Manipulation as greed strategy

Today, nobody needs to educate or explain to a business leader how volatile the macro-economic environment is. We are witnessing daily shocks, challenges, and different shades of uncertainty.

For leaders, routine business decisions now carry real risks. The environment is so challenging that experts are prescribing “everyday courage” as the remedy. This “courage” is not bravery (as we know it) or heroic acts but delivering impact with everyday choices.

The leader must inspire the workplace by being accountable to himself, regulate himself and lead with honour, truth, and authenticity. His daily choices must be a compass of painstaking principles of morality and consistency.

His actions must align with his words (his essence). His daily actions must be intentional and strong in building the legacy of truth and transparency.

The CEO must lead with insight. He must showcase the power of acute observation, deduction, penetration, discernment, and clear perception. He must apprehend the truth and observe intuitively.

The stake for the leader is high (although personal), but his failure and embarrassment will be seen clearly (and even exaggerated) in the public domain. Today, the workplace is now filled with “fakes.” Manipulative executives and colleagues who hide behind falsehoods.

Close associates now manipulate the leader’s emotions for personal gains. These so-called charismatic associates use practised performances and deceitful charms to deceive and influence. They tell lies to trigger, stimulate and manipulate the CEO’s responses.

Psychological manipulation is the deep and clinically studied tools now being used by the people the leader trusts and respects. These tools can be falsehoods, deception and underhand methods. The leader with discernment should see through this manipulative “mirror” techniques. These associates are always pushing hard to be seen (always in the face of leaders and decision-makers), understood, even “soul” connected. They behave showily to impress and even adopt the leader’s known characteristics to deceitfully match his thoughts, views, appearance and beliefs.

They “mirror” the leader to lower his defences and earn his trust. They win him over with their motives. Sometimes, they even echo the leader’s frustrations, desires and worldviews so the leader thinks they love, respect and even prefer him to others. By so doing, the leader unknowingly lowers his checks and filters. They now use these opportunities to push-in their requests, suggestions and of course, pull-down or run-down colleagues. They are subtle, deft and skilful in their activities. They isolate the leader for themselves in order to flood him with their own validations and point out gaps in the activities of their colleagues.

These “corporate” psychological manipulators even take advantage of the leader’s seeming openness. They spread false information. They gloss over their own weaknesses and are always feigning ignorance of very important duties and responsibilities. They make their manipulative tactics seem normal and exploit emotional vacuum to create strategic delays and reward reversals for team members.

I want to allegorise this heavy burden on today’s leaders by describing it as “corporate banana peel.” The slippery layers of a banana that cause serious embarrassment and gradual failure of business organisations.

The activities of these “corporate” manipulators obviously and seriously stand in the way of wholesomeness in the workplace. Selfishness and greed indeed, distort truth. It causes misalignment of feelings, actions and values. An innovative culture can only thrive when feelings align with actions in a cohesive work environment.

The framework for ensuring value-driven alignment in the workplace is the “curiosity curve”. This framework, when properly executed for all-hands-on-deck collaboration drives individual employee’s exploration, openness to new ideas and approaches, inspirational creativity (when employees pull from themselves) and focused engagement which, on a continuous basis, drives performance and “get-it-done” determination as well as commitment.

Outcome-based strategy, that reliable model for winning, can only be executed in a wholesome and cohesive work environment. Psychological manipulation makes a mess of the transformative power of ethical leadership. The leader must therefore commit to integrity, fairness, trust and positive work because it is only with integrity that we can inspire, influence and enable a trusted workforce with aligned team members.

The leader who will not fail or fall because of the “banana peel” must regularly discern and decipher hidden signals and decode body languages, facial expressions and verbal as well as non-verbal nuances of manipulative associates.

To safely move from being transactional to effective transformational style of leadership, the leader must build the all-encompassing “curiosity” into the core of the organisational systems and processes. He must use this curiosity model to his strategic advantage. He must emplace correlation between curiosity and leadership effectiveness. Colleagues must be encouraged to ask bold questions and challenge the status quo as well as assumptions of leader’s intentions.

The leader must definitely be committed to unquestionable integrity. There must be no dichotomy in the integration of his inner and outer lives. He must always checkmate hypocrisy, playing to the gallery, eyeservice and crafty grandstanding. He must build his legacy by regularly acting on his values. Remember, your actions shape organisation’s culture. You are the father of all and not only to those who suck-up to you.

Please note that without integrity, leadership is hollow. With integrity, the leader builds something enduring and substantial. Organisational trust is born out of consistent and value-based actions. Without trust and integrity, the foundation of leadership crumbles and psychological manipulators are allowed an unencumbered free reign.