Last winter I was preparing financial documents for my company’s final quarterly board meeting of the year. Being in finance I knew that the reporting of information was not really sufficient. We had no way of truly knowing how much any particular project cost because engineers were not required to track their hours, so we had no way of quantifying how many engineering hours were spent on each project. The way that our documents were reported though meant that this wasn’t plain to see, and it gave the false impression that we were tracking properly, even though we weren’t. This was one a few problems that misrepresented our shoddy tracking and lack of accountability. The chairperson of the company (of course the company name and all other names will be left out) came to me about this, worried that nothing was being done. He explained his concerns, and he asked me to write an email to the ceo, my supervisor (the VP of operations) and the company’s attorney.
In that moment it seemed like the right thing to do, but I certainly had not considered all of the pitfalls in what he was asking of me. I crafted the email, sent it, and expected to receive a concerned response with offers of solutions. Obviously I had not considered every angle of this situation. My supervisor felt completely undermined and disrespected, and wrote a long winded angry response in an attempt to save face and preserve the integrity of the books we had been adding to for so many months. There were other questions I should have asked the chairperson before I acted upon his request: why was he not going directly to the CEO about this? Had he already made attempts to communicate this with no luck? Had he received any other responses on this subject? Why was he asking me to do this?
The CEO is notorious for selectively viewing the truth in order to fit things into his world view, and having an arrogant way of handling situations and being extremely headstrong – which is also one of the reasons he has carried the company this far and created so much success, because he refuses to take no for an answer (he may well be the subject of future blog posts) but what struck me most about the situation was the chairperson’s motives and reasoning for handling the situation this way. On the part of the chairperson, two of the dark-side traits showed up in this situation: perfectionism and fear of failure. He did not want to bring incorrect or badly misrepresented books into the board meeting, and didn’t care what waves he made in trying to make this right, even thought the solution was perhaps in a longer term answer that could not have been resolved immediately. Perfectionism drove him to push for a change even though waiting may have made more sense for the situation. Pulling me in showed a fear of failure: if I was the one putting my neck on the line to state the problem, then it saved him the risk of embarrassment if the idea was rejected.
Maintaining a balance between holding the line on what is right and going to far at an inappropriate time or by taking inappropriate measures is a tough part of leadership. A virtue can become a flaw when too much of that virtue is applied excessively. For example, “Temperance or Justice in excess may lead to extreme risk aversion and paralysis in decision-making” (Crossan et al., 2012). So maintaining the balance between confidence and being aggressive, being accurate and overly perfectionist toward something, as well as being assertive versus insecure about what reception you will get for your views are all essential elements of leadership that are necessary to keep the team or company on track, depending on your level of power in the organization.
Crossan, M., Gandz, J., & Seijts, G. (2012). DEVELOPING LEADERSHIP CHARACTER. Ivey Business Journal Online, , 1. Retrieved from http://search.proquest.com/docview/926976649?accountid=458