Selfless leadership
I recently served on the executive board of a committee
tasked with selecting a philanthropic cause that would benefit from an event we
were planning. The event has been held annually in the Fall for the past 6 years;
inspired by the Olympic games, people pay to sign up a team, in return each
player receives a shirt, a coach for the event, and gets to participate in a
series of outdoor games. The winning team gets a small portion of the proceeds
donated back to a charity of their choosing, in addition to overwhelming
bragging rights. The rest of the proceeds go to our pre-selected charity,
usually picked based on a committee member’s personal ties to the cause or
foundation.
In the past, ideas for what charity we will support are
submitted voluntarily by the members. These options are then reviewed by exec
board, who vote within themselves to reach a decision. This Fall, as our
executive board sat down to discuss our options, we realized we were facing a
conflict of interest. The general committee had submitted an array of charities
they were passionate about. In addition, our president had shared a touching
story about a family member who passed away from pancreatic cancer, and suggested
the Lustgarten Foundation for this year’s event. If you’re not familiar with the Lustgardten
Foundation, they are a non-profit dedicated solely to pancreatic cancer research.
They’re awesome, and you can read more about them here if you are interested: lustgarten.org.
In this setting, it would have been easy for our president
to take advantage of an opportunistic situation. Had she pushed for the
Lustgardten Foundation, I don’t believe anyone on exec board would have given
her any rebuttal. She had earned her title as president through past year’s
hard work, gaining the respect of the committee, and her continued dedication. Furthermore,
she is graduating at the end of this term, so it’s her last time participating
in the event. Despite all these things, she didn’t use her position of power to
impose her opinions on us all. Instead, she motioned to move the decision to a
whole committee vote at our general meeting the following week.
This type of democratic motion had never been used to select
our charity before, simply because of the extra time and effort (in economic
terms: inputs) necessary. No matter the outcome, we were always assured the
money would be going to a worthy cause, so it had never seemed worthwhile in the past. But, this was considering that no president before had ever felt
so passionate about a cause as to nominate a charity during her term. Choosing to
delay the decision and allow each member an equal say speaks volumes of our
president’s character, and typifies the altruism that this event was
established for.
At the next week’s meeting, our president presented a PowerPoint
with one slide dedicated to each of our philanthropic finalists. These slides
detailed the roots of the organization, the specific efforts our money would be
supporting, and any personal ties the member who suggested the organization had
to its cause. Using iClickers to take a poll made tabulations quick: the
Lustgardten Foundation won with overwhelming majority. From an organizational standpoint, our president's decision to allow each member a vote served to unite the group. Seeing that the committee all stood behind this cause, as opposed to the president just announcing her charity as the beneficiary, also motivated fundraising efforts.
I realize this is an idyllic situation. There are many
instances where choosing not to be opportunistic results in a missed
opportunity. I wanted to share this story because, not only is it a recent and
touching experience, but I think there is something to be said for selflessness.
When we choose to be a good citizen, or do the right thing, or make the choice
that we believe is the fairest, I believe things work out for the
best. Disregarding trivial decisions we are often faced with, like whether to
take the last donut in the breakroom, big decisions that affect many (or all)
members of an organization need to be made with these things in mind. I’m not
saying it is plausible to conduct all organizational business in a democratic
fashion, but the executives of a company should try to go into these decisions reminded
of their larger and long-term company goals. Executives that show concern for employee wellbeing are ultimately rewarded with harder-working, more passionate employees. I'm experiencing this right now as I watch our fundraising efforts reach record highs for this Fall's event.
As my final thought this week, I'd like to pose a question: What are some successful companies that have crumbled under selfish leadership? (let's try to think beyond Wolf of Wallstreet... although that movie does provide some excellent examples)
My sister has done fundraising walks for the Lustgarten and she asks friends and family to support her in that. So I have made contributions to them in the past and was aware of them that way before reading your post.
ReplyDeleteYour example is a wonderful story, something of the opposite of the prompt. The President of the group didn't really have an opportunistic choice in front of her. Had she done what was done in previous years, nobody would have thought that opportunistic. Nonetheless, she rose above the historic norm to opt for more elevated behavior. I wish you all the luck in the world in finding other experiences like this one. That said, my unarticulated purpose with the prompt was to see if you could generalize from your example on ways to prevent others from acting opportunistically. If you could, it would give some insight into what good management is about. I'm at a bit of a loss with your example, however, how to generalize from it.
So, perhaps, it is not a lesson in how to manage others, but does provide some inspiration to try ourselves to live up to that ideal. Yet how I was raised looks at these matters in a somewhat different way. If everything below living up to the high ideal counts as failure, then most of us will be failing much of the time. If you don't make peace with yourself about that you can become a perfectionist and then lose confidence in yourself. So, I would counter that you need to learn to give yourself a break and accept your foibles. On occasion you may be noble. Other times, perhaps more frequently, you will be a bit less generous with others. That can still be a far cry from total disregard for their welfare.
It's not so much a question for our course, but I think one of the goals of attending college is to find an ethos that makes sense to the student and that can serve the student well thereafter. I, for one, learned to take amusement in some of the dumb things I did. They were genuinely funny to me and that took the pressure off. Past success is no guarantee of future high performance. That realization can create lots of performance anxiety unless you come up with a suitable counter for it.
Now on to bad actors. I actually only watched Wolf of Wall Street for about 15 minutes. Then I had to turn it off. I found it distasteful and not a compelling story. Much earlier, I did watch the Oliver Stone movie Wall Street, with the character of Gordon Gekko who became something of a household name thereafter. That movie was made in 1987 and I probably saw it on TV a year or two after that. Now it's 30 years later and in some sense things have only gotten worse.
To address your question in the last paragraph, if you are not familiar with these names you might do at least a Wikipedia lookup, so you can get some sense of these people. Michael Milken was one of the original corporate raiders. He was the master of the hostile takeover financed by junk bonds. Eventually, he went to prison on securities fraud. Later there was Enron (a company) and Bernie Madoff (a person). Both committed fraud at massive levels. More recently you can consider the case of Martin Shkreli, associated with raising some prescription drug prices by 2000%, and Travis Kalancik, the former CEO of Uber. Truthfully, these examples are less interesting to me than the legal, and so far no ill consequence for the actors, behavior of companies like Apple, that expatriate their profits to countries that have lower corporate tax rates. That is opportunistic, but so far not a crime. It's that sort of behavior that I believe is more interesting for us to consider.
One last point, in your blog title where everything is in all caps it's okay, but usually the word fall is not capitalized. The seasons are treated differently than the days of the week or the months of the year in this regard. I mentioned in class to avoid distractors if you can. That is one of them.
I’m happy to hear you’re already familiar with the Lustgarten Foundation’s admirable work. As for how to expand on this rather idyllic example of ‘anti-opportunism’, I thought about some ways one might promote selfless acts in an organization.
DeleteAs a leader, promoting company-wide goals, rather than individual or even departmental goals, may work to strengthen the company by uniting its employees. As my example showed, one way to do this is by including all member's in the goal setting process. It’s important to note that this process becomes more difficult with larger companies, and sometimes setting broad goals may not convey as much meaning to the smaller, individual units within the company.
A second way a leader could promote selflessness in their organization is by example. The benefits of this go beyond the obvious, I’d argue it has the power to build valuable trust in a company. I’m in the process of reading The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen R. Covey. In the latter half of the book, Covey focuses on gaining public victories through three habits of interdependence. Habit 4 is entitled ‘think win/win’, and one anecdote Covey provides illustrates my previous point nicely.
To summarize the story, Covey paints a picture of employees who frequently talk negatively about their other coworkers and their boss during coffee breaks. If one day these two gossiping employees have a disagreement, they are confident that the other person will go find someone else to air their grievances to. As a counterpoint to this, Covey talks about employees who strive to think the best in the coworkers by defending those who are not present. The difference in character this presents conveys a level of maturity and respect, and builds trust between all involved. Further, if employees experience their boss being fair, defending those who are not present, and striving to believe the best of people, these attitudes will flow downstream, spreading positivity in the company.
To your last point about making light of less than perfect situations, I totally agree that there is power in learning to laugh at yourself. It’s a nice reminder that life doesn’t have to be so serious, and we can all learn from our mistakes without viewing them as failures permanently etched on our reputation.
p.s. I will strive to improve my grammar during this fall semester.
In reading your response, I can't help but connect it to my own life just a little bit. I myself am a president of an RSO here on campus, and I constantly have to juggle putting forth an agenda that I feel is best for the organization, and incorporating agenda items I may not agree with so that there is consensus from our board.
ReplyDeleteFor people unaware of how the RSO system works, from a University standpoint the president of an organization can pretty much do whatever they want with an organization. No forms require a co-signatory, and they can act unilaterally on pretty much every University-sponsored scenario. In my own organization, I'm solely responsible for setting meeting agendas, with no oversight whatsoever. I could, if I wanted, allow only the points that I want brought up, brought up. I can arbitrarily call for votes, decide who gets to speak during deliberations, and generally just do whatever I want since there's no system in place (besides a very difficult impeachment process) to actually balance what I can do.
What I've done is created a somewhat arbitrary system of internal checks and balances to try and ensure that I'm not behaving dictatorially. When setting the agenda, I include literally anything (that's actually feasible) that a board member brings to my attention on that meeting's to do list, and then have that board member run that section of the meeting. I include open floor time at the end for anyone to bring anything else to the table. I call on everyone until we either table a discussion or have every voice heard. It makes meetings run long, and it's probably inefficient, but it's the best way I've found to behave ethically and equitably.
I'm glad your president does the same.
It seems like your organization picked a good leader. She changed a situation in which she could have acted opportunistically into an occasion that showcased her selfless pursuit of a democratic ruling. Like you said, it is not often the case that leaders at in such a way.
ReplyDeleteI can relate this to my post this week, in which I spoke to the ethical motivation to not act opportunistically. She seems to have strong morals which led her to not only offer a personal story in hope of helping a certain worthy cause, but she also did so in a way that did not use her power to pursue this agenda. Like you said, this is ideal because in many cases leaders do not have string ethics, and are only interested in pursuing ideas that will benefit themselves in the long run. Many politicians act in such a way that will not always help the people they are representing, but that will keep them in power.