Many leaders look for loyalty in the people they work with and in selecting their inner circle. One mistake that is too common among leaders is to equate disagreement with disloyalty. The fact that an employee is committed not to be intimidated and makes professional judgements in the interest of the collective goal is a positive pointer, not a sign of disloyalty.
Most leaders, especially those who use inappropriate combinations of the leadership ‘LIE’ (logic, intuition, and emotion) I wrote about last week, often want their colleagues and subordinates to be unthinkingly loyal to their emotions. Once their proposed action or decision, primarily devoid of logic, is questioned, criticised, and modified, they quickly make enemies in the workplace. These leaders praise and reward those who give them confirmation bias and always agree with them.
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If you have thirty people you lead, and you want them to think and act the way you do, you are going nowhere as a leader. You will have more people who are different from you in terms of personality type and mental models through which they process information, execute jobs, and make decisions. The leaders’ inability to identify disagreements necessary to arrive at the best decisions for their organisations has ruined their noble vision. Employees treated as disloyal when only contributing their views are often silenced and disengaged. This is common where the organisation is structured with an ultimate leader who can use their position to influence things either positively or negatively against employees.
Dear leader, before you conclude that any opposing perspective to your idea is disloyal, ask if the suggestions are for the person or the organisation. Consider that if it is in the organisation’s interest, it will reward everyone, including you, the leader, more than others. The people you are leading are working to realise your vision. Their loyalty should first be to the organisation’s vision and stakeholders, which is indirect to you, even if not massaging your ego.
I remember one of my experiences as a developing leader and how I put my career on the line, except for the intelligence of an ultimate leader who can differentiate between disagreement and disloyalty to his authority. I joined an organisation from the United Kingdom. Within four months, I was one of the people who was to be exited for poor performance. The organisation just deployed a new appraisal system. To be fair to the management team, the new system was deployed to make performance appraisal and the reward system as fair as possible. The first appraisal using the new system produced almost 70 percent of the team as below average and needed to be exited. However, the organisation’s CEO used his intuition rather than emotion. He was happy that the system moderated the supervisors’ scores, which he had always considered biased, especially for the back-office team. He was exceptional enough to have demanded a one-to-one meeting with everyone within the existing bracket before signing off. He took the time to review the individual files of many people in his attempt to be fair and just in exercising his right to exit poor-performing staff. Before it came to my turn to be interviewed by the CEO for being among the failures, an expatriate staff member had told him to meet with me for a reason I could not tell. I had created a positive impression as a subject matter expert with foreign experience.
“These leaders praise and reward those who give them confirmation bias and always agree with them.”
I got to the meeting with 90 percent of my department’s members, including a newbie like me, who is about to be excited. The CEO asked everyone what their views were on the new appraisal system. Everyone who spoke made the matter worse. They all claim they are happy with their supervisors’ appraisal scores; the new system is the devil. The CEO was pleased with the new system as a moderator of the excessive biases of the back-office supervisors. On getting to my turn, he recognised I was new and wanted to excuse me from the interrogation. But the ‘aluta’ in me rose to the occasion. I found myself challenging the appraisal system, defending the team, and putting the executive team on the spot. I demanded answers to a few questions, including whose fault it was that 90 percent of students failed in a class. Is it the students, teachers, or the learning environment? The breaking point was when I told the CEO and his team that I would volunteer to resign on behalf of the forty members of my team to save their jobs because I knew something was not right. They are making an erroneous decision if they exit all the forty people in my department. I was not the most senior person in the department. However, the leadership in me rose to the occasion to defend others.
The CEO exclaimed. ‘How can we allow someone as intellectually sound as you to resign? You defended the team well when you were not the leader. I will personally mentor you in this organisation. That was the end of the discussion with my team; none of us was excited, and the organisation rescinded its position on using the new system for the exit decision that year. I became a cult hero instantly. My mentor feared for my job as everyone told different tales of how I confronted the executive team. I did not intentionally confront them; I was passionate about the organisation I returned home to join and the CEO I have craved to work with for years.
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Unfortunately, I chased the promise to be mentored for another nine years to no avail. I have been marked as too confrontational and volatile to be a protégé, or the word was used to escape my furious reactions and defence of the defenceless staff. I remained an ‘aluta’ staff member until I exited the organisation but made my impact. I was lucky the CEO didn’t consider my disagreement with his new appraisal system disloyalty; others under most leadership would have spent only a year before they were frustrated out of the organisation.
In retrospect, I would have presented my case differently with a lighter emotion. That forms part of my experience, which I use to coach others. However, leaders must recognise where their subordinates’ passions are expressed in the organisation’s interest and not attack their person. Every disagreement that addresses a concern or advocates the need to do something that progresses the organisation is not disloyal.
Babs Olugbemi FCCA, the Chief Vision Officer at Mentoras Leadership Limited and Founder of Positive Growth Africa. He can be reached on [email protected] or 07064176953 or on Twitter @Successbabs.
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