All this talk about bossy bosses being bad lately is bogus. Innovative leaders like Steve Jobs, Marissa Mayer, Roger Ailes, Jeff Bezos all have reputations as take no prisoners, brash and sometimes vicious leaders. Disruptive innovators are often bossy. They irk, they irritate, they annoy, they intimidate. They strike fear in the hearts of their employees.
Is this so wrong?
I don’t think so.
Steve Jobs, the most popular innovator in business today, used “Think Different” as his companies tagline. This is the mantra of all innovators. However, their biggest challenge is not for THEM to think different, but to get employees to ‘think different’. As the executive coach to leaders at Fortune 500 companies around the world, I’ve seen first hand that innovators need to push, aggravate and disrupt their employees to “think different”.
Jobs could not have created the ipod, itunes, iphone and ipad, which all disrupted the music, phone and computer markets, without pushing his people to the limit.
Marissa Mayer upset many people when she announced no more telecommuting, the third rail of technology companies, in an attempt to refocus the company to be more innovative, a goal set by the Board. How can she transform Yahoo without taking transformational action?
The recent best seller, The Loudest Voice in the Room, portrays Roger Ailes as the take no prisoners, vulgar leader that built Fox News. Don’t doubt a word of it. Ailes could not have over turned CNN’s 20 year monopoly of cable news without being a royal pain. But because he is leading Fox News, the channel main stream media loves to hate, unlike Jobs he gets only bad press.
Jeff Bezos transformed consumer purchasing behavior with Amazon, yet when he sends emails to employees which contain only a question mark, he creates fear in the hearts of recipients, knowing that they need to answer to his challenges. So?
Henry Ford changed the automotive industry forever, yet he was extremely autocratic to the point of sometimes even prohibiting speaking on the assembly line. Even the beloved entertainment industry innovator Walt Disney was known to have a lack of patience as well as a fiery temper.
The challenge for copycats and aspiring innovators is not if they should do it, but HOW to do it: how to create a shift in the normal ways of thinking in their company and in the world.
One of the largest research studies on the traits of effective leaders, known as The Big Five, concludes that such abusiveness may be unavoidable. It identified Neuroticism characterized by moodiness, jealousy and emotional reactivity, as one of the traits of effective leaders. My consulting firm spends 30% of its time coaching executives to reduce the damage of neuroticism by leaders whose force is not backed by the talent of such innovators mentioned above. They need to and must change. If they don’t, then their teams are left with leader that is not known as an innovator, but more commonly known as an a-hole.
The question that many people ask is..why do employees stick around and take it? Is it because they are dysfunctional enablers? Maybe. More likely is that successful innovators unite people around core values. For Steve Jobs it was “We’re here to put a dent in the universe.” For Ailes, unity came from the vision of meeting a large unmet market demand for non-liberal biased news. The enemy was liberal media. “Fair and balanced” became the mantra, inside and outside Fox. Unity of values yields loyalty. And loyalty turns into obedience toward the vision, despite offensive and hurtful management approaches. It is tied to Freud’s “pleasure principle”: seek pleasure and avoid pain. The fear of the being attacked by the leader drives people to do what they know the leader wants.
A COO and Board Member at a Fortune 500 energy company client told me that our next book should be “How to lead change without getting killed.” What he knew from first hand experience was that leading change pits you against deadly forces from all sides. It is a truth as old as time: Galileo, the ‘father of modern science’, declared the earth rotated around the sun and spent the rest of his life under house arrest. Preston Tucker’s safety innovations for cars, including the seat belt, got him sued by the SEC. Martin Luther King was ultimately killed for leading the charge of equality for African Americans.
Innovators understand this battle intuitively and push hard in every direction. Sometimes this means yelling. Sometimes their behavior goes over the line of what we think is appropriate. But the end result is that their changes succeed, making the world a better place.