The Need For Self Preservation

First responsibility of top managers and leaders is self preservation. I was taught this lesson from a veteran, a very senior board member and a leadership practitioner of a very large and famous IT multinational of yesteryears. His basic contention was, if you don't preserve and protect yourself from each and every threat and not actively lookout for potential threats coming your way, how then will you ever be able to carry out your agenda of value creation for all your stakeholders and the community in general. His message to a couple of us more than a decade ago was to shamelessly protect ourselves if we wanted to really make a difference, and not just take one on the chin all the time.

Managers and leaders will face threats all layers. Let me focus on leadership, as the game is quiet different there and stakes are very high. In leadership roles the following threats are very real but not limited to the list mentioned below, the list below comes from my experience of having fought these demons as they trapped me at various points in time in the past.

1. Delusion
2. Insecurity
3. Amoralism

Delusion:

I have had this amazing opportunity to be in this space called delusion  I have experienced many facets of delusion and have learned very invaluable lessons, and fortunately very early in life. Few lessons I learned, are as follows:

1. What I inspect is what I get. This is true despite the fact that I know the people I work with, I have massive trust and faith in people I work with and some of them have fantastic past track records. I learnt quickly to get out of the delusion that "not placing my trust in someone is bad" is very different from my need for inspection. I trust someone, and hence I bestowed that responsibility to that person. After that, what you inspect is what you get.
2. I am as good as my current conduct. Walking this path has has helped me to stay out of the delusion that despite status-quo, faith in my abilities and character can never be displaced or disputed.
3. I am not an island. I need partnerships and eco-system to carry out my agenda. So, I own nothing and  control nothing. I facilitate for people around me. I am never in delusion of my abilities by virtue of the role and responsibility I shoulder. First thing I do is insulate myself with complementary skills and attitudes and then find ways to empower them fully.
4. Leadership is not a step in an hierarchical structure nor is it a virtue that you need to shoulder all the time. Leadership is a tool that one can pick up at discretion depending on the need of the hour.
5. Leadership and Management and  are two different things. Successful people oscillate between the two based on the best one can achieve by deploying either one of these two tools or a hybrid one. On many ocassions I have chosen one of my mates/colleagues to play a leadership role on a key initiative if that's what is needed to meet objectives or deliver results. My role then is that of  a management person supporting, mandating and aligning resources to my colleague's leadership to ensure success and meeting of objectives.

Insecurity:

I will be honest. I have never been insecure when I was in a corporate job, not even on my worst day. Hence I had to learn this lesson too late in life when the stakes were really high ! As a corporate citizen, I have never been prey to the 6 Cs that characterize insecurity - Comparison, Compensation, Competition, Compulsion, Condemnation and Control. I stepped off a corporate job in August 2011 and started off on my own as an independent IT Consultant. I was blessed with the opportunity to experience insecurity and discover how I could go from bad to worse. Fantastic lessons learned. Insecurity was neither financial, nor was it fear of failure. Insecurity came from the delusion that to be a good business person, I need to understand every aspect of business. I obviously don't. So, I decided to do everything myself ! How stupid is that. Insecurity makes you wear a mask of a superhero. You try to be who you are not and your actions speak. I decided to register for service tax, manage my own financial aspects (tax, income, balance sheet) etc. Instead of focusing on my core strengths and work with people who have complementary skill sets (something I did all my life by choice in corporate jobs), I became superman. I wore a mask and I started comparing my consulting fees with what other consultants charge. I started, leveraging my gift of gab, putting down fellow consultants with some potential clients. There was a deep compulsion to push clients to innovate and do new things instead of helping them see benefits that they could realize and enjoy, talking to them in their language (again something I have practised all my life as a corporate citizen). It took a meeting with L N Sunderrajan to help me realize that I was insecure. I will never forget the favor he did me, by calling me over for a drink at the MIG Cricket Club, Bandra - to discuss a completely different agenda. Sunder has used experts and partners for his financial accounting needs, coding and design. He focuses on the core strengths of his team members and himself and delivers along with his partners. Luckily, I met him while I was in the 4th month of my stint as an individual IT consultant and learnt the most valuable lesson of my life.I am not sure if Sunder ever noticed me to be insecure. I did talk to him on my need to be financially selfish and not share income. How short-sighted and naive is that for someone who has always talked about delivering success in the long-term thru partnerships while in a corporate job!

You will be the only person who would not know if you are insecure. People around you notice it. Keeping an open mind to that fact that somewhere insecurity could lurks within you, helps you test dispassionately this hypothesis. If you keep a keen eye and ear open to how people around you behave with you and what they talk to you. People tend to run projects without involving the potential end-users right from conceptualization till the time its ready for UAT, if some of the Cs are in the play. The Cs are responsible for blaming end users for lack of imagination and appreciation. People who operate in partnership models neither face these C issues, nor are in the business of requirement gathering.

Amoralism:  

The best way to preserve oneself  is to be completely at peace with the eco-system while carrying the burden of one's beliefs, value systems and personal notions of ethics. If you noticed some skepticism laced in dark humor in the last sentence, you've got what I mean. As Sarkar  says, there is nothing that's either right or wrong. One who has the power, his wrong becomes right (bad english translation)!

Organizations are either social or commercial enterprises out there to achieve certain goals, meet certain objectives and deliver value to its stakeholders. They go about it in a certain manner. Its important to work in places where there is a cultural alignment of notions of personal ethics and value system biases with that of the enterprise's. Its quiet naive to blame an organization to be immoral or ethically wrong if personal biases are tangential to that of the organization. Choosing the right organization to work for, actually means choosing the most congenial place to work, where you have alignment on value systems, ethics and morals. I am borrowing a few lines verbatim from a doctoral thesis :

The phenomenon of amoralism: An investigation of the cognitive and emotive roots.

Doctoral Thesis / Dissertation,  2008,  250 Pages

Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.)

1. The Statement of the Problem

It is a common empirical observation that most people take considerations of morality as important factors in making a morally relevant choice. Moreover, such considerations ordinarily override other reasons for actions. To say that a certain act is useful, agreeable, profitable but yet immoral usually means to condemn the act in the strongest possible terms. In the ordinary discourse the labeling of some action-guiding principle or a particular action as immoral gives the ultimate reason for rejecting it. Likewise, one may think of an action as difficult, unpleasant, risky and costly but yet required from the moral point of view.

You cannot preserve yourself if you are at war with the ethics and value systems of the organization, even if you have what is hilariously known as good ethics and best value systems. Step into organizations where there is harmony and homogeneity between your personal belief systems and that of the organization. This is one aspect where diversity does not take anyone anywhere. People who often blame the workplace to be devoid of ethics (when actually, all the while the employee and the organization have their own ethic systems, but have nothing in common), usually forget that they have the power to choose not be part of the game on that particular playground!

Protect and preserve yourself vehemently against habits, virtues, weakness and people with negative influences. One might ask, what is negative? Anything that deflates , demoralizes and puts you down is negative. Sometimes, it is incompatibility with the co-system, sometimes its your sense of perception and values and sometimes its people who dont like either your agenda or you. Some of us might wash our hands off people issues saying we are not political or my organization is not political. The moment there is more than one person in the room, there is politics! People who take up leadership roles need to deal with this with equal enthusiasm as they do with other challenges. If you dont survive, you will cease to exist in a state of power that is needed to carry out your agenda and meet your goals of delivering value to your stakeholders and the community in general.