The White Tower - London - 2015 - C. Davis
Here we are, moving through another week of the Educated Leadership blog! This week we read an article about business leaders that seem to lose track of their morals and ethics after reaching the highest levels in their companies.
The article was called, “The Harder They Fall”, by Roderick M. Kramer and was printed in the October 2003 edition of The Harvard Business Review. The premise of Mr. Kramer’s article was that the skills required to climb the corporate ladder to its highest level are not the same skills one needs to remain in the job, once it is attained.
To become CEO of a major corporation, many hurdles and challenges must be faced and conquered. In the end, the competition often comes down to one or two extremely qualified candidates. The contest can be cut-throat and the experience can change the personality of those involved. Mr. Kramer noted, “Indeed, to get to the apex of their profession, individuals are often forced to jettison certain attitudes and behaviors – the same attitudes and behaviors they need for survival once they get to the top. As a result, we often ended up with leaders who lacked the prudence, sense of proportion, and self-restraint needed to cope with the trappings of power” (2003, p. 60).
In my career, I have seen variations on this theme. Usually, they fall into a version of what is known as the “Peter Principle”. The idea was proposed by Laurence Peter in 1969 and presented in his book titled, “The Peter Principle”. Mr. Peter proposed that people tend to rise to "their level of incompetence." Thus, as a person moves up to higher and higher corporate levels, they become progressively less effective because good performance in one job does not guarantee similar performance in another.
Kramer (2003)
pointed out that the tools of self-reflection and restraint no longer are available to those who have fought for and reached the top. I would add that it also becomes increasingly difficult to maintain connectedness to the lower levels of the organization. I have seen several reasons for this happening. The first being that the breadth of responsibilities for the manager increases greatly with each step up. The bandwidth required to maintain a level of understanding gets strained with each move. At the same time, the number of people vying for time and attention with the manager goes up. The complexity of the inner workings of the organization over which the manager presides becomes more difficult to intuit. Additionally, many fall into the trap of only listening to those who agree with them. The biggest reason I have seen people struggle as they earned promotions is that they do not have the management and leadership skills needed to delegate to and trust those they now have in their charge. I put the moral dilemma here at the feet of the corporation, or at least in the lap of the managers (or Boards of Directors) that do not provide training and tools to those they promote.
Taking this idea and applying it to life, I think it isn’t a far leap to make. My first thought is parenthood. How many of us got “promoted” to being a parent with very little in the way of skills or knowledge about what we were getting into? The responsibility and workload are hard to comprehend until one is thrust into the job. There are plenty of books and classes available, but few have the time or wherewithal to avail themselves of the information. To tie this back into our class, does that make becoming a parent without the skills to perform a moral dilemma? There are certainly cases where it seems immoral for some people to have children in their custody.
As I consider other areas where this unpreparedness or the phenomenon of needing one set of skills to get to a destination but a separate set after arrival occurs, I can see it other places. There are moral questions about giving 18-year-olds the right to vote when our education system isn’t teaching them critical thinking skills. Our current political situation highlights the lack of prerequisites our election process requires of someone to sit in the highest seat in our government. The morality of having someone with no political experience as president is in question now.
We will all face dilemmas. We will need to draw upon our own morals, gather all the reliable information we can get, and decide. We need to learn from the examples of those who have climbed to the top only to fall, sometimes spectacularly, and do our best to do better.
See you next week!
Kramer, R. M. (2003). The Harder They Fall. Harvard Business Review, 81(10), 58-66.
Peter, L. J. (1996). The Peter Principle: Buccaneer Books. Orig. Published 1969
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