Losing Faith and Finding Meaning | Leadership Passages: The Personal and Professional Transitions That Make or Break a Leader (J-B US non-Franchise Leadership)

When you lose faith, you mortgage your commitment as a leader. But as we’ll see, you have the option of developing your leadership capabilities, even when your faith has disappeared.

Overcoming Disillusionment

When Lisa interviewed and was selected for a midlevel legal position at a Silicon Valley company, she was pleased. She had previously worked in the Midwest as assistant general counsel for a family-run business, and though she liked the owners, she never felt particularly comfortable there. Lisa was very liberal in her politics and social views, but she felt that the founder and owner of the company was a staunch conservative whose politics translated into a poor record on minority hiring and who was willing to support only charitable causes that reinforced his own political viewpoint. She stayed there five years, enjoyed her work, and was well rewarded, but when she heard about an opening at the Silicon Valley company—a company that regularly received glowing notices in the media for being a great place for women to work—she applied for and got the job.

Lisa’s first four years with the company were successful. Not only was she promoted twice but the company put her on the advisory group of two ongoing, highly visible philanthropic programs. During this time, Lisa truly believed she was working for the best organization in the country and told this to her family and friends, as well as to new hires she was recruiting. She admired the CEO’s decisions and communication, and felt the company’s culture and values were ideally suited to her beliefs and work style.

With her second promotion to general counsel, Lisa joined the CEO’s team of direct reports. Shortly afterward, she began to view the company differently; she began to lose faith. Coincidentally, the dot-com bubble of the late nineties was beginning to implode, and the company’s stock began to fall. Among several difficult moves, the company decided to cut funding to several worthy causes, including a breast cancer research center. During an advisory committee meeting on the company’s foundation donations, the CEO and two male direct reports made a joke that when the economy rebounded, they would have to find another women’s disease they could support. “Let’s look at ovaries next time,” one of the executives said.

Everyone laughed, and though Lisa didn’t say anything, she noted their insensitivity and boorish behavior. Later, she participated in another difficult meeting in which the CEO and his direct reports discussed head-count reduction. As part of the discussion, they focused on the external message to accompany their decisions. The strategy was to cut deeply into full-time employment in order to convince Wall Street analysts and reporters that the company was serious about cost control. The CEO commented that he wanted to position the company as “more fiscally responsible than the Street gives us credit for.” Lisa’s position was that there might be other alternatives than terminating numerous talented and skilled employees. The CEO suggested that Lisa, because of her newness to the management committee, might not be experienced in managing through a down business cycle.

Lisa was astonished that her idealism about the CEO and his management team could have been so inaccurate. But sitting in on management meetings, in combination with the economic downturn, fueled her new perception that her colleagues’ values were situational and opportunistic. The top managers fostered the positive appearance of leading a “good place to work,” but it was an illusion. They did not walk their talk.

For a while, Lisa struggled with her new perceptions. Initially, she was angry with the CEO and his team and seriously considered quitting. The more she thought about this alternative, though, the less attractive it seemed. She loved her job, the rewards that came with it, and being part of the Silicon Valley high-tech culture. More significantly, she realized that even though she was less enthusiastic about her company’s leadership, she still relished working with many of the company’s bright people, especially her own team. She took great pride in having developed her direct reports, and she didn’t want to desert them. In addition, Lisa still represented her company on the board of a national environmental group, and she knew that if she were to leave the company, she would need to relinquish that role. Lisa realized that despite her anger and disillusionment, she had a meaningful job and could continue to feel good about herself as a person and as a leader if she remained with the company.

Making Good Choices

Instinctively, Lisa made the right choices as she began looking at her company critically. She could have reacted by resigning. Or she could have stayed but grown increasingly cynical, getting stuck in this passage because she couldn’t forgive the CEO for being a different leader from the one she had thought him to be. She found a way to re-energize herself instead.

Here are some dos and don’ts that will help you when you find yourself in a similar passage. First the don’ts:

Don’t seek refuge in cynicism. To Lisa’s credit, she bypassed the cynical stage. Many are not so fortunate. Cynicism appears with great regularity to leaders when their initial idealism is dispelled. Typically, young leaders join organizations fresh from other companies or assignments and are excited and energized about work. If they’re lucky, they eventually find a challenging role with a good boss, working for a company with an outstanding reputation that offers them the opportunity to do things they’ve always wanted to do, as well as to learn and grow. Over time, however, idealistic new people inevitably lose some of their excitement and energy. They may have a boss who, in recruiting them, promises an opportunity that never materializes. They realize that the excitement of corporate travel requires them to sacrifice time with friends or the opportunity to build satisfying relationships. They learn that senior managers, who have a great impact on the organizational culture, are also flawed human beings. They discover that the organization they thought they were working for was only imaginary; the real one doesn’t fulfill their expectations.

In most companies, as we have observed, over time people form a scar of cynicism to cover up their wounded ideals. We encounter many cynical people today who make fun of their organizational culture, subtly criticize decisions, convey skepticism that things will ever change, and disparage other leaders as ways of coping with their disillusionment. In many instances, these critical leaders bond with others who share a similar outlook, engaging in conversations whose sole purpose is to mock institutional policies and senior managers’ actions.

The result: leaders who work without purpose. They do their jobs efficiently and effectively but without real commitment, just going through the motions. They lack passion and energy. They are unwilling to do anything extra or to take any real risks that put themselves on the edge. There is no better way to limit your own development as a leader than by seeking refuge in cynicism.

Unfortunately, this strategy also makes their existence less productive. If your focus is on escape, you can’t be stretching yourself or your team, or taking on new and diverse experiences, or putting yourself at risk. When you believe your company is impossible to change, escape fantasies salve your wounded idealism. The problem, of course, is that they don’t make you into a more effective leader.
Don’t be a victim. When you stop believing in the organization, you may feel like a victim. You’re convinced that the company or the entire world has misled you, and now you have to pay the price. You go around the office or your home bemoaning your fate and the dastardly bosses who led you astray.

Self-pity is neither pretty nor productive. Although your feelings of hurt and anger are legitimate, they do not supply permission to feel powerless. If you’ve ever worked with a victim, you know how enervating it is. People lose faith when they give up. Their pessimism and resignation suck the life out of teams.

You may well have been victimized by an unethical leader in your organization or a company that has blundered into serious missteps, but whether you play the victim is your choice. We coach senior leaders on a maxim of leadership: it is impossible to be an executive victim. That is to say, when you choose to be a leader and when many people are counting on you and your competence, you are not a victim of anyone else’s power. In most companies, you can regain your power to influence other people and achieve goals, and if you recognize this fact, you won’t act or think like a victim.

Now, on the positive side, here is what you can do.

Create meaningful work for yourself. Even in a worst-case scenario—your company is under investigation, predicted to fall into bankruptcy, or in some serious downward spiral—you can still find purpose when you grasp that meaningful work may be different from the way you conceived it. Some leaders convince themselves that winning is what is meaningful about their job or that work is all about a particular title, salary, boss, or company. When they lose faith in these systemic elements, they feel betrayed. They thought that working for a great boss or great company was what work was all about, and now that they know it is not, what’s left?

What’s left is the meaning you create for yourself. Here are the three ways leaders renew faith in their jobs, their careers, and their leadership roles:

Through other people. You are responsible for your direct reports. They look to you for guidance; they expect you to help develop them. Take this responsibility seriously. Focus on the reality that other people’s work lives are in your hands and that if you lose faith and sink into cynicism or victimhood, you’ll be worthless to them. You may also find meaning in helping a boss achieve goals. You may be disillusioned by the CEO’s actions, but you still respect your boss. If you believe in what he is trying to accomplish, focus your effort on making his goal your goal.
Through a specific project on which you’re working. Just because you believe the organizational system is bankrupt doesn’t mean it taints everything it touches. You can find meaning in specific tasks. Your next project assignment may be worthwhile, whether it’s developing a new manufacturing process or creating knowledge networks. The work itself can be fulfilling if you work diligently and creatively.
Through your sense of achievement. Even within a moral vacuum, achievement is possible. You can learn new skills, create provocative ideas, and even inject good values into a corrupt system. In other words, you can achieve a lot in any leadership position, and the feeling of achievement will help sustain you, even if you no longer believe in the company or its leaders.

Reconnect with what originally drew you to your area of expertise or the business world in general. Some people lose faith in the system, not because of any specific act of malfeasance on the part of senior management but because they’ve grown jaded. Maybe their careers haven’t worked out exactly as they had planned or they had impossibly high expectations that could never be met.

We’ve found that veteran executives can find new meaning by refocusing on what initially excited them about their business. Sometimes they recall one of the passages we’ve discussed, such as their first stretch assignment or being in charge of a business for the first time. Whatever it is, the focus on replicating their initial excitement can help to replace what is now missing. To recapture their purpose, they may simply need to request another stretch assignment. We’ve coached senior vice presidents in the later stages of their careers who have volunteered to work in their company’s office in an undeveloped country, because they relished living and working in another culture and enjoyed the challenge of living with risk. Some executives recall their first mentor with gratitude, and they want to pay back the system by mentoring others. All of this can help rekindle your drive and sense of purpose.