Leadership ≠ Control: How to Avoid the Authoritarian Spiral
The Dangerous Leadership Pattern Nobody Wants to Talk About
I’ve said it before, but it’s worth saying again: Emotional dysregulation, bullying and bloviating are not leadership attributes. People who cannot manage themselves should not manage others.
But as we all know, there are many people in positions of power who abuse it, despite there being a growing consensus that coercion, even by otherwise visionary leaders, neither gets the best results out of people nor generates the innovation necessary to thrive in the modern economy.
Yet, most of us have the impulse to coerce when we can get away with it, and leaders often can get away with it unless checks and balances constrain them.
For instance, at too many companies, CEOs appoint board members specifically not to challenge their authority, not to hold them accountable. CEOs also sometimes hire HR people who will serve them rather than be real partners who can hold them accountable. When this happens, HR investigations can go badly off the rails.
However if a company has a board of directors, it is the board’s responsibility to hold the CEO accountable — it’s one of the reasons you have a board of directors in the first place.
Compliance Exists to Go Around the CEO
For these situations, companies have a compliance function that should have a strong leader. The compliance function should report directly to the audit committee and can go around the CEO if needed. The internal audit function works the same way for the same reasons. If someone needs to report financial wrongdoing or discrimination or harassment, they need to be able to go around the CEO if the CEO is the problem.
This works better in public companies than it does in private ones. Dambisa Moyo, author of How Boards Work, explains that public corporations have far greater obligations — from all manner of stakeholders — for transparency and disclosures around forward-leaning social and cultural issues than privately held companies do.
For example, issues of gender diversity, pay parity, climate change, and ESG (environmental, social, and governance) factors are all areas where public companies are subject to scrutiny and reporting whereas private institutions generally are not.
The Most Powerful Are Often the Least Accountable
The issue here is that the people who have the most power — the people on the board of directors — are generally best positioned to dodge accountability. This puts HR in a terrible position unless the organizational structure is deliberately designed to limit the power of the CEO. The board of directors must hold the CEO accountable and have HR’s back.
Of course, many small businesses — bars, restaurants, dry cleaners, bodegas, and so on — don’t have a board of directors. The company I cofounded, Radical Candor®, has no board of directors. How can small business owners hold themselves accountable? A few things can help.
One is to appoint an ombudsperson whom people can go to with complaints. This ombudsperson needs to be someone who carries a lot of sway with the business owner — a mentor, for example — and who is willing to give a personal email address and phone number to all employees.
Another idea is to form a complaints committee: two or three employees who are generally trusted by the rank and file because they will not be afraid to bring problems to your attention.
These kinds of checks and balances are the only way to ensure you’re continually optimizing for collaboration instead of coercion.
Foster Collaboration, Not Coercion
Collaboration is essential to any great human accomplishment. Designing organizations that promote healthy collaboration requires proactive efforts to combat coercive behaviors from individuals and groups, such as arbitrary, ego-driven, fact-ignoring biased decision-making, bullying, harassment, and physical violations or violence.
When we build organizations and management systems that put checks and balances on the power of leaders, they can be held accountable for their behavior and their results. Employees are not silenced. We help each other improve, and we achieve more than we could ever dream of achieving alone.
When we design management systems carefully, we can mitigate the damage this can do, embody true leadership, and resist the lure of authoritarianism.
Need more tips? Read Radical Respect. Need help right now? You can chat 24/7 with my Google Portrait. Click the image below to get started.
Radical Respect is a weekly newsletter I am publishing on LinkedIn to highlight some of the things that get in the way of creating a collaborative, respectful working environment. A healthy organization is not merely an absence of unpleasant symptoms. Creating a just working environment is about eliminating bad behavior and reinforcing collaborative, respectful behavior. Each week I’ll offer tips on how to do that so you can create a workplace where everyone feels supported and respected. Learn more in my new book Radical Respect, available wherever books are sold! You can also follow Radical Candor® and the Radical Candor Podcast more tips about building better relationships at work.
