How to Identify a Good Leader

A Simple but Counterintuitive Measure

Welcome to Polymathic Being, a place to explore counterintuitive insights across multiple domains.  These essays take common topics and investigate them from different perspectives and disciplines to come up with unique insights and solutions. 

Today's topic continues to build on our understanding of what I might be so bold as to call ‘true’ leadership. Today we investigate a simple but often very accurate measure of a good vs. a bad leader. It’ll be counterintuitive because it goes against almost all of the corporate processes for rewards. Yet these rewards are almost always focused on the wrong behaviors, not true leadership.

Intro

We’ve all been there; the frustration of working for, or with, a bad leader. Sometimes it’s hard to put your finger on exactly what’s bugging you but it’s pretty clear that the team is frustrated, nothing really gets done the way everyone says it should, and employee turnover is high. It’s the underpinning of Functional Stupidity and The Successfully Unsuccessful which we’ve explored previously.

Functional Stupidity and How to Avoid it

The Successfully Unsuccessful

I’ve dealt with this personally as an employee of terrible leaders and it’s something I’ve worked to solve as an organizational optimization expert. Today we’ll put on the hat of the optimizer and explore a couple of very quick indicators of poor leadership

What Makes a Bad Leader?

• A bad leader is liked by their superiors and disliked by their team.

You might say then they aren’t much of a leader and are instead, a follower. I completely agree. Yet most corporate reward structures not only enable but incentivize this behavior. (The LinkedIn posts are legion on this)

For example, I worked for a leader who came highly recommended by my leadership but I never found a single person who ever worked for them who liked them. Worse, most warned me to stay far, far away. Sadly, I didn’t have that option. When their horrible behavior took hold, and I went to HR, I was told that her boss liked her and that unless she did something completely unethical (read illegal) then there wasn’t anything they would do about her bad leadership.

The most baffling was how good she was at making her leaders feel like she was great. Not only great but her superiors felt that the complaints lodged against her by dozens of people were misapplied. She was exceptionally good in this sense. Brilliant even. Yet she was not only a toxic leader but also a toxic follower and yes, this makes her superiors look bad too.

What Makes a Good Leader?

• A good leader is one whose team members respect them, are empowered by them, and are able to achieve unexpected results while this leader often doesn’t get along with their peers and superiors.

While a bad leader is obvious to their team, a good leader is counterintuitive to the organization. But step back and think of this a minute. You’ll often see this leader moving mountains but with mixed reviews by certain peers and leaders.

This occurs because a good leader is like a mirror to those around them. This leader isn’t a threat to other good leaders but weak leaders will never like the mirror that reflects back who they really are.

An example of a good leader was one who once tell me, “Mike, if you’re not pissing people off, you’re only average.” He knew that to actually drive change, you have to challenge. In a world that rewards those who tell leaders what they hope to hear, not need to hear, challenging pisses people off.

A good leader also provides psychological safety to the team to allow them to challenge the leader themselves.

Providing Top Cover Part 2

Upside Down Rewards

Yet corporate America, more often than not, rewards the bad leaders and treats any complaint against them as poor team members. It underpins so much of what we hate in the workforce.

So often we find the sycophants succeeding, at least in the eyes of their leadership, while the business struggles to achieve modest goals, while they complain about employee turnover as top talent leaves to move to better opportunities.

As research has shown, most workers quit a job due to leadership, not the position. My career was a mix of this. I had great direct leaders and I had terrible direct leaders. I will say that the terrible leaders made me willing to take a pay cut to get out of there.

I look back at those jobs I left, I talk to co-workers who stayed and, by and large, those leaders are still there too and likely promoted over the years.

It challenges our sense of fairness but, just like I wrote in The Successfully Unsuccessful… these bad leaders are successful in how to stick around. Just not in how to make anything or anyone better.

That’s one reason I advocate quiet quitting which is just one more counterintuitive insight in how we can reclaim our work-life balance and focus on the tasks that really matter in life. It also highlights those perverse incentive structures so you can literally stop the ‘rat race’ and still do great things.

Yes, Do Quiet Quit

In Summary

If you’re a leader, and you have a subordinate that represents a bad leader, you might want to double-check what’s going on. Frankly, it’s not a good look and your teams deserve better. For me, if I find a subordinate who keeps feeding me everything I like to hear I treat that as a major red flag. I don’t want confirmation bias, I want the reality of the situation.

As a leader, the best thing you can do is create the psychological safety I mentioned earlier (take a look at that link) and make sure that you are doing skip-level meetings and truly listening to the team. There will be a lot of noise to sift through but take the time to sift because it’s critical.

If you’re under a bad leader, look for ways to diversify your experience, build a larger network, continue to do great things, and you’ll often find your escape path to something better than you could have imagined. There’s no answer for how to fix the problem though sometimes, just acknowledging what they’re asking for, and finding ways to get it done right anyway can go a long way!

Acknowledge and Ignore

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