Think quickly. Is it better for your career to be selfish or to be selfless? Most leadership programs advocate selflessness and meeting the needs of your employees as a way to succeed but does that always work?
Does selfishness make you a better leader, taking the good work and leaving your team the scut work, taking credit when your team deserves it, taking way more compensation than your team members? You probably won’t have an engaged team if you do that but you might have advanced your career.
Or does the leader who fully engages a team by making sure they have good work to do, get the credit they deserve, and shares monetary rewards have a better career?
I think it comes down to short run versus long run. In the short run, if you’re going to be in a job for only a short time then it pays to be selfish. You can get quick results and jump to another job to do it again.
If you are in a particular job job for the long haul though then you’ll piss everyone off by being selfish and you’ll eventually have poor results and your career won’t advance.
Maybe this is the problem with large companies that move people around very quickly. Selfish people will succeed in the short run, become bosses, torment their employees, and then move up thus creating an executive filled with selfish people who engineer scandals such as at Enron, Worldcom, Nortel etc.
Imagine as you leave work tonight that you’re living in the seventies. You clean off your desk, tidy your office and turn off the lights. That’s it. When you get back to work on Monday morning, your work would be exactly as you left it.
There would be no mail waiting as mail wasn’t delivered on Saturdays at work.
No one would have sent you any faxes because they weren’t in use yet.
No one could have left you a phone message as there was no voice mail and no one would have answered the phone after hours.
There wouldn’t be any interoffice memos as no one else would have been in the office either.
No one could have emailed you as you didn’t even have a computer.
There would have been nothing to check on Twitter, LinkedIn, Facebook, Pinterest etc.
Work would have been exactly as you left it. No change whatsoever.
Wouldn’t that be incredibly freeing to feel that now?
A while ago I wrote a post on Evidence Based Management. It’s great to see that charitable foundations are also using these techniques to make funding decisions. The following story comes from Macleans.
“Stern offers up an example from the early years of the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation when it decided, largely based on guesswork, that smaller-sized high schools would improve student outcomes. Grants of $1 billion were handed out to build small schools or restructure existing schools into smaller units. But five years and 1,500 schools later, a comprehensive review revealed that all this money had done very little for student results. Math scores actually suffered.
“From the ashes [of the small-schools scheme], the foundation developed new requirements that all Gates projects and grantees be subject to rigorous and verifiable measurement,” Stern writes. “The Gates Foundation now maintains a department whose sole function is to measure and analyze results.” In other words, the Gates Foundation substantially increased the size of its administrative overhead to ensure its efforts were cost-effective and productive.”
Well you wouldn’t want to work for someone who lies all the time but how about if you knew they lied just some of the time? Does that mean you would only trust them some of the time? And what times would you know you’re supposed to trust them?
I’m not sure that we expect that bosses will tell the truth all the time but why shouldn’t they? Is moral ambiguity acceptable?
I did a quick poll yesterday on Twitter and found that 29% of my meagre pool of respondents trust their boss to tell them the truth always and 36% agreed that they do most of the time. Does that mean that only 29% of people really trust their boss?
I guess it comes down to a variant on what my mother used to say: “If you can’t say something truthful, don’t say anything at all.”
Leadership is about getting results so it’s nice to be able to see an industry mature and the growing leadership skills begin to bring better results and in particular, better productivity.
Foosball and free food still exist but long gone are the days of mindless spending and large losses in the software industry. The post-bubble era is seeing dramatic increases in productivity for software companies. It looks like the industry is really maturing. Our little baby is growing up.
Average revenue per employee has increased to $287,000 from $195,000 in 2003.
Average net income per employee is now $3,700 (which sounds anemic but represents huge improvement over the average net loss of $61,600 per employee back in 2003.)
62% of the companies are now profitable versus only 46% back in 2003.
The average market cap per employee increased from $600,000 to $1,129,000.
This may sound like a fairy tale but Axel Zein does a good job of talking about the Perfect Boss in his recent TED Talk which I thought you might enjoy.
Think quickly. Is it better for your career to be selfish or to be selfless? Most leadership programs advocate selflessness and meeting the needs of your employees as a way to succeed but does that always work?
