Leadership is a spiritual responsibility. It is a leader’s sacred duty to watch over those under their command. Leaders will be held accountable for how those serving under them fared. Too many leaders conduct themselves in defiance of that fact. They exploit their position for their own personal gain. They steal from their stakeholders. They conceal the truth. They abuse their people. They create toxic workplaces as malignant as an aggressive metastatic cancer.
Our workforce is suffering under Cialis 80 mg dosage and other easy methods to sexually arouse a man. these bloated ticks masquerading as leaders. They use all of the resources at their disposal in their never ending quest to gorge their own bellies. They are parasites who cause disease in their host employees and organizations. These kinds of leaders appoint themselves as God over their people and they act accordingly. Big mistake.
How do leaders go so far astray? Denial and dysfunction. Or in more clinical terms, maladaptive patterns of believing and behaving. Typically, these leaders display an incredible level of arrogance and ignorance. They believe that they have attained an exalted status. They believe the team is there to serve them. They believe the organization is their own personal treasury of resources. They think that because they haven’t been caught they never will be caught. They think that if they surround themselves with those who fear them, owe them, or are as dysfunctional as they are, they insulate themselves from accountability. Their mindset is so wrong it warps their behavior.
Compounding that is another classic mistake bad leaders make: not doing their own work. I’m not talking about the required tasks of their particular job. I’m talking about the work it takes to mature and evolve as a person. To grow beyond previous boundaries. To become a healthier version of themselves. Bad leaders scoff and laugh at such a notion. They stand on their grandiose delusion that the world is the way they want it to be because they say so. What they don’t realize is that what they are standing on is a thin, transparent piece of glass the rest of us can see right through. Inevitably, the weight of the leader’s transgressions will shatter that glass and they will plummet down.
Bad leaders behaving badly takes an enormous toll on their employee’s lives. Rather than being protected by the ones in charge of watching out for them, far too many employees suffer as a direct result of the leader’s behavior. They battle problems with their health, family, and finances. Their view of themselves and the world around them grows dim. Their inner light begins to flicker and in some cases, goes out. What a massive loss of human potential. What a legacy of hardship for families to bear. What a grave spiritual consequence for any leader to bear.
Leaders, how do you pass your spiritual tests? How do you honor the position of tremendous responsibility that you have been graced with? First, you submit to God’s authority. If you can’t, why should your people submit to you? Second, you do your own work. Just like no one can do your sit-ups for you, no one except for you can untangle the Gordian’s knot of your emotional baggage. We all have it. Stop pretending you don’t and set about the work of dealing with it. Root out and heal the dysfunction. If you grew up in an alcoholic or addicted family, that affected you. Same thing for abusive or neglectful families. Same thing for families with a parent who had a mental illness. Or a parent who was absent. Or a hundred other ways that a rough beginning presents itself. Unless you have dealt with whatever dysfunction existed in your early life, those issues are still impacting you. In the worst cases, they’re haunting you by driving behavior that were you fully aware of it, you most certainly would not choose.
Surrounding yourself with people as dysfunctional as you isn’t going to cut it. All that does is create a shared illusion of invincibility that will inevitably crash itself headlong into the rocks of reality. The system you work in is just one system. Even if your whole enterprise shares the illusion, there is still an outside world that doesn’t. Man’s laws and God’s laws still apply. The day of accountability will arrive. Bad leaders will have to take responsibility for not only their poor choices, but for the damage those decisions caused their people.
Finally, after leaders have submitted to God as their proper authority and have done their own work to mature, they pass their spiritual tests by creating a culture of vitality. It’s the only truly sustainable culture for any organization. The workplace environment must be physically and emotionally safe. No abuse or exploitation of any kind. It must also be run in a healthy way, not like an addicted or abusive family. The worst leaders replicate the dynamics that existed in their childhood living room. They either are or act like the addict, coalescing everyone around them to protect them from the consequences of their choices. Anyone who plays their prescribed role gets favored. Anyone who calls out the craziness for what it is gets shunned or abused. The entire system is built around concealing the activities of the addict and creating a false image the rest of the world buys in to. When a workplace environment is based on a sick family system, that becomes its sole focus and eventually it implodes. Only a healthy culture can survive, thrive, and allow each of its individual members to flourish. Only healthy cultures realize the full potential of the mission that they are tasked with accomplishing. Only healthy leaders can create healthy workplaces. Leaders, pass your tests!