I.T., Leadership and Creativity

This study (excerpted here in the press release) shows that bullying and abusive leaders are often tolerated if they are perceived to be successful.
This is is no surprise to me. I once had the misfortune (in 1999) of working for a Vice President at Sabre who had no discernible interpersonal skills (I did not think this was possible, but the daily evidence backed up that unlikely reality). He was a classic tyrannical, bullying, obnoxious leader, yet his leadership style was quite clearly tolerated by Sabre right up to the point that he left the corporation.
In that particular case, the VP waited until I went on vacation, then took away all of my responsibilities (while neglecting to inform me until I went to see him on my return, after discovering that everybody in the team was treating me like I was radioactive) and told me to go find another job within Sabre. While classless in the extreme, the move was fortuitous in that I was able to find another role in Sabre and quit working for what is definitely the most interpersonally defective leader I have ever encountered.
The conclusion of this study is somewhat depressing, but quite understandable. A lot of corporate leaders, even when confronted with clear evidence of bad behaviour by leaders, will attempt to rationalize away the evidence, using a variety of tactics ranging from cynical, lazy and tired cliches (a classic one being "to make an omelette you have to break a few eggs") through to ad hominem fallacies, usually based on some variant of allegations that the evidence for bad behaviour is coming from "poor performers", "whiners" etc. etc. None of the rationalizations is at all plausible, but they are remarkably resilient when people wish to live in denial.
UPDATE - I found an interesting doctoral thesis that suggests that if you find yourself faced with a bullying leader, that collective action is a more likely route to effecting positive change.

Now why didn't the other airlines think of this one first...?

With Carly Fiorina re-appearing recently as a public figure to try and gain the Republican nomination for a Senate seat in California (after a lengthy period out of the public eye battling breast cancer), I found this interesting article about her tenure at HP, which ended with her dismissal in 2005.
As is often the case, the demonization of Fiorina after she left HP tended to focus on and personalize her own perceived failings, and overlook the contribution of other actors in the debacle. As this article makes clear, there was plenty of blame to go around, starting with the HP board of directors, who, worried about the decline in the HP stock price, felt that they needed an outside to "save" the corporation. Once they had hired Fiorina, they failed to exert proper stewardship and ignored numerous warning signs up till and after her dismissal. As a result, HP came under scrutiny for ethics violations even after Fiorina left, and Carly Fiorina's successor as CEO, Mark Hurd, had to apologize to the outside world for the ethical lapses.
The situation that unfolded at HP was very similar to what occurred inside EDS during the period of time when Dick Brown was the CEO. Like Fiorina, Dick Brown was a sales-driven deal-maker with little interest in operational processes. As a result, he focussed on splashy sales deals (which drove the stock price up) and then ignored execution issues (which in turn drove the stock down and eroded his credibility to the point where he was forced to resign in 2003). Once again, he was enabled in this by a weak and largely compliant board, his own position as CEO and Chairman, which is still one of the colossal conflicts of interest for a corporation, and his own employment contract, which rewarded him handsomely for inflating the EDS stock price. Dick was merely doing what his contract incented him to to, which in the short term made the marketplace happy, but it stored up medium-term trouble as solutions were oversold and execution was neglected.
Both Carly Fiorina and Dick Brown were examples of what the article terms "rock star" CEOs; sales-focussed ethically neutral leaders who came to be seen by their employees as self-centered, uncaring and inauthentic. Sadly, the pendulum in large corporations has not yet swung all the way back from those excesses.

Good posting about some of the traps that you can fall into if you are a smart person...