Chapter 7: The Courage to Listen to Followers


OVERVIEW

When courageous followers are successful at steering leaders away from potentially disastrous behaviors, actions, or policies, we rarely see the process or even recognize its results. The media do not typically report preventive actions they do not see or catastrophes that didn’t occur.

Similarly, when leaders or organizations self-destruct, we only see the visible acts, or failures to act, of the leadership. Unfortunately, courageous followers do not always succeed, despite their best efforts. Attempts that courageous followers may have made to head off the disaster usually remain invisible.

As we began the new millennium, contrary to this general rule of courageous follower public invisibility, people around the world got a rare glimpse of attempts from below to head off disaster in a range of U.S. institutions. In time, these specific events and personalities will fade from popular view, but leaders would do well to remember such examples as cautionary tales.

In the private sector, headlines were made when a midlevel vice president tried to caution the CEO of Enron, the country’s largest energy trading corporation, that its accounting procedures were egregiously misrepresenting the company’s financial position. She took a large personal risk by breaking with the corporate culture and sounding the alarm about these practices. The CEO read the detailed memo prepared by the VP and even interviewed her. Then, instead of treating the vice president’s information with the utmost seriousness, he referred it to the company’s law firm and asked them to investigate the matter, but not to make a “detailed analysis” or second-guess the company’s outside accountants, effectively quashing the investigation. The saga of this now-former CEO and his company is still playing out as of this writing. Meanwhile, investors in the company lost virtually everything, thousands of employees lost most of their retirement funds, and the CEO, other former executives, and the company’s outside auditors and lawyers are facing a myriad of hearings before the U.S. Congress and a barrage of lawsuits. Had the CEO only listened to the courageous follower in his ranks and taken her concerns seriously! Perhaps he could have steered the corporate ship, despite the advanced state of its moral rot, to a soft landing instead of a crash and burn.

In the public sector, the new millennium saw the U.S. government and governments around the world reorder their priorities in the wake of the infamous September 11 terrorist attacks on the United States. In the months following these events, information emerged on the attempts by law enforcement field personnel to alert headquarters to signs of impending terrorist activity. While second-guessing events is limited in its value, some of these field personnel subsequently took significant career risks by calling congressional attention to the troubling fact that months later organizational deficiencies, which contributed to the intelligence failures, were not being adequately remedied.

In the pedophilia scandal that shook the U.S. Catholic Church around the same time as these other events, both the Catholic laity and the general public learned of the numerous attempts to bring the problem to the church hierarchy for remedy. Lay Catholics, individual priests, and Catholic journalists over a period of decades attempted to convey the seriousness of the problem. Instead of meeting these courageous and loyal attempts with courage of their own, the church leadership all too often covered up the problem, allowed abusers to continue wreaking damage on young lives, and stonewalled those raising the issue. In addition to the human suffering this caused, church leaders came under great pressure to resign, and, at the time of this writing, the Catholic Church faces numerous lawsuits of potentially severe financial consequence. Only the future will tell how much damage these failures to value the concerns of loyal followers will have on the strength of the church as an institution.

These events, and our own experience, confirm that all the courage and skill in the world can’t assure that a leader will listen to important feedback. This in no way excuses followers from making vigorous efforts to communicate effectively. But it does require an examination of what responsibility leaders have when followers do their best to raise important issues. This is especially so when we, ourselves, are in the leadership role.

In this chapter, we will examine how leaders, intentionally or unintentionally, fail to develop and heed courageous followers, and what they can do to remedy this. We will examine this issue from both the perspective of the leader and the perspective of any board or oversight body that shares responsibility for the actions of the organization.

Leaders, by definition, want to succeed. Sometimes their road to success does not lie in the direction they think or cannot be traveled at the speed they believe. By failing to allow for this possibility, despite the signal flags being raised by loyal supporters, many leaders before them have crashed into walls and shattered the dreams of all those who had a stake in the journey. Leaders must learn how and when to listen. If they don’t, they may as well cover the instruments on their dashboards, fire their pit crews, and race with abandon down the track, until they run out of gas or are stopped abruptly by hard reality.




The Courageous Follower. Standing Up to & for Our Leaders
The Courageous Follower: Standing Up to and for Our Leaders (2nd Edition)
ISBN: 157675247X
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2003
Pages: 158
Authors: Ira Chaleff

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