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Leadership Truth #8 - Great Leaders Do Not Overly Worry about Popularity

Guest post by: Robert Whipple

Article Overview: While everybody likes to be popular, great leaders understand their primary goal is to balance the needs of all stakeholders at the same time. This inevitably leads to some stakeholders being unhappy with certain decisions. How do leaders deal with the fact that they are unpopular for some portion of the time?

Leadership Truth #8 - Great Leaders Do Not Overly Worry about Popularity

Success in business is a complex endeavor. Often in the chaos of everyday challenges, it is easy for a leader to lose his bearings. Not all decisions benefit all constituencies equally or at the same time. Sometimes a long-term policy that is a benefit to shareholders feels like a short-term hit to employees. Likewise, having the foresight to make investments in the community may seem like a waste of resources to shareholders. It takes courage of conviction to do things that are temporarily unpopular. This is where being transparent and having a strong vision that includes all stakeholders pays off.

Many people think good leadership means being popular most of the time. Actually, good leadership means the leader needs to be willing to be highly unpopular with some people for part of the time. As Colin Powell stated, "Sometimes being a good leader means pissing people off." I often found it ironic that leadership capability assessments include assessments by subordinates. On the surface this sounds logical. Who better to recognize the worth of a leader than those who work for him? The problem is that if the assessment is taken at a time when people are angry with the leader, the rating for that leader will naturally be pretty low. Why this is ironic is that leaders who always try to be popular with people are mediocre. Sometimes to be rated highly as a leader using the conventional processes, you need to be a rather poor leader in reality.

The great leaders do not play the popularity game, in either direction. Instead, regardless of how they are assessed in the short term, they seek to do the right thing. A better approach is always to attempt to be respected. People will perform better for a despised leader who is respected than for a well-liked pushover leader who tries to please everyone but is not respected. Respect is highly correlated with trust. You cannot trust someone you do not respect, and it is pretty hard to respect someone you don't trust.

One constituency leaders must always seek to please is customers. It is a rare situation where a strategy that involves alienating a customer is a good one. I suppose there are some obscure scenarios where infuriating a customer is the right thing to do. For example, if a customer is harassing or even threatening one of your employees, the customer needs to be removed. For the most part, customer satisfaction is incredibly important to any organization. I always found it fascinating that a dissatisfied customer holds incredible promise for any organization. It is almost like we should revere the dissatisfied customer. There are several reasons:

• If we know the existence of a dissatisfied customer, it is because she has told us she is unhappy. What a blessing that is. Roughly 80% of dissatisfied customers never complain; they just switch to another company. If we have someone who is upset enough to actually contact us, that is a wonderful opportunity to reinforce the candor.

• Not only can we possibly convert a disgruntled customer into a happy one, we have information on why there is an issue. Without this information, there is little opportunity to snuff out the things we are doing that annoy the silent majority of unhappy customers.

• Converting an unhappy customer into a satisfied one creates a customer for life. Something has changed the mindset of this individual to switch from a negative stance to a positive one. This dramatic change means we really have a strong advocate for our business, one who will tell other potential customers of our worth. Making this conversion means we have done something incredibly right. We have the opportunity to celebrate and reinforce our good behaviors.

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Article Tags: behaviors, Leadership, popularity, stakeholders, values, vision



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