Bosses from hell? No thanks.

I read an article over at CNNMoney.com this week, “In defense of bosses from hell.” It’s an interesting piece that got me thinking.

Most books about leadership read like the Scout manual: CEOs and top managers should be authentic, considerate, sensitive, and modest, as well as creative, smart, and strategically brilliant. All true—but not very useful in the real world, where the person in the corner office might be as approachable as the junkyard dog.

The author, Jeffrey Pfeffer, then goes on to raise some interesting proofs of point: Steve Jobs, Bobby Knight, Michael Eisner, and Anna Wintour. All egomaniacal and notoriously difficult to work with, and all wildly successful.

Fair enough.

I certainly don’t have to concede they are all very successful, because they are. But I actually know a few people who have worked in some of these pressure cookers. Those people are, for the most part, deeply troubled by their time in those companies. Long hours, total disregard for anything but the job, and a total focus on “who can do Thing A for me right f****g now” don’t create environments in which 1 or 100 or 10,000 people ordinarily grow and prosper.

Then there’s the legacy

And here’s the thing: yes, those people have run successful companies, but what is their legacy? These abusive people usually run to the end of their reign fairly ungracefully once they’ve burned through all the people that will put up with their crap and can’t come up with a story compelling enough to recruit fresh recruits to send to the slaughter.

Also, people like those that Pfeffer is talking about almost by definition don’t create their own next generation of leaders to succeed them. When they depart, they leave their companies foundering for the next leader with the next big idea. But you know what? People with good big ideas are pretty rare. It’s easy to conflate “mean” with “smart”, and the damaged companies these leaders leave behind seem prone to just hire mean people, but this time without the profits.

For example, Disney hasn’t returned to its Eisner-heyday glory. And look at all the speculation around the doom that might befall Apple when Jobs exits. There might not be any doom when Jobs leaves, but who would know? If there is a team at Apple it’s totally obscured by Jobs and, with no time in the light out leading the company, it’s unlikely that they will be able to transition smoothly.

That these people are successful is an aberration to be managed when it happens, but we certainly shouldn’t adopt or even tolerate this as a model for our leaders.

Your utopia, my minimum qualification for participation

Pfeffer closes with this statement, which I mostly agree with:

It would be wonderful if workplaces were filled with leaders who behaved as polite, mature adults. Despite their track records of success, Apple, Oracle, and big Hollywood studios have lost a lot of talent to nasty behavior. But utopia is impossible, which is why management consultants and authors should stop talking so much about how to find an ideal leader and instead focus on placing people into jobs that play to their strengths—and where their flaws won’t be fatal.

No argument that leaders (or any people) are without flaw, and we should all certainly focus on finding roles for people that play to their strengths. In my book I call this finding everyone’s “starring role.”

But having a workplace filled with leaders behaving as polite, mature adults is not Utopian. It’s a reasonable expectation.

If we don’t adopt this as a baseline expectation, then there’s no real difference between leaders at work and the attractive, popular, and cruel ruling class at my old high school. Their excuse was that they were kids. What’s ours?