How to Detect a Selfish Leader

“I’m a great collaborator—everybody says so.”

It’s not hard to detect the flaw in a statement like that. A leader who takes pride in commanding the room and guiding an organization’s staff and volunteers can easily convince themselves that everybody’s agreement means they’re skilled at collaborating. It’s a common self-delusion: According to research by leadership experts Ivan Matviak and Heidi K. Gardner, high-level senior leaders tend to underestimate how much they “engage in two key behaviors that are detrimental to collaboration: dominating conversations and micromanaging.”

In their discussion of the phenomenon  (opens in a new tab) in an article for Harvard Business Review, Matviak and Gardner explain that leaders who demonstrate those behaviors don’t necessarily mean ill—they got where they are because they’ve proven their expertise and care about quality. But in any environment where collaboration is key—which is to say any association office or volunteer group—that kind of dominance only sows alienation, tension, and people eyeing the exit.

In response, Matviak and Gardner recommend that leaders ask their colleagues to be honest with them, soliciting feedback about how they manage, and when their management style is overly dominant. Just as important, they recommend that leaders be honest with themselves. Too often, he writes, such leaders are quick to rationalize their behavior, “defending their actions with what they know to be their own good intentions.” But it’s better to recognize those flaws, he writes, to keep everybody focused on the organization’s bigger purpose.

There’s a wrinkle in that thinking too, though: High-toned talk about a “bigger purpose” can also be used to excuse divisive behaviors. In a sharp piece in the MIT Sloan Management Review, “Dethroning Loyalty  (opens in a new tab),” leadership experts Ron Carucci and Jim Detert point out that leaders are generally wise enough to know that demanding abject fealty is a dead end, stoking sycophancy and leaving blind spots unaddressed. But a leader can still find ways to, perhaps semi-unconsciously, behave in loyalty-chasing ways—hiring and promoting from a narrow pool of educational and experiential backgrounds, for instance, or rewarding volunteers’ hard work on an initiative that isn’t really serving the mission. 

So talk about “serving the mission” can easily ring hollow. But that doesn’t mean serving the mission is a bad idea. Rather, Carucci and Detert offer a specific idea for how it’s done well and ethically, something they call shared principled commitment. In it, “people are committed to the organization’s mission and will prioritize it when hard choices are necessary, but not without two-way regard for the humans involved.”

The second part is crucial, because while serving a mission demands leadership, it also demands respect from and attention to the needs of all stakeholders. “It’s not enough to say that ‘the mission is bigger than me’ and that ‘your commitment should be to the mission, not me,’” Carucci and Detert write. “You have to show it by routinely illustrating the distinction.” Leadership means dedicating attention an association’s mission; it also means being alert to the circumstances where you confuse it with attention to yourself