How can you tell when a leader is becoming tainted by hubris and self-centered behavior? We like the simple explanation offered by Patrick Decker, the retired CEO of Xylem, a multibillion-dollar water solutions company. As he was rising through the corporate ranks, Decker was fortunate to participate in a leadership development program where he received some mentoring advice from Larry Bossidy, the retired CEO of AlliedSignal (later Honeywell). Decker had asked Bossidy what to pay attention to when moving people into new and more substantial roles. Bossidy replied, “Watch for whether they grow or swell.” Decker explains, “When moving a person into a leadership role, I pay attention to the behaviors that start to show up.”:
Does the new leader:
- Sponge up as much learning from others as possible?
- Get inquisitive?
- Ask for help and guidance?
- Show humility and solicit the input of others?
- Dedicate themselves to developing their direct reports, empowering them, and creating opportunities for development?
Or:
- Does their ego start to take over?
- Do they get territorial, focus too narrowly on their own objectives, or become jealous of their peers’ successes?
- Do they use intimidation as a shortcut to getting people to move?
Swelling is how you can tell when new leaders are letting power go to their heads, and the surest sign that a leader is headed for trouble.”
Swelling is another word for hubris, and as Decker suggests, it progresses to other damaging behaviors. As the offspring of hubris, these behaviors work to undermine and diminish a leader’s impact. Hubris is at the root of all sorts of other abhorrent and self-centered leader behavior, such as…
Self-centered Behaviors
Rigidity
Backbone and resolve convey strength in a leader. But when a leader’s opinions and preferences are calcified to the point that they are shut off to new ideas and contemporary approaches, their influence slowly rots. Closed-minded leadership is characterized by a my-way-or-the-highway mentality, and entire organizations have fallen because of leadership rigor mortis.
Complacency
Vibrancy as a leader depends on continuously striving to gain new skills and competencies and embracing new approaches. Over time, though, a leader may come to rely too much on past experience, automating his response to new challenges that actually warrant novel approaches. Even a leader who starts out as part of the raucous revolution can eventually become part of the tired and entitled establishment. Complacency grows as passion diminishes. Before long complacency causes a leader to settle, expecting and accepting less of himself…and those being led.
Incompetence
A leader needs to have a depth of knowledge to engender confidence among those he is leading – leadership competence yields follower confidence. Conversely, people will quickly lose confidence if they sense that their leader doesn’t know what he’s doing. Hubris deludes a leader into thinking he knows more than he actually does, causing him to overestimate his talents and underestimate his limitations.
Intimidation
Make no mistake, fear gets results. If it didn’t, it wouldn’t be used by so many leaders as the primary means of motivating people. But fear has diminishing returns, eventually undermining the very returns a leader aims to get by stoking it. A leader’s job should be building people’s courage and confidence, not tearing them down by injecting them with fear and anxiety. Hubris sees it differently, using fear as a weapon of power to motivate and subjugate others.
Invulnerability
People need to know that the person behind the leader’s role is real and vulnerable, just like them. Vulnerability and authenticity help bridge the natural distance between followers and a leader. Human beings come equipped with authenticity detectors. They will be loyal and sympathetic to a leader who is conscious of his own weaknesses and limitations and likewise will distrust a leader whose heart is impenetrable and who pretends to be invulnerable. Hubris causes a leader to falsely portray himself as invincible and superior to all others.
Ingratitude
Above all, a leader is charged with getting results. But results are an end, and the means to getting those results is the hard work, passion, and abiding commitment of people. A leader needs followers more than followers need the leader because a leader’s results depend on their work. It’s simple really: without followers, you can’t be a leader. A leader who fails to express gratitude–generously and genuinely–will lose the hearts and minds of followers and undermine results in the process. As the purest form of self-centeredness, hubris withholds gratitude because acknowledging the contribution of others takes attention and acclaim away from the leader himself.
Self-Centered Choices
It may strike you as odd that deceit, or some similar word, is not included in our list of hubristic behaviors. We believe that most leaders are good and decent people right from the get-go. Even though a leader who’s ensnared by hubris will nearly always end up making self-centered and arrogant choices, he or she may not end up doing unethical things. There are plenty of bad but ethical leaders (though we don’t think the reverse is true).
That said, the leader who compromises core principles is certainly more prone to deceitful and unethical behavior, and it is these very compromises that ego and unchecked ambition work to bring about. Why? Because each compromise removes a single brick from the larger foundation of a leader’s moral structure. If enough bricks are removed, eventually there won’t be enough moral structure to support a leader’s overall integrity. Ultimately, deceit, in all its forms, stems from a collapse of morality. Victory is assured—for ego, pride, and self-interest—when a leader loses moral grounding.
How can leaders balance confidence with humility to avoid the trap of hubris and maintain their effectiveness and integrity?
This post is based on an excerpt from The Leadership Killer: Reclaiming Humility in an Age of Arrogance.
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Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay
