Irrational and self-destructive executives
Why do executives act in so irrational and self-destructive a fashion?
Businesses are the last battleground of civilised man. CEOs, like generals, fight it out in what is frequently a highly public struggle for their own survival, for the survival of their teams, their brands and the benefit of their workforce and their shareholders.
The combat is perhaps over polished tables, but is no less real than that of military battles, and no less revealing of the incompetence of those who take part, and of their lack of self-understanding. Both battles, whether financial or military, are a convenient way of looking at how we manage ourselves; and give dramatic pegs on which to hang key ideas and themes. So this book juxtaposes, from time to time, the military with the civilian battles and, whilst doing that, it tries to explain why we act the way we do, why we mess up so frequently.
Few executives are financially independent. They are ordinary people, who daily do extraordinary things. They have their strengths and weaknesses like all of us and, like all of us, they build defences, form habits, hide in comfort zones and cover up to help them get through each day. There are three main issues that lie behind why we make a mess of things, why we are so incompetent:
Firstly, we need training in how to grow up: Our working lives depend upon our ability to form strong adult relationships that allow us to argue, disagree, resolve and continue to develop ideas without destroying friendships. We have to learn how to understand others, how to probe behaviours, how to see the other persons view. And above all, we need to learn about ourselves, how we think and react. Few of us have had any training in how to do this, in how to grow up. We just muddle through and hopefully learn on the hoof. But we lack knowledge and understanding where it matters most what makes us like we are and how to deal with it.
Secondly, we are poor listeners: We all know the satisfaction of helping others to succeed. This depends upon listening first, finding out what is truly concerning the other person, deeply understanding them. To do this, we need to know how they feel, and we need to spend time doing it. We need to be open to feelings ourselves, to become empathetic. And yet we are frightened to show our feelings, to trust others with our fears, to ask for help. At the most basic level, though we know we depend on others, we do not even know how to listen to them, or hear what they are trying to tell us. So we destroy the opportunity to share trust, to help others, or to delegate competently.
Thirdly, we do not know how to deal with fear: Time and again, CEO’s are driven by fear, inner demons, and deep-seated anxieties that they scarcely understand themselves. Managers are driven by a fear of failure that is all the more gut-wrenching because they have never known how to confront it or deal with it.
It is not surprising that so many executives are unhappy. At worst, lonely, overworked, stressed, with little left in their lives to balance their careers, they run on adrenalin and an insatiable need for the glory of the next deal to help them cover up their fear of failure.
Management and leadership present challenges at all levels – to the individual, to the team, and of course, to whole organisations and to the cultures that have been created in them. It is extraordinary, but true, that whole organisations can collaborate in a collective incompetence – a cover-up – about their supposedly great past, the quality of their products, the way they did things. This phenomenon can even happen across a whole sector. Appendix 1 is devoted to the collective cover-up over Chernobyl. Like all cover-ups, it was a futile effort, founded in fear, which probably did more than anything to destroy international confidence in nuclear power as an acceptable future energy option. Ironically, in so doing, it has made the developed economies even more dependent on oil and the Middle East – it has discouraged more innovative options that might be more eco-friendly.