Without a management fad, a flavor-of-the-month fix, or a purely inspirational ploy, I approach my clients as a professor, a coach and a consultant. I diagnose, intervene and prescribe. The leader or corporation does not always make for a congenial, truthful, or willing patient. Moreover, every chink in the armor of a leader or flaw in corporate policy necessarily points in multiple directions, complicating the picture. A differential diagnosis must replace simple-minded rhetoric and quick-fix leadership schemes. The most dynamic and ingenious of leaders will also have toxic dimensions to his personality and behavior.
Toxicity is a fact of leadership and organizational life. It is little understood but much talked about. It is time to sober up the conversation and take a hard look at human nature, the role of leaders, and the flexibility and resiliency of organizational systems. We must waste less time on the quest for instant fixes, magical surveys and hollow data and metrics. Only by entering the narratives of leadership and corporate life can we walk the road toward positive transformation.
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
Lastly
Without a management fad, a flavor-of-the-month fix, or a purely inspirational ploy, I approach my clients as a professor, a coach and a consultant. I diagnose, intervene and prescribe. The leader or corporation does not always make for a congenial, truthful, or willing patient. Moreover, every chink in the armor of a leader or flaw in corporate policy necessarily points in multiple directions, complicating the picture. A differential diagnosis must replace simple-minded rhetoric and quick-fix leadership schemes. The most dynamic and ingenious of leaders will also have toxic dimensions to his personality and behavior.
Toxicity is a fact of leadership and organizational life. It is little understood but much talked about. It is time to sober up the conversation and take a hard look at human nature, the role of leaders, and the flexibility and resiliency of organizational systems. We must waste less time on the quest for instant fixes, magical surveys and hollow data and metrics. Only by entering the narratives of leadership and corporate life can we walk the road toward positive transformation.
© 2010 Alan Goldman