Article: Life Lessons on the Job

Last Updated: March 18, 2003

Richard Farson is both a psychologist and a CEO who has spent 30-plus years heading organizations. His experience has given him an extraordinary appreciation of the absurdities of organizations, and how nothing works quite the way we have been taught. In a 1996 book called Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes in Leadership, Farson outlined some important lessons he'd learned, and his wisdom applies as much to everyday life as to the office. Here are some of his choicest observations.
• In management as in parenthood, it's not so much what we do as what we are that counts.
What parents do deliberately appears to make little difference in the most important outcomes - whether their children grow up to be happy or unhappy, successful or unsuccessful, good or evil. There is no question that parents can and should do worthwhile things for their children, but it's what they are that really matters; for example, whether they are sensitive and caring or cold and indifferent. Most children adopt the characteristics that define their parents, whether their parents want them to or not. The same dynamic occurs in management and leadership. People learn - and respond to - what we are. When you think about it, perhaps that is the way it should be. What a dreadful world it would be if we actually did possess the skill to convey something other than what we really are.
• Remember what we might call the "reciprocity rule" of human behavior: over time, people come to share, reciprocally, similar attitudes toward each other.
That is, if I have a low opinion of you, then while you may for a time hold a high opinion of me, it is unlikely your high opinion will persist. Eventually you will come to feel about me the way I feel about you. If we genuinely respect our colleagues and employees, those feelings will be communicated without the need for artifice or technique. And they will be reciprocated.
• There is no right way to be a manager.
Completely different types of leaders enjoy equal success, and part of the reason is that employees have the power to make their leaders look good. Organizations survive because most people are trying to do their best and will try to keep things going under any circumstances.
• It is more important for managers to like their employees than for their employees to like them.
• There are no leaders, there is only leadership.
The real strength of a leader is the ability to elicit the strength of the group. Leadership is less the property of a person than the property of a group. True leaders are defined by the groups they are serving. People who are leaders in one situation are usually followers in another. In a well-functioning group, the behavior of the leader is not all that different from the behavior of other responsible group members.
• If any one thing can be said to be true about good leaders, it is that they trust their instinct.
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