Everyone is out there selling themselves as the leader who can single-handedly defeat all problems. They’re pushing their personal brand, flooding LinkedIn with boastful content. This content that overwhelms our feeds crowding out meaningful updates from friends and rendering the services useless. People celebrate each other for being busy, for claimed successes, and for repeating inspirational quotes from people they’ve never met—quotes those people often never said. More than annoying us all, this self-aggrandizing is creating a general attitude that is pernicious and harmful to how we work. These posts are harmful because they anchor our conversations and expectations in a form of leadership ineffective in the long term. The focus on superficial models of success overshadows the critical importance of collaborative, systemic approaches to building durable organizations that solve complex problems. How do these attitudes create issues at work?
- Appearances trump substance, the veneer of success becomes unmoored from driving business outcomes
- It encourages individuals to make decisions aimed at building their resumes rather than focusing on work that is collectively useful
- People celebrate being busy and the quantity of work, wearing their weariness like a medal
- It leads us to reward constant firefighting without adequately rewarding fire prevention
There are a lot of possible avenues to inoculate your organization from these ill effects. It starts with leaders understanding how these attitudes can create the wrong incentives on their teams and to deliberately create incentives that promote long-term success.
- To accomplish anything meaningful you need a team of people. You need to ensure that incentives promote working together and reward team successes appropriately.
- Don’t be Google. Don’t create systems of promotions that cause the cannibalization of your products and success.
- Tirelessly focus projects and programs on aligned business outcomes.
- Deeply appreciate and have a system for rewarding people who are preventing fires. It’s harder to quantify their impact, but these are the individuals you need the most.
This is not an exhaustive list but illustrative of the type of thinking needed to counteract social-media-led thinking that is collectively getting rewarded in business. It is imperative that leaders think deeply about incentives within their organizations and recalibrate them to align behavior with desired outcomes.
Continuing the Conversation
The conversation shouldn’t stop here. Every situation is unique and I value your experiences. I invite you to reach out to me directly, for feedback on this article or to start a dialogue on how we can transform your challenges into opportunities.