I spoke with one of my leaders at work about my Leadership class and it led to a great conversation. From that conversation, I emailed my professor and it left me with a lot of good thoughts to ponder:
“Hi,
I had a delightful conversation with one of my leaders today about your Leadership course and we discussed some of the insights I have picked up so far. As we were discussing, he prompted me if our class has had any discussions about the need for leaders to pull away from their direct reports. In his personal journey, he mentioned that this was something that was shared with him. It seems as though Business for Life for him required that he remove personal relationships with those that report to him to ensure that everything stays strictly business.
I imagine that there are both pros and cons to this approach, similar to most of the topics we cover. However, this brought up an interesting tension when it comes to persuasion. Dale Carnegie suggests that we should be trying to make friends to help us drive our persuasive influence. Does it make sense that leaders that follow Power Outright need to avoid personal relationships in the business realm? When we lean towards Power of Persuasion, do we lose control over our Power Outright and vice versa? Is there a way to leverage both without sending too complex of signals to those around us? Is it safer to choose one path than the other? I imagine for most of us, Power of Persuasion is the way to go since very few of us have power over another person. However, what does this say about the leaders that do use Power Outright? Are they forced into this loneliness? Is this an ‘old way’ of thinking?
I wonder how Obama approached this with your experience. Did he try to keep the professional and personal life separate? As the POTUS, he had to use persuasion to convince people to follow him, so I could imagine that he needed to build relationships. However, it seems like the POTUS would also need to leverage his Power Outright as well. Does this make it difficult to maintain our leadership when we start using Power Outright? Additionally, does business for life focus more on the fact that the professional life demands to be a part of our personal lives, but we are forced to keep our personal lives out of our professional? Interestingly enough, it seems that the opposite of Business for Life is Personal Relationships Never. This is clearly extreme, but I do think the adage ‘it is lonely at the top’ applies to this type of leadership. I do wonder if there is a balanced or holistic approach that has proven successful between these two ideas.
Many of these questions do not need to be answered, but I wanted to say that I have truly appreciated this class. These are the type of questions that I enjoy thinking about throughout my days and I feel like this class has done a great job allowing me to analyze my own journey in a beneficial way. Thank you for all of the great lectures!”
The response:
“
Dear Connor,
This is a great question. You are right that “Business for Life” would suggest that one should make the personal and the professional at work entirely overlap such that our direct reports also become our friends. (And, to that end, Dale Carnegie seems to provide us a textbook for doing just that.) And yet, something seems problematic about this approach, insofar as we think maintaining a professional distance is key to maintaining credibility and authority in the eyes of others.
What I would say is that, to the degree, we believe this, it is because we tend to think our personal behavior is unbecoming of authority, indeed, that our personal behavior is somehow unprofessional. For Defoe, the key is that our personal behavior has to be professional such that, when we narrow the divide between ourselves and our co-workers, rather than seeing us in a different light, they see that we are consistent in our behavior, regardless of what side of the proverbial shop counter we are on.
How tenable is this? Not very, I think, which is one reason why most of us still try to maintain a distinction between the personal and the professional. In Obama’s case, when I first got to know him, he actually tried to erase this distinction — everyone called him Barack — but, over time, I think he realized that it was necessary for him, his authority, and his position, to maintain a more formal distance from the people he worked with. Did this affect his persuasive ability? Not so much with the people who worked for him, but certainly with people on Capitol Hill. Much like Caesar and the Senators, they were fine with regarding him as first among equals, but when he wasn’t eager to press the flesh with them, it made many of them feel that he regarded them as inferior. They wanted to be treated as friends; he treated them as business associates.
I hope these comments are helpful to you, Connor. It’s a fascinating topic, and one, I think, well worth mulling over.”
