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Blink and an organization and family changes: downsizings; rightsizings; firings; premature returns of expatriates; divorce; career reshufflings and life transitions.
Jonathan Wise was transferred from Los Angeles to the Phoenix office of his corporation. No warning. Kaya Krystal quit her lucrative Seattle engineering position without notice. Max Crass is suing his Detroit auto company over his recent layoff. Jefferson Adams is being shipped out of his Scottsdale upper management position to Tokyo, on a five year expatriate assignment. He detests sushi and is an individualist down to his bone marrow.
And Winston Walker no longer is a CEO at one of Key Biscayne's five star resorts. Apparently he was part of a restructuring effort that moved him "laterally" across the organizational chart - and into a corporate sandbox in Moscow, Idaho.
Sound familiar? Welcome to the fleeting, unstable world of company life. Change is now. Abrupt transitions rule. Logic is something that you study in Philosophy 101. Dysfunctional behavior emerges and disturbing toxic leaders rule. Is this management of the absurd?
In Transforming Toxic Leaders, I open a few of these closed Fortune 500 doors and unveil the inner workings of infidelity, betrayal and mental and emotional turbulence in high places. Toxic behavior grows like a corporate tsunami and employees are unsure as to their footing, office space or survival. Here today but where tomorrow? Is fidelity a relic of the past? Please set me straight. Fidelity or infidelity? That is the question.
Suffice to say that human shelf life is quite short in the second decade of this millennium. Fleeting pit stops along the corporate highway resemble our personal lives. We juggle jobs, careers, wives and husbands.
Why screw around with "fidelity" and get bogged down by the "F" word? Total access to the corporate and lovers' marketplace is what I crave. I deeply desire and salivate at the thought of complete, utter, comprehensive shelf space to as many suitors and cash and skin partners as I can handle. I must learn how to entice and seduce the beautiful and the powerful. Attempting to better themselves, some ambitious CEO wannabes carefully learn their infidelity lessons from infamous corporate rakes and mercenaries. I've encountered more than a few up and coming leaders who worship the original Soldier of Fortune downsizing daddy of the 1980's, Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap. Always on the prowl, climbers must ascertain their marketplace value to Fortune 500s. Will my brief stints with Dell and HP pave the way for a big payoff with Apple? How can I learn to walk onstage at an IBM or Daimler interview and wow them with classified dirt from their ferocious competitor? Mercenary venues abound for the initiated - all the world's a stage and it takes great acting skills to seize corporate opportunities and give the executive audience what they crave on demand.
Why all the movement? Why all the drama? Why all the gushing and rushing to seize corporate moments wherever they appear? Why is this Soldier of Fortune player permanently wed to the mercenary game? Is he schooled in corporate seduction? One of the primary reasons is the promise of a payoff... the marketplace rush of free agency. With the recession enveloping us and corporate downsizings and instability on the rise why not look out for number one by increasing my repertoire into the stratosphere? Why not be positively proactive and dramatically resourceful as opposed to being completely at the mercy of my current company's next round of layoffs and rightsizings? Afterall, I'm not just a piece of meat or a commodity that you can throw off the company shelf and discard at will. I have worth and pride! Right? Well, if you successfully jump ship and shock everyone by signing on with a competitor there is always the prospect of a considerable pay increase and title upgrade. It's the U.S./American way to move up the corporate ladder as a free agent - whether you are in a Phoenix-based Fortune 500 aerospace company or an NBA basketball player.
Have you players out there noticed that your worth often times peaks when you are at a crossroads and for sale to the highest bidder? Somehow married men and extremely employed CEOs can look awfully good to some hungry suitors who are on the open market in search of sexual or corporate adulterers. Your value soars and you may even feel appreciated for a change in the eyes of a fresh lover or a new executive board. Join the growing ranks of the Fortune 500 Soldier of Fortune phenomenon. Love, brains and knowhow are in fact viewed by crass colleagues as commodities. Our talents, creativity, serious work ethic, people skills, thick lips, six packs and designer clothes are all part of that total package we offer. The fiscal runts run the numbers and figure out what our guys, thighs, eyes, highs and IQs are worth to companies A, B and C. Whether we want to hang our hats or perpetually look elsewhere we need to understand value.
Here at home in Miami Beach, Florida, my corporate crew takes me for granted and doesn't care to acknowledge what I'm worth until I declare myself a free agent. If I get a chance to do face to face with corporate players in Boston, Dallas or San Francisco, I can flash my pearly whites and turn temporarily brilliant during a second or third round of interviews. With an on-cue stellar performance before an executive hiring committee - I'll have a shot at a leading actor role. I can potentially go up $40,000 to $50,000 and beyond and also do some serious negotiations for a position upgrade such as Senior Manager, Provost or CEO.
Can we benchmark the aspiring corporate Soldier of Fortune who shakes, rattles and rolls in pursuit of the highest bidder? Shine a spotlight on corporate sports, the NBA, and specifically upon mega all stars Lebron James and Amare Stoudemire. Are they regular guys searching for the right corporate fit? Are they professional Soldiers of Fortune? Is it all about moving toward the most obscene pay check in the history of professional sports? Perhaps. But, be forewarned that the astute corporate Soldier of Fortune is quick to articulate that the corporation has no loyalty to me - so why should I be loyal to them? Indiscretions beget indiscretions.
What to do? Do I leave the Cleveland Cavaliers and the Phoenix Suns despite their professed allegiance to me? Shall I flex my mercenary muscles and repay not so random acts of corporate fidelity with - infidelity? Am I a mercenary shopping for a championship who is determined to join Dwayne Wade and the Kardashians in South Beach? How about LeBron's fans in Cleveland? Well, if South Beach, Dwayne and a championship means leaving my long term home city and fans - so be it! And what about all those fans in Phoenix, Scottsdale, Tempe and around the world who worshiped Amare? Unfortunately kids, Amare is in the Big Apple where he got the big, bigger, biggest paycheck and the longest contractual guarantee despite the threat of his lingering injuries.
The most extreme CEOs and athletes are addicted to their own indiscretions, infidelities and a twenty-four seven, lifelong Soldier of Fortune existence. A few of these troubled leaders even attempt to decipher or justify their actions. As revealed in Transforming Toxic Leaders and Destructive Leaders and Dysfunctional Organizations, I am most familiar with those toxic characters that disassociate themselves from their companies when calling for help and insist upon remaining anonymous and undetected as part of the coaching agreement. Toxic leaders, presidents, airline pilots and CFOs discretely check in with therapists, consultants and coaches. Once experts are face-to-face with the troubled ones -what typically ensues is a difficult and unchartered dialogue and treatment. What's it all about? How do business and psychological experts handle the professional confessionals of prime time power brokers who confess only in the shadows - admitting to difficult-to-control cravings for sex, money, power or fame? Faced with rampant, blatant indiscretions on the part of their clients some therapists and executive coaches stand firm and carve out ethical boundaries while others white out such allegedly judgmental terms as "infidelity" and manufacture suspect humanistic metaphors and theories in order to justify their clients' greed and selfishness. In fact, within a toxic corporate world infidelity occupies a priestly position. Everything and everyone is for sale to the highest bidder. Can therapists and executive coaches be co-opted into this toxicity? Can they be bought for a price and rendered bit players and enablers in this parallel Soldier of Fortune reality? Can they be expected to withhold their diagnoses and assessments from the corporate entity and workplace population? Enter into a flawed and decadent corporate universe. At present, I will not delve into this any further. Use your imagination.
What do we do about this Soldier of Fortune phenomenon? How to we respond to Soldier of Fortune seduction? Is there an antidote to the ranks of smooth corporate mercenaries who appear to be alive and well and growing? Or are we just forever stuck with these snakes in suits who work the system? What can we do about these Fortune 500 street walkers?
There is an alternative. There is something to be said for athletes, leaders and companies staying the course, exercising patience and loyalty. Yankee captain, Derek Jeter, has been a loyalist to the Steinbrenner family and the New York Yankees down to the bone marrow. Mickey Mantle was a Yankee to the death and Ted Williams could not think outside of the Boston Red Sox company store. How did this come to be? Perhaps the secular religion of infidelity can be challenged in the workplace? Or in other words, is it possible to demote the Soldier of Fortune lifestyle of the ultimate Fortune 500 poster boy, Al "Chainsaw" Dunlap? How could Al have seduced Sunbeam into paying him seven figures for a brief cameo as a downsizer if company leadership was on the same page with their corporate neighbors? Why did it take the business gurus and Sunbeam so long to see through his seamy seduction and conclusively identify Dunlap as a professional Soldier of Fortune without a moral compass? Did deadly downsizers court corporate clients with their past victories or seduce them with Soldier of Fortune rhetoric? Talk about medicine shows!
Walking the walk of allegiance and "not being for sale at any price" is at the heart of a struggling and yet-to-be-articulated fidelity mantra. But the pendulum has swung so far in the other direction that fidelity may soon be relegated to the realm of the ultra religious and those so called conservative losers who are accused of not having the guts to cultivate boy toys, mistresses or offer their brilliance to the fattest cats who add the most zeros when writing a "for services rendered" check. In the real world, Soldier of Fortune seduction is fairly common in the upper echelons. Have a heart to heart with top executives who have been duped.
But this phenomenon is not just about the skewed allegiances of individual employees and leaders or the failures of interviewing teams to expose clandestine motives. We are in fact professionals working within decadent, toxic systems. Unfortunately, the big picture reveals that too many Fortune 500 companies carry on as if their professionals were expendable widgets - to be deleted into the IT trash with a clique of a toxic leader's mouse. But this deep disrespect only further fuels the fire in the bellies of the growing ranks of mercenaries. It pours gasoline on the flames of extreme individualism and infidelity. Companies and individuals both are operating as soldiers of fortune. Surely World Com and Enron spoke volumes on this subject. And if BP texts an offer to you on your Blackberry -will you think twice before you serve notice and move onto a bigger paycheck?
Transforming the Soldier of Fortune seducer is no easy task and constitutes a central objective in my recent book, Transforming Toxic Leaders. Consulting with corporations and expounding upon the virtues of very careful and mindful recruitment and selection is a must. It all begins with the entry portals and who you grant entrance into your organization. To turn the tides of infidelity Fortune 500s can also consider investing more strategically in ongoing training and development of a corporate family - an interconnected, intricately woven company family with staying power. Advocating fidelity begins at the top of the hierarchy. Commitment to intelligent, strategic long term hires, team building and growing a cohesive corporate culture points companies in the direction of loftier, Everest goals. CEOs and corporations pledged to dignity, grace and a healthy, supportive culture are not in the business of fast food diplomacy, shotgun hires, under-the-table-negotiations or hit ‘n run downsizings and layoffs.
A healthy workplace requires that corporate infidelity be minimized, trivialized and certainly not rewarded. Toxic Soldier of Fortune agendas and scenarios are to be put on notice and no longer admired or even tolerated. Seduction and sharp tongued magicians are not to be believed.
Making the impossible possible in the midst of growing ranks of mercenaries requires a number of patient, sober U-turns out of infidelity and Soldier of Fortune seduction. What are the alternatives? How do we approach sober corporate transformation? We may want to face the music in part by making an astute selection of an executive coach or leadership consultant. But where do we look for a prototype? In Transforming Toxic Leaders and my most recent book Destructive Leaders and Dysfunctional Organizations: A Therapeutic Perspective, I address this delicate and difficult process of sorting through the offerings of external experts. Mixed in with some of the great consultants and executive coaches you will also find those who are themselves, engaged in the mercenary mission of Soldier of Fortune seduction. Patience! Referrals!
On the very positive side, do consider some of the breakthroughs displayed in Southwest Airlines and Trader Joes. Inspired, strategic leadership rewards fidelity, team work, cross training and camaraderie and demotes the Soldier of Fortune phenomenon. Greed is an outsider, seduction is viewed as a private bedroom affair, and clandestine agendas are for back alleys. It is time for a new corporate deity. It's a return to the Buddha of Fidelity.
