It’s Not Pie…

Harvard Business Review: If Humble People Make the Best Leaders, Why Do We Fall for Charismatic Narcissists? People are drawn to those who look and act the romanticized role of the leader. But charismatic leadership can have a dark side. Read More

Article by Margarita Mayo, Professor of Leadership and Organizational Behavior at IE Business School in Madrid. She was recently featured on the Thinkers50 Radar as one of 30 thought leaders to watch in 2017.

1736 N. Bailey Dict. Domesticum, [To make] An Umble Pye. Boil the umbles of a deer till they are very tender [etc.]. https://www.macmillandictionaryblog.com/stories-behind-words-humble-pie

Is all of this going somewhere, you may ask? Yes, yes, it is. I am slowly emerging from the emotional bunker where I spent all of my time since election day. You may think I’m about to talk partisan politics here but you would be wrong. I am going to talk about leadership. This happens to be a familiar subject as I spent some time in leadership roles over the years and even once served as a director of leadership education for a small private college. What does this have to do with design? As it turns out, a lot.

Much of my blog has been dedicated to exploring the common thread of design throughout our life. Design is a process and designers are both stewards and shepherds of that process. Designers are also artists in their own right. To be a successful designer, one has to have the ability to engage others and possess sufficient confidence in one’s own vision; serving to bring others along on the journey toward an artistic goal. Most of us are familiar with the warped ways this is depicted in popular media. Movies can’t resist the stereotype of the effete pseudo-aristocratic designer who humiliates someone into changing everything about their space and appearance. They make for an entertaining plot-thickener of sorts in movies otherwise missing one, but it sucks to deal with that type of person in real life.

As it turns out, we can think of leaders in a very similar way to how we think about designers. CEOs, for example, are stereotyped as something indistinguishable from schoolyard bullies, except older and with golden parachutes. In reality, we rarely hear anything about the most successful people in business – and the brilliant jerks (phrase courtesy of Bob Sutton) we do happen to know about often get sidelined from working directly with people before they completely drive a company into the ground. Sutton shared recently, “Nasty behavior spreads much faster than nice behavior, unfortunately…The evidence generally is that when you treat people badly, the only time it really seems to work is if you’re in a zero-sum game and it’s a shorter-term game,” he explains. “And my perspective is that even if you’re in the zero-sum game, where the assholes get ahead, there’s all this negative carnage...”

Hmmm, perhaps there are some additional parallels we can draw here but let’s skip to the part about PIE. A zero-sum game, defined by Miriam-Webster as “a situation in which one person or group can win something only by causing another person or group to lose it,” is often described metaphorically in terms of pie. In the act of obtaining what one deems to be their share of a pie, they are most certainly going to deprive someone else of that share. Perhaps it’s regrettable to the recipient, but one who feels entitled to pie considers such deprivation to be necessary collateral damage.

A design is not a PIE. Neither is Democracy. You can make the case that, like pie, both are the product of a process… a process of experimentation to select from an infinitude of available somethings to create another something that is delicious FOR EVERYONE. It works best to take our time and make it with lots of love. It is meant to be shared with others. We want everyone to enjoy it. When it stops being delicious our desire to keep making it will diminish. That’s where the comparison ends.

A successful leader, a successful person, does not act like the fruits of our democracy are stuck in a proverbial pie made for people to fight over. Only people born with privilege can push this idea because it’s fundamentally self-affirming for them (having already “won” their piece). Everyone else marinates in this myth however. We watch how the stereotypical designer emulates the aristocracy of their most privileged clients and convinces the stereotypical ‘uncultured slob’ to change everything. It’s like preaching to the choir. We buy it in our designers and our leaders far too often.

The most harm being done is to those who think they will find themselves on the losing end of an already existing fight to get a piece of this proverbial pie. It is these folks who potentially lose faith while constantly swimming upstream in our culture. They lose interest in our companies, organizations and institutions. Or they may take different path – attempting to push others down in an effort to increase their odds of success and/or aligning themselves with power to gain favor from those in a position to bestow it upon them.

Democracy is not designed to sustain aristocracy in the form of unearned privilege typified by gross wealth inequity. There was a time when most politicians would agree and tell you that. Many of them emerged from some form of hardship and managed to overcome the obstacles set before them; they entered politics to help others do the same. They may have come from wealth themselves, but something drove them to pursue politics as a “public service.” They weren’t thickening the plot and pre-casting themselves in some television drama for wannabe millionaires or politicos.

As those with the most power and privilege have entered increasingly into politics solely for self-preservation, they find “misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows.” Indeed, we are discovering where the message that ‘democracy can be delicious for everyone’ has been lost in some places. It has been replaced with a ‘win at all costs’ mentality that exists at both ends of our existing gross inequity. It exists for completely different reasons and necessitates completely different ‘solutions.’ Unfortunately, the mindset itself is so seductive it may be difficult for some to notice this impassable chasm between the two. Or maybe we are noticing and that’s why we’re here.

If we don’t correct this course with authentic, not made-for-television leadership, we’ll all be eating humble pie soon enough when democracy fails. For some, that might just seem good enough if they can be convinced its necessary collateral damage. Great leaders should spare no effort to bolster a democracy that convinces people otherwise. To do so, they must be humble stewards and shepherds of the design process that yields it.