Member-only story
A couple lifetimes ago, I was working for a company where the CEO, “Bob”, liked to have a weekly operations meeting. A weekly operations meeting with the CEO and operations leader is pretty normal in a technology company.
However Bob’s operations meeting were a little different than most. Rather than taking a detailed, hard-nosed, look into how manufacturing, test, and quality (the operations portion) of the company were doing, this operations meeting seemed to have one goal: Make the CEO feel good.
Problems were never brought up. In fact, Bob would get mad if you brought up a problem.
Bob liked to give an inspirational talk at the end of every operations meeting. Bob’s talks would be on leadership topics that we see regularly such as the importance of loyalty, or getting things done. Whatever.
The topics were fine, and the words Bob used in the leadership talks were fine, yet Bob’s talks fell flat again and again. Why, you ask? It was simple:
BOB, THE CEO, WASN’T REAL. HE WASN’T AUTHENTIC.
Bob’s daily actions were different than the words he used in his talks. Everyone in the room, except Bob, knew he was faking it as a leader.
