Episode 160: When The Bad Leader Finds You, or You Find the Bad Leader

Welcome to another edition of "Around with Randall", your weekly podcast on making your nonprofit more effective for your community. And here is your host, the CEO and founder of Hallett Philanthropy, Randall Hallett.

It's an honor to have you with me today here on this edition of "Around with Randall". We want to talk about leadership today, but maybe not in the most positive way. What happens when we have to deal with bad leadership? What are the implications, and really, the tactical. What can we do with bad leadership when we're not the leader? And hopefully you're listening to this not thinking of yourself. I want to give you a couple of examples of just bad leadership, and these are across about several different industries, time frames, things of that nature. One of my favorite worst leader examples is what's happened in the Pack 12 Conference, which is an athletic conference made up of schools on the west coast - the Arizona schools, the Los Angeles schools, Los UCLA, and USC, Cal Berkeley, Stanford, Oregon, Oregon State, Washington, Washington State, Utah, and Colorado. If you follow this at all you know that it doesn't exist anymore. For the most part, after this year football, now it's ended so we're moving into basketball, they'll end that and by the end of the year you've got a number of schools that are going to the Big 10. You've got a number of schools going to the Big 12. And you've got a couple schools that don't know where to go. All of this is based upon absolutely horrific leadership on the part of its conference commissioner, maybe not the current one as much as it was the previous one who made just terrible decisions, and everybody seemed to follow him. And basically, he killed a conference which is hard to do when you are one of the big athletic conferences at the University level in athletics. He did it. From bad television deals, bad decisions, moving the corporate headquarters, to really expensive buildings, and spending all kinds of money, not getting the support of the University presidents who technically are his boss, really not good. I just have have another way to put it, just terrible.

Another example, I work with a client who has a CEO who really probably is in over his or her head, and it's causing issues. And I'm not just talking about philanthropy. I would not deny that, but there's now really big problems with monetary decisions that have been made and things of that nature that they are not growing, and they don't have the right leaders, and they're not engaging the right people. The doctors are mad. It's just a bad deal, and it's, you, I can see it. If we think about historically, we think about Richard Nixon, former president from 1969 to till he resigned in 1974, and we're talking about Watergate, now there's a lot of arguments whether he knew about Watergate before or after. I think probably he did, but there's least arguments. I don't know anybody who says it was a really good idea to cover it up. Talk about horrific leadership. How would our, what how would his legacy be different if he had come out when he quote unquote found out, said we're cleaning house, we're getting rid of these people, we need to make this right, and it was wrong that it happened. Owning it, he probably doesn't have to resign but the coverup killed him. It was John Dean in Congressional hearings that said as Congress was beginning to look into the Watergate Affair, who said based on a tape that Richard Nixon kept of the Oval Office, there's a cancer growing on the presidency. That sounds bad to me. You can't run from that. You got to step into it.

I have another client. They've gone through, and I think this is true of a number of organizations who have gone through massive purchasing of hospitals, mergers, but really more acquisitions. And they were not in a financial position to do all that they did, and now the leadership team that made a lot of those decisions is gone and everyone else is ruing the day. They've got financial problems just based on really bad leadership and engagement.

I would throw Congress under the bus, and this isn't meant to be conservative or liberal, democrat or republican, but I don't know anybody that says we can just keep doing what we're doing with Social Security and Medicare without absolutely catastrophic consequences in a decade or so, maybe a little less. What kind of leaders are we sending to Washington? They're like, yeah, we don't want to talk about it because the only people they're going to suffer aren't the 435 representatives in the house or the 100 Senators, 535 in total. It's going to be us as Citizens. Go fix the problem. And if we' had done it 20 years ago when it was first discussed we wouldn't have as big a problem as we're going to have.

What types of bad leadership qualities, or things, or outcomes should we be aware of? It's abuse of power, and it's nepotism. I think of an old friend who worked in a system where the CEO's daughter who knew nothing about philanthropy was the head of the system philanthropy office, and they just laughed at her. That reflected bad on the CEO. Overly protective about who follows them blindly, meaning they, it's about allegiance and power than it is success. That there's bullying, micromanaging, gossiping, deception, incapable of receiving criticism, they don't want hear anybody else's opinion, they're driven by finger pointing, causing chaos in the office. All of these things are things we normally see and feel if we work for bad leaders. The five things I think of that bad leadership drives is bad culture, that poor leadership erodes it, and it becomes to steal from the book in the movie Lord of the Flies with all those boys just kind of becoming feudalistic, every man for himself, low morale.

People don't want to be there, and they may be in a situation while the job market seems to be still kind of positive but they can't move. They've got a spouse, significant other, who has a job here. I don't have all the options. It's not like I can pick up and leave and go across the country country. My family's here, my kids are in school, my parents are near, whatever.

Low productivity. When you have the first two, other people don't want to come to work. They don't want to get stuff done, and that leads to attrition. People who can leave will leave, and if everybody's mad this leads to bad customer service, poor customer service and satisfaction, because you can tell someone else's attitude. In a recent study, 75% of US workers said that their boss is the most stressful part of the day, and that one and two employees had left their job just to get away from their boss. Bad leaders, if you need evidence that we need to be better at this, that last statistic two are over to me overwhelming in terms of importance. 75% said that their boss was the most stressful part of their day. Oh my Lord, what kind of failure of leadership do we need to identify to have that? And secondly that one and two employees left because of their boss? Well I wish I had a magic wand and could say fix the bad leader and give that to everybody for the holidays, Christmas, Hanukkah, whatever. I can't. But maybe I can give you some tactical things that will help you deal with bad leaders and to help yourself in that process.

And there are six major topics major things that you can realize and do that I think might be helpful. Five that are very tactical, one that's a little bit more strategic in terms of longevity. Got a bad leader? What should you do? Number one, in some way, shape, or form, you're gonna have to focus on results. So if you are a leader yourself, but reporting to other bad leaders, we'll get to that in a second, you might have some additional options. But if you work for bad leader, focus on the job, on the responsibilities, and most importantly on the results. Clarify what those instructions, those results are, and do it in writing. I love reading about the advocates in the paper for travel, or for bad service, or bad situations. The New York Times has one. There's a travel one, and they they talk about how, when you're in a situation so if it's travel my airline canceled my flight, what am I supposed to do, they didn't give me a refund, they all have a very similar, whether it's travel or business or whatever, very similar basic premise. Put it in writing because it becomes your evidence and your proof, and it's so true. This is why when you're the leader I advocate, if you've been a client of mine or worked with me, you've seen me do the metrics presentation, and about how I kind of have a two-step process to really build out portfolio development and metrics for every client I work with. But it's in writing. There's a clarity to it. I do it from a leadership perspective because I think it's the right thing to do. If you don't have that you need to put it in writing. What is it you need me to do? How are we going to measure? Why is it important and how often are we going to measure it? And if you do it just verbally, it doesn't have the sense of stickiness, concreteness to make up a word when you need it at the end of the year to say I got a lot done. Well I didn't want you, I want you to do these things. Wait, no, you told me if you have it in writing it makes it much easier. That means your goals are also in writing, clearly stated. Even if you have to help develop them, and send them, and say do you agree with these. This is, can we talk about these. You have to have something in writing. If you don't, I'm not talking about just a job description, goals, and not one goal, a series of them that shows progress. If you're a leader of other people with bad leadership above you, part of this is also not taking what's happening above you and forcing it down into the people below you. You can do so much as a leader when you have bad leadership above you and not embody exactly what they're doing. What can you own in a leadership perspective and do it positively with people that report to you? Having bad leadership is not an excuse for you being a bad leader. It just means you're going to have to work through a few extra steps. I've been incredibly fortunate. I've never worked for a terrible leader. Never. I worked for an absent leader when it was a vacuum and I could step into that, but I never worked for anybody bad, really bad, absentee has its privileges meaning you have a chance to kind of figure things out and kind of input your own process, your own metrics, your own viability. But just because you have a bad leader doesn't mean it's a blank check for you to take it out on other people. So focus on results. Do it in writing. Have a clarity as to what's to be accomplished. Have a goal. Have a series of goals. Know how to measure those goals and put it in writing. If you can get them to sign off on it, even better. It becomes a benchmark of what you can value yourself at as you accomplish things.

Client I currently work with. I just did a huge capacity study for them. Kind of interesting in some of the things we talked about. But one of the things that came out of it was not that she works for a bad leader. She works for really good leader. But there was a disconnect in terms of numbers, and when I showed her the results of her work over the year and a half she'd been with the organization there is this huge V where she's the upswing of the backside of the v in terms of dollars, in terms of donors, in terms of engagement. And you could tie it almost to the day she started. And she goes, I need this to verify with the people I work with about the value that I bring. Results wasn't bad. Leadership results matter.

Number two, talk about it with the leader. Speak up for yourself. First and foremost, do it respectfully. When I was a kid a lot of people liked the movie The Godfather and there's no doubting the Francis Ford Coppola genius movie, top three or four of almost any movie list, and that maybe the Godfather 2 in 1972 and four I believe are never really measured to me. I didn't quite understand them. I wasn't deep enough to be honest. And in the last decade I've come to love really all three - the first two probably better than the third - and I watch them a million times, and there's a phrase in there, keep your friends close, keep your enemies closer. If you try, respectfully, to push people away who are bad leaders it will end up costing you. You will not know what's going on. You will not have the communication you want. There will be gaps and things will come back on you. You've got to lean in. You cannot disappear, even if you're doing your job well. The results are good, measured. You got to lean in. In episode four of these podcasts of "Around with Randall" I did one on managing up, and I don't have enough time. That was 20 minutes, I don't have enough time to go through all of it, do a presentation along that line for a lot of clients and conferences as well, I'd go back and listen to that because there's some tactical things about leaning in and talking with your supervisor on a regular basis. You can ask for feedback. What do you think about? All these things, how are we doing? If you wait till the end of the year to get feedback, and it's not good feedback, it's not what you want. But if you ask for feedback on a regular basis, even with a bad leader, at least you can gauge where they're at, what they're thinking. So talk about it respectfully. You can't look at your boss and say, boy are you terrible. But you can say here's what I'm doing inside the organization. Here are my responsibilities. Here are my goals. How do you see this working? Am I doing the things you need? Do you see this as value added for the outcomes that we're trying to get to? What would you suggest I do that would be helpful to what you need to accomplish? And what I can do in my own job or series of responsibilities?

Number three may sound a little crazy. Try to empathize why is it that they're doing what they're doing? The term that I hear most often used is, can you put yourself in their shoes? I sometimes think that bad leadership comes because we don't know what to do. And as a leader we're supposed to be omnipotent, all knowing, all being, all seeing, all doing. I don't know anybody that's that, and so can you empathize to figure out what the rationale is for why things are happening. If you can figure out what the pressure points are you might be able to adjust what you do and how you do it with poor and bad leadership, at least to a couple degrees, and that can make all the difference in the world. At the same time, even if you figure them out you have to realize there are certain things you can't change. You can't change certain things if the expectations of the leadership team are unreasonable and it's being pressed upon you. You can certainly empathize and understand, but you can't change them because they're getting their marching orders from somewhere else. So this circles back to focus on results, and what you're responsible for. Can you isolate yourself a little bit and empathize as to why this is happening? And this is not meant to say empathize with bad, incorrect, inappropriate behavior. If you're being yelled at, abused mentally, physically, emotionally, that is not an excuse. Man, you turn those people in or you walk. But there's a lot of degrees of bad leadership that don't necessarily entail true abuse they're just bad. Figure out why. Might give you some insight as to what's going on.

Number four, don't sabotage. Don't fall into the blame game. I could do my job better if it wasn't for him, her, or they, or them. At some point you're going to have to own your responsibilities. If you blame everyone else publicly, often particularly if you have people that report to you and you're dealing with bad leadership it just is going to come back and haunt you. I've had a number of clients who have had leaders who aren't getting the leadership that they need, and they're asking me what do I do. I said you have to be a positive influence in the office. You got to keep your mouth shut. You can't play the blame game because as soon as you do you become the problem. The minute you turn negative, the minute you blame other people, the minute that happens you become the problem. You are the negative influence on everything. Can't work. Doesn't work.

Number five, realize boundaries. Is there a part of the challenge overall, if we go back a couple about empathizing and figuring out what's going on, that actually you're responsible for small part. If so, how do you correct that? Realizing boundaries is about actually ownership in some degree. How do we own a piece of the success or the challenge? It's what I tell my kids. You can only control what you can control, and if you realize what you can control and what you can't then you can fix what that is that you have input on. All of that may lead to better outcomes and a better relationship.

Number six and final, this is kind of the long-term strategy piece, take care of yourself. If you can't fix this and it's just mentally, and emotionally, and spiritually broken for you, leave. Life's too short now. I would leave. Appropriately, in fact, I had a client who had someone in their office who, she wasn't the leader but she's left, was leaving. She didn't have a plan and she left. She was unhappy and that was more about her, but she left and just because she just said one day well I just quit and walked out. Then she was like, I don't have a job, I don't have income. I had someone who is a friend of mine who I'm helping, she did the same thing and is like, I shouldn't have done that. No, don't just walk out. Create a plan to leave. It's easier to get a job if you've got a job. There's nothing long wrong about looking for new employment. Be honest. Be open. Be upfront with yourself. Most importantly, and eventually with the organization, if you're ready to leave but you have to take care of yourself because if you keep going back they will keep using you. Most people don't care that much. Something my dad always taught me, most people just simply don't care. They're in it for themselves. When you find those people that do care, those are the people to get around but you have to take care of yourself.

So focus on the results, talk with them to your leaders, get closer to them. That, Godfather, friends close keep your enemies closer. Asking for feedback and kind of managing up, that was episode four. Number three is empathy. Try to empathize a little bit. Try to figure out what the inputs are that are causing this, and maybe just they're just not a very good person. Don't try to sabotage them. The organization, the issue, you'll look bad. Remember the finger. If you point it, it comes right back at you. Realize that there are boundaries. You can own part of the problem or challenge, but only to a certain degree. And you can't change everything. Realize that. And finally, take care of yourself. If you have to leave, leave. A lot of good opportunities out there. Bad leadership is an epidemic. They degrees. One moment of bad leadership does not make someone a bad leader, but they don't have the right as your leader to stagnate your career, impute your reputation, unless you've done something then they really haven't done it, you've done it to yourself, or abuse. You, if you can't find that right mix go find somewhere you can because there's also good people out there, I promise.

Don't forget, check out the blogs. Couple of real interesting ones I posted they're 90 second reads at Hallettphilanthropy.com. You can get an RSS feed right to your desk, Tuesday, Thursday they come out. And if you'd like to get a hold of me, that's podcast@hallettphilanthropy.com. You're doing something important this time of year, I think as we are here in the holidays, as I record, this is an understanding that not everybody has the same great fortunes and blessings, and that people are in need, and this is what nonprofits specialize in - helping those who need it the most. Remember some people make things happen, some people watch things happen, then there are those who wondered what happened. And our life is built in the nonprofit world on making things happen for those who are wondering what happened. And I hope you feel that and know that you can make a difference too. You are making a difference and you will be making a difference. And I hope you lean into that because it is important work that we do each and every day. I'll look forward to seeing you the next time right back here on another edition of "Around with Randall". Don't forget, make it a great day.