3 or whatever weeks it takes. It doesn't matter if some areas are very organized and don't need help, it's good for morale to show support and interest. It makes a whole world of difference to empower the managers and make people feel they have an impact on what they are doing.

Criteria formed from 3rd parties

Continuing from 'zero involvement' comes how your form a criteria of someone's work. Impossible if you are not leading (hence, getting involved), so you will end up forming what you think of someone's work based on what people around tell you, which, as you now, some people will take advantage of and throw dirty water on anyone's job, actions, put words where they don't belong and many other dark things you can imagine humans do. It is not an option: Leadership means getting to know the people, their works, their way of thinking. An interesting thought: Tim Cook from Apple mentioned in some interview how to disconnect from the day to day basis of the job, he visited the stores, to talk to customers and salesmen. That simple act will make a difference on your life and the life of the people you talk to. He will not get told how the stores are, he will know first hand.

In the end, I think all this sums up to something really simple: Leading means help people grow. What does growing accounts for? If you go beyond professional education towards human education, people learn by example, by getting involved, by being coherent, by communicating and by forming relationships that inspire. Did you know you can tell how a company is being lead just by how the frontman or receptionist treats you?

I hope you find this post really interesting and if you'd like to share something that relates to you or brings you memories from similar experiences, let me know in the comments. What do you think a proper leader should be like? What are the golden rules for a leader? How would you form an Integrated Leadership? Please let me know in the comments below!