Money, meanness and power: can we counter the corrupting influence of power?
In his blog post early this week, The More Leaders Make, The Meaner They Get, Scott Berinato reports on research by Sreedhari Desai on whether sky-high pay leads to worse treatment of workers. According to Desai’s study, the answer is yes:
Increasing executive compensation results in executives behaving meanly toward those lower down the hierarchy.
Chalk one up for Lord Acton. But is it money that makes leaders meaner? Or the power connected to money? While Desai’s research shows a correlation between high pay and mean behavior, it doesn’t establish a cause between the two. Desai’s research suggests that money is an insulator. It shields leaders from the results of their actions.
This echoes a point I made about abuse of power in an earlier post: the more leaders insulate themselves from themselves and others, the greater the tendency to abuse power. In writing on the Eliot Spitzer scandal, I said:
When power comes into play, the walls between public and private self are fortified by the trappings of the job itself – unlisted numbers, personal assistants, wood paneling and leather furniture, a limo and driver, private jets, mobile devices, and layers and layers of intermediaries that protect them from contact with their everyday self.
We are not meant to be cut off from the stream of constant feedback about our behavior. Our tiniest actions have profound effects on others. We constantly receive feedback about our actions, so we can steadily monitor, adjust and correct our behavior and respond to our environment. We’re a cybernetic system, undoubtedly an evolutionary design necessary for survival. But when we rise in the ranks, when leadership, money, or fame insulates us, we are too far upstream to be aware of the downstream effects of our actions. Time, space, the trappings of power, and the layers of staff, agents and bureaucracy separate us from the results of our actions.
Smart leaders know this, and go to great lengths to connect with all the people in their organizations, at all levels, to hear the feedback, to solicit and engage with bad news, to open themselves up to feedback and criticism. But it’s not only leaders who need to be vigilant. While it’s human nature to be constantly receiving feedback, it’s also human nature to cut ourselves off from it, or filter it out. We distance ourselves from feedback, for instance, when we sit behind a computer and post anonymously, or when we surround ourselves with admirers, students, or just live in a too homogenous world. This is one of the reasons exposure to diversity is so crucial. Our assumptions, interpretations and cultural lenses filter out data that don’t correspond to our belief systems. We need to shake up the cognitive egg, to be buffeted about at least occasionally by jarring information, dissonant data and reflections of ourselves that may be hard to take.
For those of us who coach, train and help leaders grow and develop, rather than using an annual review instrument and helping people interpret results of a survey or rating, we’d be better off teaching them how to read and interpret the millions of verbal and nonverbal signals we receive daily, and how to connect them to our actions. Life is a performance review; we just have to remember to engage with it directly on occasion.
Dear Julie,
Thank you for bringing these ideas together. I love how you write that “We are not meant to be cut off from the stream of constant feedback about our behavior.” This idea helps me understand a lot from previous organizational experiences I’ve endured and also it makes me think of the United States, a country I love but which seems to have the same disconnection from the constant feedback from others, and to think of myself as well because I, as a US citizen, must also have absorbed a consciousness that is at times cut off from the constant feedback from other cultures.
George F. Kennan, former US Ambassador to the Soviet Union and one of the architects of the cold war, eventually wrote: “Perhaps our diplomacy of the first five decades of this century [referring to the period from 1900-1950, beginning just after the Spanish American war through the end of WWII, the period in which the US began to understand that it had global power], and our reactions to the very different problems that have assailed us since 1950, both reflect realities much deeper than our specific responses of either period: namely, the lack of any accepted, enduring doctrine for relating military strength to political policy, and a persistent tendency to fashion our policy towards others with a view to feeding a pleasing image of ourselves rather than to achieving real, and desperately needed, results in our relationships with others.” In a sense he’s saying that the US itself also got rich and powerful and then became mean through being disconnected from the stream of constant feedback about our behavior.
It’s easy to see from the outside, like when BP is feeding a pleasing image of itself at the expense of the US but how do we see when we are doing the same thing?
I imagine that you, as a coach and trainer who regularly helps organizational leaders, might have some thoughts about how to use your ideas in working on ourselves and our countries as members of national or global organizations that need more connection to the signals from each other?
Thank you Stanford, for such a thoughtful comment. And for linking the ideas to geopolitical arena. I don’t have the final answer on how to help people meaningfully engage with feedback they would prefer to avoid. I’ve noticed that even when people do see the feedback, they tend to either compartmentalize it, as a small problem, and/or they see it, but don’t really understand its effect on others. Which is to say, I think that, as you put it, “feeding our pleasing image” is important, or else it wouldn’t be so hard to see our faults. Good coaches that I’ve met have been able to balance the two, to help people feel good about themselves, while also helping them cast a sober eye on the parts of their personality that need work.
You paint a very clear picture of how those with power get insulated from feedback. Isn’t it also true that all of us, regardless of our rank and power, have ways of defending and protecting ourselves againt information/feedback that conflicts with how we want to see ourselves or be seen? We’re all so savvy at being slippery in that realm… Perhaps those with gobs of social rank and power have greater impact on more people but that tendency to protect ourselves from that which feels ‘other’ and threatening seems to cross the power line… and that leaves all of us not quite as ‘evolved’ as we might otherwise be.
Hi Lesli, Yes, for sure. Cutting ourselves off from feedback and defending our self image is an equal opportunity thing. As I point out, we have lots of means at our disposal for that. I think they way high social status is enacted and enforced by the trappings of power and money amplify an already existing tendency.
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