领导人太强悍的危险

雷曼兄弟(Lehman Brothers)破产一年后，前首席执行官迪克．富尔德(Dick Fuld)又重新在电视上露面。他的一些最激烈言辞又一次引起讨论。他在一则录像片段中宣称：“当我发现一个卖空者，我就挖出他的心脏，在他还活着的时候，当着他的面吃下去。”

在雷曼垮台后，批评富尔德发火不难。。但鉴于富尔德曾在雷曼取得的显著成就，一个更有趣的问题是：人们原本是否有可能发现其领导风格所潜藏的危险——并采取相应措施避免灾难？我们需要坚强、有力而自信的领导人。但如何才能防止他们这种性格发展到失控？

企业心理咨询公司PCL最近发表了一份名为《十年黑暗》(A decade of the dark side)的报告。该报告对过去10年高级经理人所做的1.8万份心理测试进行了研究。测试中使用的霍根发展调查方法(Hogan Development Survey，HDS)与其它测试方法的不同之处在于，它分析了领导人失败的原因，而不只是针对个人优缺点进行客观的描述。

One year on from the fall of Lehman Brothers, the face of Dick Fuld, former chief executive, has been back on our television screens. Some of his greatest hits have received another airing. “When I find a short seller, I want to tear his heart out and eat it before his eyes while he's still alive,” he declares in one clip.

It is easy to criticise an outburst like that after what happened at his bank. But it is more interesting to ask whether, given Mr Fuld's remarkable achievements at Lehman, it might have been possible to spot the danger inherent in his leadership style – and to do something about it to avert disaster. We need tough, strong, confident leaders. But how can we prevent them spiralling out of control?

Last week, PCL, the business psychology consultancy, published a report, “A decade of the dark side”, which contained a study of 18,000 psychometric tests completed by senior managers during the past 10 years. The test that was used, the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), differs from other tests in that it analyses why leaders fail, rather than just providing a neutral account of individuals' strengths and weaknesses.

The key insight of the HDS approach is that leaders are rarely either confident or arrogant, enthusiastic or volatile, diligent or perfectionist. Most people tend to have a personality located somewhere along a spectrum of behaviour, with, for example, blameless and well-founded confidence at one end and destructive, over-riding arrogance at the other. The trick is to find out where people stand on that spectrum.

Presenting his findings in London, Geoff Trickey, managing director of PCL, explained that strong and distinctive personality characteristics can be positive or negative. At best, they help drive success. At worst, they actually derail leaders, and destroy the loyalty and commitment of colleagues.

Under stress, leaders may rely on the strengths that have served them well in the past. But you can have too much of a good thing. A useful strength can become a damagingly extreme form of behaviour. So a careful leader becomes too cautious, an imaginative leader turns eccentric and a charming leader becomes manipulative.

Success can be a bad teacher, too. “It is intoxicating,” Mr Trickey says. “It erodes self-awareness and self-restraint, and fosters self-indulgence.” To avoid being led into the “dark side” by our strengths, we need to retain some of that self-awareness and restraint.