Harvey Golub, former CEO of American Express, used to smoke in his office. Golub was a great CEO, a powerful personality, a very effective leader, highly appreciated by his employees, shareholders and competitors. So what made Golub’s smoking habits problematic? Well, American Express is a smoke-free building. Was Golub aware of how negatively this abuse of privilege could have been perceived by others? In fact, he couldn’t have cared less. He was a disproportionately important figure in the organization who happened to have a nicotine addiction. If feeding that addiction meant keeping his organization running well at the expense of some politically correct notion about double standards, then Golub was okay with that. In contrast, I recently heard a story about the executives of Wal-Mart. The company itself is notoriously frugal and concerned about the impact of costs on the bottom line. Despite their busy travel schedules, the executives that lead the largest corporation in the world, stay at cheap hotels when traveling. To do otherwise would be to risk violating a value and creating the impression of a double standard.
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Other people become political by experience. They learn the art of politics because they realize that being political is essential for achieving their objectives.
Most of us feel the same way.
When Jim Collins wrote about Level 5 leaders, he mentioned that many had a “formative experience” which impacted the direction of their lives. Abraham Zeleznick wrote about the same phenomena 15 years ago in his book, Managerial Mystique. He said that “leaders grow through mastering painful conflict during their developmental years, while managers confront few of [those] experiences.” |
  
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Some people are ultra political by nature. They walk into a room at a crowded party and immediately get a feel for who is powerful and who is not. Worse, they brush by those who aren’t important to get at those who are. Eventually, the behavior gets noticed and discussed, and a reputation develops. A consensus forms that such a person is not to be trusted, and must be dealt with carefully.
If power and influence are leadership commodities, then politics is the marketplace inside the organization through which many deals and bargains are made. Everyone knows that leaders compete for resources; grappling over slices of the budget pie, CEO face-time, manpower, etc. To a degree, such resources are a way of quantifying power and influence. Leaders also compete for followers ¾ with each other, with outside distractions, and with conflicting organizational priorities.
My father, a wise, blue collar, salt-of-the-earth man, who earned every penny he ever made, said it best: “Watch out for that guy. He’s a politician.” To my father, a politician was the worst thing you could be. Straight shooters say what they mean and do what they say. They live by their word. They don’t try to trick you, turn the tables on you, make promises they have no intention of keeping, say what they know you want to hear, cut you out of the loop, use you, or do an end run around you to reach their objectives. For my father, that was the one big turn-off of working for a large organization: way too much gamesmanship, politics and backstabbing. Who needs it?
Can mystique be cultivated deliberately? I believe that it can be amplified, but it must also be genuine. A leader cannot simply begin to dress, talk, or act differently in order to adopt an aura of mystique. That would be cause for mockery. Instead, he or she develops a sense of mystique naturally or organically, in tune with a greater understanding of life’s own mysteries.
