The Lover,with a Woeful Ballad

November 1, 2007

Shakespeare described man in his third age “sighing like furnace,” something many leaders find themselves doing as they struggle with the tsunami of problems every organization presents. For the leader who has come up through the ranks, one of the toughest is how to relate to former peers who now report to you. Shakespeare painted a compelling portrait of the problem in Henry IV, Part II. Before Prince Hal becomes Henry V, his relationship with the aging rogue Falstaff is that of student and fellow hell-raiser. For all Falstaff’s excesses, he is often Hal’s wise teacher, helping the future king see beyond the cloistered, narrow education traditionally afforded a prince to glimpse what his future subjects feel, think, and need. But when it comes time for Hal to assume his royal responsibilities, he rejects Falstaff, despite their having shared a sea of ale and the sound of “the chimes at midnight.”Henry doesn’t invite Falstaff to his coronation, and he pointedly tells the ribald knight,“I know thee not, old man.”

Today’s leaders would instantly recognize the young king’s predicament. It’s difficult to set boundaries and fine-tune your working relationships with former cronies.

Most organizations,with the exception of the military, maintain the fiction that they are at least semidemocracies,however autocratic they are in fact. As a modern leader, you don’t have the option of telling the person with whom you once shared a pod and lunchtime confidences that you know her not. But relationships inevitably change when a person is promoted from within the ranks. You may no longer be able to speak openly as you once did, and your friends may feel awkward around you or resent you. They may perceive you as lording your position over them when you’re just behaving as a leader should. I know of a young executive, let’s call her Marjorie,who was recently promoted from middle management to head of the marketing department at a pharmaceutical company.

One of three internal candidates for the job, she was close friends with the other two. Marjorie had already distinguished herself within the company, so it was no surprise that she got the promotion, even though she was the youngest and least experienced of the three. But the transition was much more difficult than she had anticipated. Her friends were envious. She would sometimes find herself in the awkward situation of attending an executive meeting at which one of her friends was criticized and then going straight to lunch with her. The new executive missed being able to share what she knew with her friends, and she missed their support. Her fellow executives had a more authoritarian style than she did, and some even advised her to drop her old friends, which she had no intention of doing. Her compromise was to try to divide her time between her new peers and her old. The transition was still hard, but she made a good early move: She had frank conversations with her friends, during which she asked them how they were feeling and assured them their friendships were important to her and would continue.

However tough it was for Marjorie, she had the advantage of knowing the organization and its players. The challenge for the newcomer is knowing who to listen to and who to trust. Leaders new to an organization are swamped with claims on their time and attention. Often, the person who makes the most noise is the neediest person in the group and the one you have to be most wary of, a lesson I learned more than 50 years ago from the renowned psychiatrist Wilfred Bion. At the time, Bion was doing pioneering work in the new practice of group psychotherapy. He warned his students: Focusing your attention on the most clamorous of your followers will not only anger and alienate the healthier among them. It will distract you from working with the entire group on what actually matters, accomplishing a common mission.

Knowing what to pay attention to is just as important– and just as difficult. In their efforts to effect change, leaders coming into new organizations are often thwarted by an unconscious conspiracy to preserve the status quo. Problem after problem will be dumped in your lap – plenty of new ones and a bulging archive of issues left unresolved by previous administrations – and responding to them all ensures that you will never have time to pursue your own agenda. When I arrived at the University of Cincinnati as president I was totally unprepared for the volume of issues that found their way to my desk, starting with the 150 pieces of mail I typically had to respond to each day. The cumulative effect of handling each of these small matters was to keep me from addressing what was truly important: articulating a vision for the university and persuading the rest of the community to embrace it as their own. It is at this stage that an inability to delegate effectively can be disastrous.

Newcomer or not, almost all leaders find themselves at some point in the position of having to ask others to leave the organization–firing them, to put it bluntly. This is always a painful task, if only because it usually devastates the person being let go and because the timing is never opportune.Facing you across the desk always seems to be the employee who’s just delivered triplets or bought an expensive house. There’s little available to guide leaders on how to do this awful business in a humane way; only remember that you have people’s emotional lives in your hands in such circumstances as surely as any surgeon or lover does.

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