With the Hollywood awards season upon us, the idea of “celebrity”
gives me pause regarding my work with organizational leaders. "You get fame. You create
celebrity. There's a difference,” notes Dr. Chris Bell author of American Idolatry:
Celebrity, Commodity and Reality Television. What is celebrity? Celebrity is the conscious promotion of
oneself. And in American society we
increasingly reward those who strive to be noticed and on display with media
coverage and multi-million dollar deals.
It’s enough to make me stop watching “Entertainment Tonight” – well,
almost. But I have to admit that we
consumers of celebrity gossip are creating this appetite for all things
superficially juicy.
You most likely have met the “celebrity” leader in an
organization at some point in your work career.
Well-liked . . . friendly . . . attractive . . . can make you believe
that she agrees with everything you say . . . that she is on your side on every issue. Until you learn she makes everyone else feel
that way, too. How can she be all things
to all people and agree with everyone on everything? Easy.
She doesn’t have a sense of the value of her true self and seeks to feel
worthwhile and accepted by creating an attractive image and/or convincing the
world that she is something other than what she truly is. A true chameleon, she is a master at
adaptation . . . a true embodiment of Darwin’s notion of survival of the
fittest. There is definitely talent
here, and we call it politics. But those
who survive in politics typically are those who have a talent for promoting and
preserving only themselves.
Think of Jefferson and Adams. To me Thomas Jefferson, while a brilliant
man, tended towards the “celebrity” side of the leadership spectrum. Quite charming and affable, Jefferson pretended
that he had nothing to do with scurrilous rumors about Adams, a man he counted
as a friend, which he paid to have printed during the election of 1800. But Jefferson’s quest for the Presidency was
more important to him than his friendship with Adams, and they went for 10
years without speaking to one another due to Jefferson’s self-interest in
defeating his friend.
In contrast, John Adams existed more toward the “character”
side of the continuum (perhaps to an extreme).
When the British soldiers, accused of killing Bostonians in what became
known as the Boston Massacre, needed a lawyer, John Adams took the case. Not because he was a Loyalist and certainly
not because he stood to personally profit (he lost business because of it), but
because he believed that everyone was entitled to legal defense. He put his own interests aside to stand for a
deeply held principle, defended the soldiers, and won the case. Perhaps to a fault, Adams routinely put
principle before his own self-interest and even lost the election of 1800 in
part because he truly believed the unpopular Alien and Sedition Acts were in
the best interest of the American people even if they were not in his personal
interest of getting re-elected.
While politics is a part of every group, how prevalent
should it be in an organization? Not
that prevalent, I say, because most organizations purport to have a mission
about something other than individual self-promotion and
self-preservation. Self-preservation and
self-promotion become distracters and, ultimately, attributes of individuals
you can’t trust. To me, trustworthiness
is the very foundation of leadership.
So, those with what Iacocca describes as “character”
are the leaders I admire and are those I try to emulate. To me “character” is having an
alignment of values and purpose that is apparent to others on a consistent
basis. You can predict what an
individual with character will do next because their actions are in tune with what
they claim to stand for. An individual
with “character” is focused on the greater good, and not simply on what is in
it for herself.
