Leadership is Overrated

This week on my Facebook page, that shares the same name as this blog,  I asked a simple question.  If you had an academically capable eighteen year old daughter, would you advise her to go to college or have a baby?  I thought this question had a simple answer, and it does, college.  That is, if you have a brain.  What amazed me were the incorrect answers.  Incorrect is a polite term for stupid, dumb ass, and moronic.

Someone wrote, "Kids are gonna do what kids do.  It doesn't matter what you tell them.  So why bother?"  Some other genius wrote that we have no right to tell kids how to live.  A number of Bill Gates wannabe's wrote that college is useless and too expensive.  Do you think Bill Gates's kids are going to college?  

The people, who made this last statement, fall in two categories: people who never went to college, and college dropouts.  Their opinions are about as useful as mine would be in the area of childbirth pain. If you haven't experienced it, you don't have a clue or any basis for an opinion.

The answers to this question brought me to two important realizations.  First, kids are screwed up for a reason.  What's amazing is that so many turn out well.  Second, most small businesses fail for the very same reason, lack of leadership.

Leadership has three parts which combine to create the credibility that makes leadership effective.  First, leadership is based on deeds, how you live your life.  Telling your kids, "Don't take drugs." won't work if you're just getting out of ninety days of drug rehab.   This is the walking the walk part.

Second. leadership is about results.  Losers can't lead, at least not to any desirable destination.  If your ex-wife is chasing you for back child support and you haven't held a steady job in years, you aren't in a position to lead anywhere except bankruptcy.  Why would anyone take your advice?

Successful leadership requires a base of previous positive results.  If you're looking for career advice in software programming, would you listen to Bill Gates or your next door neighbor schmo, who tells you he'll be rich in five years as he asks to borrow fifty bucks until God knows when?

The third leg of leadership is advice.  The privilege to advise others stands on the base of credibility established by deeds and results.  If you have no credibility, you'll receive no acceptance as an advisor.  If you're a loser, your kids are idiots if they take your advice.  Ditto for your employees.

Finally, leadership doesn't begin when a problem arises.  If your leadership began with your daughter at age eighteen, don't be surprised when she gets pregnant by the guy picking up your garbage twice a week.  Apparently he was delivering as well. 

Positive leadership should have started with her birth.  By her eighteenth birthday, you'd have credibility by your deeds, accomplishments, and prior good advice. In fact, you've been leading all of her life, just maybe to a bad destination if you haven't been leading by setting a good example.  Leadership isn't alway intentional, only good leadership is.

Leading children is easy compared to leading employees.  Unless, you're a real miscreant, deviant asshole, your children love you, even if they show it by driving into your garage door with your brand new car.  

Employees are much harder to lead.  You're dealing with someone else's barely human offspring, who have been taught that the least amount of work is the proper amount.  I don't mean all employees are like this.  They aren't.  But, over the life of your business, you will manage many of these demonic vampires.  They'll suck the blood out of your soul and the money from your accounts if you let them.

Vampires feed on poor leadership.  If you can't get your ass out of bed for work until 10 A.M., don't be surprised that your staff shows up promptly at 9:59 A.M.  You lead by deeds and accomplishments to establish the credibility for leadership, or the vampires feast.  They'll suck the life out of your good employees as well.  You don't need wood to stake these creatures.  You just set a good example and hold your staff to this standard.  Your fanged employees will leave for another blood bank.

In our CPA firm, guess who has the highest billings and who works the longest hours?  Go ahead, we're vampire proof here.  The partners bill the most and work the hardest, year after year.  All the numbers are available for our staff to see.  We don't lead with, "You should.."  We lead with, "We do..."

 We have established our credibility with deeds. When we lead, if someone doesn't follow, we encourage him to move his ass on down the road to his next victim.

The answers to my Facebook question about pregnancy or college shed light on why small businesses fail.  Many business owners can't correctly evaluate the simplest of situations.  I was tempted to show definitive mathematical proof that the college student earns more over a lifetime than the pregnant daughter even if the pregnant one goes back to college later.  But, what's the purpose?  People, who can't answer this simple question correctly, won't understand the math anyway.

How can you determine the best marketing method for your business if you can't correctly advise an eighteen year old girl not to get pregnant?  Either intellectual laziness or stupidity has to be the cause. Neither leads to successful business ownership.

I need to take some Prozac.  I'm beyond amazed that anyone would advise a teenage girl to become pregnant.  This is why people join cults and fall prey to financial scams.

I would like to thank Jeff George, quarterback of the Redskins for about thirty seconds, for the quote, "Leadership is overrated."  George had a gun for an arm and a pea shooter for brain.  He was gone shortly after he shared his bit of wisdom.

Thanks for reading!  For real tax and accounting advice, please visit the main S&K web site at www.skcpas.com, unless you think your eighteen year old should get pregnant.  Also, please like the "How to Screw Up Your Small Business" Facebook page.  You too can be amazed at the responses to my posts.

Until next time, let's do it to them before they do it to us.