Harrumph, harrumph, zzzz.
During my sophomore year at university I had the opportunity to attend a guest lecture by a world renown diplomat who had quite literally written the book on much of what I was studying. I jumped at the chance to go; it’s not often that world leaders make time in their schedules for 19 year old students. The lecture was being held in a tiny room which barely held 60 people, so I got there early, found a good seat, and sat attentively.
Eventually the lecture began, and the diplomat had a rapt audience. But fifteen minutes into the lecture, the university president – a pompous, arrogant, self-promoting multi-millionaire – finally decided to show up. He announced his arrival by hacking a smoker’s cough, pushed his ample girth to the front of the room in a way that ensured that his backside hit the faces of several students, and plopped into a seat in the front row. The diplomat nodded to acknowledge his presence and continued. But then, five minutes later, we heard something different from our honoured president. Snoring.
It was mortifying, so much so that immediately after the lecture, one of my classmates wrote a letter to the campus newspaper expressing her shock and embarrassment that the public face of the unversity would behave in such a crude and boorish manner. After the letter was printed, the subsequent newspaper carried a personal attack on my classmate for writing the letter. It took just seconds of research on the university’s UNIX directory to see that the woman who had written the retaliatory letter was in fact one of the university president’s personal pupils, a group of masters’ degree students who received free tuition in postsecondary management in exchange for accepting full time employment as his personal cabal of flunkies. This thirtysomething woman’s take on the situation was: how dare some ignorant, stupid little girl insult our esteemed University Leader, who arrived late because he was working hard, and fell asleep in public because he is diabetic but he skipped his lunch so that he could work so hard for you!
I learned a lot about leadership from that incident, but not from the diplomat. Years later, my executive coach would help me to understand the difference between “authentic confidence”, where authorities lead because they are respected, and “inauthentic confidence”, where authorities have to force and fake respect because there is no way in hell they could merit it on their own.
Sadly, there’s lots of it happening these days, both in business (see Gary Marshall’s column in this month’s issue of .net magazine) and in politics. I don’t know whether to feel pity or contempt for anyone who would fake their identity to support a manager who wouldn’t know leadership if it hit him (or her) in the face. Real leadership inspires support, not syncophancy. As some have said, it’s a Jacquiavellian world now.
