Good leadership is no more parental than companies are surrogate families

I have a pen set in a wooden box in a glass-fronted cabinet in my office. It has a plaque from an organisation that I used to work for. I got it when I was leaving to go to my next job. A couple of days later, the plaque – with my name and their best wishes that had been hastily glued to the front of the box – fell off. 

The pen set is an anomaly in itself; it’s a mass-produced corporate giveaway from the marketing department’s corporate gift catalogue stock. And the message on the (reattached) engraved plaque, put together at the last moment, is hardly profound. So why do I keep it?

It’s actually one of my most prized possessions – a memento mori – a daily reminder of the pointlessness of fetishising your place in a company and the empty quest for soul affirmation from the organisations we work for. 

The truth is I loved working for that organisation, with its people, for 15 years, and I learnt and gained, and, I hope, gave so much. Its last lesson, of non-attachment, was accidentally its greatest.

We shouldn’t strive for prizes, or rely for our deepest well-being on affirmation from the organisation we work for. While it is vital that our employers provide a nourishing, inclusive and psychologically safe space for us to do our best work, we should not make the mistake of anthropomorphising companies as families. Often we do this, but it’s not just a pointless exercise; it’s actually damaging because it disempowers us by creating emotional dependencies. 

A company is an organisation: it is not alive, and it doesn’t care. It’s there for the purpose of creating value, yet we create this fantasy that it is human and so we expect human responses. The individuals who make up the company might be wonderful and care a whole lot, but that still does not make them your family. And even the most caring companies, bosses and colleagues will inevitably disappoint from time to time.

In an ideal world, our work needs to bring us affirmation for its own sake and our organisations need to be human-centric, fallible, forgivable – not godlike. Organisations are not cults – they are professional, diverse workplaces where respect is vital and boundaries are crucial.

This means that we need to strive to develop a more balanced perspective to understand the dynamics of work, people and organisations. If we invest too much emotional attachment into the companies we work for, we risk letting our expectations get the better of our rational minds and face inevitable disappointments, as neither the organisation nor its leaders can unfailingly fulfil our needs. 

As leaders and managers, it is even more important to cultivate such a dispassionate mindset because it falls to us to assist and advise disappointed and sometimes angry team members whose expectations, rightly or wrongly, have not been met.

We have to stay calm and not get angry ourselves, because when we get angry, we suffer the double jeopardy of diminishing others and disempowering ourselves. We have to be able to listen to anger and understand to be able to help. We need to be able to guard against making judgements out of defensiveness, and not get drawn into the fray.

Managing angry employees can be painful sometimes because, as leaders, we do not have the answers all the time. In fact, one of the truisms about leadership is that it is about leaders learning. It is vital to learn the humility to admit exactly that in public. 

Be kind and be curious, but don’t take it on inappropriately, nor evade your accountability. It’s a paradox that the higher up the tree we climb, the more our ability to lead is dependent upon us lessening our sense of self-importance to remain connected and relevant as leaders.

You’re there to solve the organisation’s problems and take it further, not for your own self-importance or comfort. You don’t need flattery or mollifying, you need to understand and take the right, fair and sometimes tough actions on behalf of the organisation.

We need to remember we are not our jobs, we just borrow them to fill them as best as we can before we pass them to the next incumbent – who you should set up for success. 

As we try to create the space for different opinions and navigate emotional storms, we have to balance the muddy maelstrom of competing agendas and issues to ensure the company’s own interests aren’t subsumed in the process.

As much as it is important to listen, it’s vital too to ensure that one voice doesn’t drown out all the others or suck up all the available time in a meeting involving other team members. Or that you don’t either, monopolising as the HIPPO in the room – the Highest Paid Person’s Opinion dominating. 

Just like bouncers at a nightclub enjoin the unruly to take it outside when tempers flare, so too do managers who are chairing meetings have to defuse and take individual staff issues offline or run the risk of the entire session being trashed.

It is important to realise as early as possible in our careers that leadership is no more parental than companies are surrogate families.

Good leadership means modifying people’s expectations from familial validation and all the attendant disappointment to the more enduring personal affirmation of doing a job well and ensuring that people are properly paid and recognised for doing just that, no other reason. And equally, ensuring those who are not performing are helped to improve, if they can and will. 

Leadership is hard, and when you’re doing it right it often won’t feel like it because invariably you’re losing at least one popularity contest in the room. When you realise that leadership is doing what’s best for everyone rather than winning affirmation from a few, you’re on the road to leadership zen and real freedom as an individual.

As leaders, we have to lose our defensiveness. As employees, we have to temper our expectations. Together, we have to get back to the basics of why we are at work. Being extraordinary is about doing the ordinary extra well – all the time. But with all the disruption in recent years, from pandemics to politics, we seem to have lost sight of that. It’s time to recalibrate. 

That’s why I pick up the pen set in my cabinet sometimes – to remember and then laugh and let it go. DM