Question: What is the best advice an HR director can give to her hubristic CEO?
Answer: Doesn’t matter, he isn’t listening to a word she says…
…and that’s not good news. When a leader stops listening, it’s time to start worrying, because it shows that he or she is out of control.
Hubris was defined by the Ancient Greeks as outrageous and harmful actions that defied proper behaviour in the eyes of society and the gods. In today’s milder usage, hubris means behaviour driven by overweening pride and inflated self-confidence, usually underpinned by being in a position of power.
In business, hubris may develop in leaders (or in entire teams or organisations) following a long streak of good results. The positive leadership traits that helped deliver the successes – charisma, confidence, decisiveness – can, over time, slide into darker behaviours; delusions of infallibility, and an increasing unwillingness to brook alternate viewpoints or to even take any advice. The result is likely to be decision-making that relies more on the leader’s confidence than reality.
How can you tell if your boss is headed down the hubristic highway? There are some telltale signs:
The leader is surrounded by people who don’t have anything much to say, and rarely (if ever) object to anything he or she says or does
‘Heroic’ and disruptive initiatives become more frequent, and are reliant on optimistic forecasts rather than trends revealed by hard data
Analysis is broad-brush and bold; there is little detail, and few if any caveats or compromises.
Hubris occurs when people achieve a status or level of power that lets them get away with behaviour that normal mortals can’t. But the exercise of hubris actually threatens the continued enjoyment of that power and status – because leaders driven by hubris are more likely to make poor decisions, and because people around hubristic leaders end up being alienated by their grandstanding or alarmed by the poor decisions that create risk for the entire business.
Nobody can run a large organisation as their sole fiefdom for long; every leader needs senior people to buy in to their leadership, and to support it whole-heartedly. Hubris undermines that support, making the leader’s position increasingly isolated and exposed.
How can you intervene to persuade the boss to dial down the hubris, and get back to acting in a positive and collaborative way with the rest of the business?
The key to modifying their behaviour is to work on their primary motivation, which is to maintain their position of power and status. The first and trickiest step is to convince them that they have a problem in the first place; once this insight has been achieved, you can move on to showing how their behaviour is leaching away support, and how that dwindling support is an increasing risk to their position.
One potential eye-opener is to put real-life case studies of the consequences of unchecked hubris within businesses, and get them to reflect on them.
Another intervention could be gathering (anonymised) feedback from the leader’s peers and reports; hearing their peers’ poor opinions of their behaviour, or statements like ‘I’m afraid to open my mouth in excom meetings’, will give the leader a jolt of reality, and could remind them that they need to get along with senior people in the long term.
Ask them to think back to the last time they were challenged over a plan or initiative, and then probe the reasons why such challenges have stopped occurring.
Any or all of these interventions might succeed in opening a crack in their carapace of self-belief and infallibility, allowing them to see how their confidence and self-assurance have led to hubris. Once they realise their peril, they should be open to hearing about how they can rescue the situation.
