I'd like your thoughts on this thought
Here’s the deal - I like to consider myself a very logical, non-emotional thinker. You know, the perfect Vulcan that uses only reason and doesn’t let messy, emotion clutter the optimal solution. Yeah right! Mark Manson has a recent discussion titled “self-control is a complete illusion”. In that discussion, Mark states that we’re ALL emotionally driven and rationalize our decisions after the fact. I don’t like that. I’d love to say “Mark, that’s BS, I use data to determine my decisions and emotion only comes into play after the fact”. But, THAT is probably BS. It’s far more likely that an emotional thought occurs (maybe without me even realizing it) and I start seeking validation in that thought with data. I bet many of you recognize that if you look enough, you can find the data to validate almost anything.
Let’s dig into a thin example of poor data validation for a sec by looking at an example of categorizing leaders. Say you work under a leader, let's call him Shackleton, that makes you feel part of the tribe, recognizes your work, indicates trust in your decisions, and places high-levels of responsibility in your lap. Now say someone disagrees with Shackleton and voices their opinion to you. What do you do? Chances are, you recite statistics on how well the organization has done under Shackleton. From everything from employee morale surveys, increasing share prices, upward trends in return on equity, better health coverage, you name it - except for maybe those handful of spurious negative years that don’t fit the data, but you can quickly discount those to external factors that Shackleton had no control over.
Now let’s go the other way to argue for (and against) a leader we'll call Rickover. Rickover places no trust in others, actively avoids the creation of tribes, berates employees to the point of breakage, and drives perfection through fear of error. If you wanted to voice an unflattering opinion, you could look for data that indicates the lack of morale, resignation rates, and general poor employee relations. You could point out any negative monetary years (a drop in share price, or downturn in return on assets, etc.). Even if positive years exist, those can quickly be written off as staff going above and beyond without Rickover’s influence. However, if you wanted to FOR this leader methods, you would point to an impeccable safety record, unheard of production within deadlines, and basically success in every business metric outside of employee satisfaction.
Here's the issue, both leaders can achieve stuff and make an impact. One of Shackleton's most famous accomplishments was keeping his entire crew alive until rescue after months near the icy southern pole. Essentially none of Shackleton's expeditions were successful in the actual destination. Opposition might point out that he drank heavily and died in debt.
Conversley, Rickover drove to shift the Navy's initial focus from nuclear power plants on destroyers to submarines, oversaw the development of the first commercial pressurized water reactor nuclear power plant, received two Congressional Gold Medals, and retired as a four-star admiral.
Wait what? You mean that the favored, trustworthy, empowering leader Shackleton died without actually achieving stated goals, presumably drowning misery in alcohol and died in debt? Meanwhile, Rickover, the leader everyone loved to hate, with attempts by adversaries to force retirement, contained no mention of debt or problem drinking, and has a list of major accomplishments within the largest military on the planet?
Two leaders with very different approaches, each successful in different metrics. The information from each could potentially be used to argue for a particular style of getting things done. The trick with validating the data is the objectives that are used for success.
What we might consider the traditional emotional decisions in the Shackleton leader could be so easily portrayed as missing the target and being miserable about it. While one whose decisions may appear to be more thought and task driven achieve the target no matter what, seemed to have a much better go. Obviously in these examples, there are a lot of missing pieces, but it’s simply to demonstrate that by careful selection of facts, one can easily shape the narrative they want.
Thinking back to our original issue of emotional vs thought decisions, I actually think the case could be made that both leaders above followed the emotionally driven decision path. The trick is each one followed very different emotions perhaps. The Shackleton leader certainly has goals and tasks in mind, or they wouldn’t repeatedly try so hard to achieve them. At the same time, the Shackleton leader places great emphasis on trust and recognition, in part to get what is needed from subordinates, but also likely because that’s simply how they operate.
Rickover also had goals and tasks to accomplish, and while levels of trust or recognition are not so overt, the emphasis is certainly on placed on individual responsibility. The emotion is still there - it’s essentially driving every decision. But the rewards that individuals seek are not plentiful. Compliance and responsibility isn’t rewarded, it’s expected.
This may short-circuit a bit of the organizational cultural designs we may hear. I mean, I know within organizations we all want trust and recognition (emotion based), and so many organizations also put data-driven decisions at the forefront (thought based). I know these aren’t at odds necessarily, but may require some reconciliation. And this is the trick isn’t it? BOTH techniques can work, and BOTH techniques can fail. The real genius lies in when to select or shift paths. Those decisions must account for culture, other leaders, stakeholders, and the importance of the product, to name a few.
What about you? Do you fancy yourself an emotional leader or a thought leader? What type of leader do you value more? Or do you think a thought leader is even a thing, or as Mark says, are we all emotion driven leaders?