chapter 44
Control your dark side: ruthlessness
If you read widely about leadership, you will notice that most books and articles focus on the positive aspects of leadership. There are some exceptions: you can find pieces on psychopaths as leaders, for instance. But normally, leaders are portrayed to be good and virtuous people. A short look at history will show that many of the most famous leaders in history were evil murderers; many business barons of the past were ruthless in exploiting their labour forces. Effective leaders are not always nice leaders. Even nice leaders can be uncomfortable company. They are often very driven, and focused to the point of obsession.
“Effective leaders are not always nice leaders.”
Having interviewed countless leaders over the years, I have found that they all have one trait from the dark side: ruthlessness. They often bridle at this term and will insist that they just have a ‘hard edge’ when required. This hard edge matters when it comes to performance, especially if you are a real leader who wants to take people where they would not have got by themselves. You will be asking your team to go beyond their comfort zone. As a leader, you will always find reasons why a deadline cannot be met, or why a target cannot be achieved. If you are reasonable, you will accept these excuses and adjust the target and the timetable. The problem is that when you accept excuses, you accept failure. You accept underperformance. As a leader, you have to be ruthless in sticking to your goals: this still allows you to be flexible about the means and supportive of how your team gets there.
Most leaders discover their ruthless streak because they are very focused on achieving their mission. They will stick to their goal, forcing the organisation and colleagues to stretch themselves and to find creative solutions to challenging problems. They force innovation, force the pace and force business not as usual.
As ever, this mission focus can go too far. Protestors who break the law, terrorists who kill and business leaders who bribe, pollute and bend the law are all highly mission-focused and believe that the ends justify the means. In every case, it is the sense of mission that creates the ruthlessness, the readiness to push or to break boundaries.
You do not have to be a ruthless person to do ruthless things. Instead, you have to be committed to achieving a significant goal or mission. Then you will make sacrifices yourself and you will expect others to do the same.
The leader’s ruthless streak manifests itself on two main occasions: goal focus and performance.
Goal focus
Leaders, with some exceptions, are not ruthless for the sake of being ruthless. They are ruthless because they are mission- and goal-focused. If you are inflexible about the goal, it pays to be highly flexible about how you get there, and to be highly supportive of your team. If you are ruthless and inflexible about the process and ruthless and unpleasant in dealing with your team, you are unlikely to have a motivated team. You will be unlikely to achieve your goal.
If you are not committed to the mission or goal, you will be a weak leader. You will listen to all the excuses, all the problems and all the reasons why something cannot be done. Then you will backtrack on the goal and the deadline. Once team members realise that they can bargain their way out of commitments, you have opened the floodgates. Colleagues will keep on coming to you to change their goals. Rest assured that they will not be trying to persuade you to make their goals any more stretching than they already are. You will be on the road to mediocrity.
High performance requires leaders be ruthless occasionally.
Performance
Firing someone is very hard to do. You know you are seriously messing with someone’s life. You are removing their livelihood, betraying their trust and damaging their self-image. Most (but not all) leaders do not like firing people. But ultimately, the mission comes first. Put brutally, survival of the organisation comes before survival of the individual. For instance, a head teacher fired a colleague with whom she had been friends for over 20 years. The head teacher was very nice personally, but ruthless professionally. I asked her how she could throw away 20 years of friendship and trust. Her answer was to the point: ‘I had to decide whether to improve the life chances of hundreds of children, or sustain the lifestyle of one adult who was holding all the children back. I had to support the children.’
“Survival of the organisation comes before survival of the individual.”
Performance is not always about achieving goals: it can also be about living up to the values of the organisation. Another CEO explained: ‘I find that I hire most people for their skills and fire most for their (lack of) values.’ He was also very nice personally but professionally ruthless when he needed to be.
Clearly, this is a slippery slope. All new leaders find it very hard the first time they have to fire someone. But then, like a vampire tasting blood, they start to like it. They find that firing people is the ultimate way to shift blame when things go wrong, since the fired person cannot answer back. It is a way that weak managers look strong.