How does it happen that a company’s morale and performance move in opposite directions? I’ve experienced it once, early in my career. I was working for a market-research consulting firm whose owner was an ironic, charming academic, beloved by the staff of bright eccentrics who filled the offices with rock music and laughter. Morale couldn’t have been higher. Then, into the Garden came distraction: Not only did our leader charm the staff, but also numerous young women, and he kept a condo near the office for romantic assignations.
This eventually became a burden for the two of us who reported directly to him. For instance, as research director, it fell to me to be the one who tried to patch things up the day a group of important new clients flew in to meet with him, and he was entertaining at the condo with the phone turned off.
Even as the founder’s interest in the company waned, morale soared — perhaps the two were even correlated. Eventually though, expenses weighed down the party barge. However, only when layoffs started did morale join the financials in sinking.
What got me thinking about morale and performance was happening upon a list of 10 movies with leadership messages selected by a sample of readers of Inc. magazine. (The full list is at Inc.com.) The one with the most mentions was the only one I hadn’t seen, “Twelve O’Clock High,” which was released before I was born.
Developing Leadership
The Inc. writer, Mike Hofman, summarizes the film’s lesson: “New leaders must first earn employees’ respect, even if that means being unpopular. If they do it right, love will follow.” Having now seen the movie, all I can say is that I hope you never have to work for a leader like the Gregory Peck character, Gen. Frank Savage. Yes, he’s “frank” in a “savage” way, which summarizes the Subtlety Index of this movie.
The movie is set in 1942, when the first U.S. pilots are flying in Europe, taking on the deadly work of bombing German factories via “daylight precision bombing.” Gen. Savage takes over from a commander who is guilty of “overidentification with his troops,” which seems to mean that it bothers him when they die and that he cares about how they live. Savage starts by insulting the troops, telling one, “I’m gonna make you wish you’d never been born.”
In his big speech to the troops, he advises them to quite worrying about dying, adding the cheery advice: “Consider yourself already dead.” He then announces that anyone who doesn’t want to fly for him can request a transfer. When every single pilot immediately requests a transfer, his solution is to get his assistant to stall, via bureaucratic nitpicking.
Then, magically, the group stops losing planes, as if Savage’s frankness is too dense for German anti-aircraft guns to penetrate. When, predictably, it comes time for the transfers to go through, the star pilot says that he’s withdrawing his, and the rest concur.
Unpopularity Poll
So how is this the leading leadership movie among readers of a business magazine? That’s inspiration? The article concludes that the message is, “Savage succeeds because he doesn’t give a damn about his own popularity — only about the effectiveness of the squadron.”
Hold on. What’s mentioned in the movie but not in the article is that the General adds practice runs, whereupon he discovers that the planes fly too far apart, which makes the group’s defensive guns less effective. Thus, what seems to be important — acting the tough-guy/jerk — is really irrelevant. What matters is that standards are raised, not the phony ones such as attire on base, but real performance.
The film ends in a way that seems to me to reveal the error of the main character’s leadership ways. Still, the modern-day managers apparently learned what they wanted to learn; in Hofman’s words: “Good leaders don’t always have be SOBs. But Savage would argue that when the straits are dire and the stakes enormous, it’s the only way.” No, it’s one way — the slow and painful path of those who learn the lesson of personality and miss the lesson of true leadership.
Dale Dauten is the founder of The Innovators’ Lab. His latest book is “(Great) Employees Only: How Gifted Bosses Hire and De-Hire Their Way to Success.”
