Great Leaders Drive Accountability, not Entitlement
Few managers would question that "entitlement" behavior in the workplace is on the rise or its potentially damaging affect on organizational effectiveness and productivity. While many dump this problem at the feet of the "me generation," I think that's just a convenient way to point fingers and lay the blame elsewhere.
On the contrary, my observation is that this behavior has been an ongoing trend for decades and multiple generations. But it's not just an employee problem; it's also a management problem.
CEOs, executives, and senior managers have struggled with the challenges of holding folks accountable and meeting performance and behavioral issues head-on for generations. And over time, managers seem to be increasingly less comfortable with these critical aspects of their jobs.
Moreover, this unwillingness to hold people accountable appears to be an epidemic that starts at the top - with investors and boards - and follows the leadership chain all the way down to the line manager level.
So the combination of increasing entitlement behavior in the workplace and the ongoing decline in management accountability at every level in the organization are really two sides of the same coin. And the only solution to the problem is strong, gutsy leaders who are willing and able to stop the trend one management team and one company at a time. If you think that's unrealistic, then you've never worked in the tech industry where great leaders have built corporate cultures that effectively counter these ongoing trends.
How do they do that? Employees at these companies aren't entitled, they're empowered. And if they want to keep that privilege, they're held accountable from the very top to the very bottom of the organization. So the business thrives and everybody's happy, more or less.
I've worked at and with a number of companies where empowerment and accountability are simply two aspects of the same corporate culture. You don't get one without the other. And that culture is typically driven from the top down by one person, the CEO. But make no mistake; these CEOs are far from perfect.
The fact is that great leaders come in all shapes and sizes. And in my experience, for every Mark Hurd (HP), Lou Gerstner (IBM), and Eric Schmidt (Google) - where brilliant leadership and maturity coexist in the same executive - there's a Larry Ellison (Oracle), Bill Gates (Microsoft), Steve Jobs (Apple), and Michael Dell (Dell) who, at least early in their careers, were quite a bit less mature and, on numerous occasions behaved like dysfunctional, abusive jerks. In many cases they continue to be controversial, ruthless, and predatory. And those are just the famous ones. I could name dozens of others you've never heard of.
The truth is that there's quite a behavioral spectrum for great leaders, but one thing is common at all their companies - the cultures they engender don't accommodate entitlement-minded individuals. Instead, they empower individuals, hold them accountable, and that powerful combination drives success.
As long as we continue to turn out great leaders who build great cultures - regardless of where they fall on the behavioral spectrum - corporate America should survive to see the "entitlement" trend reverse itself. But that's just my observation and opinion on an extraordinarily critical and controversial issue. What's yours?
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