The Power of the Herd. Linda Kohanov
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and Annie McKee have a term for it: the “Sacrifice Syndrome.” In Resonant Leadership, they characterize it as a counterproductive yet hard-to-resist trap that leaders fall into when they “sacrifice too much for too long — and reap too little.” Deeply religious, Gaudí also subscribed to the Catholic concept of “mortification of the flesh” at a time when early-twentieth-century painters and composers were romanticizing the idea of suffering for one’s art. And while we’re at it, let’s add the pressures of the visionary state itself. The muses don’t give a hoot about keeping your mortal body in optimal working order. When inspiration hits, it’s common to forget to eat or sleep for hours, even days, on end. And when inspiration fails, usually near some crucial deadline, a full-blown sleep disorder is on the horizon. With all these factors combined, Gaudí was lucky he lived long enough to meet a tragic end at seventy-four, let alone exhibit the endurance and clarity to continually raise funds for the cathedral while managing its construction and perfecting its revolutionary design.
And here’s perhaps the most unwieldy paradox of all: new perspectives demand sensitivity, creativity, and time spent alone to take form, while the subsequent manifestation of any significant, long-term vision requires motivating large numbers of people to pursue a common goal. A loner wandering around in that pulsating, open-nerve state may be able to mainline inspiration, but can he deal with the conflict, miscommunication, power plays, judgment, and politics of bringing his finest ideas to fruition? At the opposite end of the spectrum, intensely social people who develop a skin thick enough to let them navigate interpersonal and organizational dramas often lose connection to the very sensitivity that breeds inventive, nuanced thinking.
The solution involves a simple division of labor, you might say, but history has proven otherwise. Shrewd, charismatic managers and entrepreneurs have been known to prey upon brilliant yet socially awkward artists and inventors, whose ideas get diluted in the process. This kind of relationship, at its most benign, becomes codependent as the visionary loses touch with worldly concerns while his business partners neglect to further develop their own creative capacities. And both sides of this human equation are susceptible to the Sacrifice Syndrome as ambitious ideas face innumerable hurdles along the way, demanding visionaries and more practical leaders alike to break through the pressures, prejudices, and habits of the status quo on their way to creating lasting, meaningful change.
Finally, there’s the ultimate, arguably supernatural challenge: ensuring that the vision remains healthy after your poor worn-out bones are buried in the ground. Gaudí’s cathedral currently faces a threat more insidious than Catholic-hating communists: public transportation. One proposal involves construction of a subway nearby, which architects fear would damage the basilica over time. Another plan would turn the church into a train station. Apparently, it wasn’t enough to hit Gaudí with a tram. The assault of mass transit continues unabated nearly a century after his death.
These possible compromises to Sagrada Familia’s integrity illuminate one crucial aspect of managing individual and group needs over the long term. Not only do leaders have to convince colleagues, investors, and employees to buy into significant ideas, but at some point these innovators must also inspire a much larger public to support the vision as well. Whether in business, politics, art, or religion, initiating significant change is a lot like trying to overhaul an entire railway system while runaway trains continue to speed through it. No matter how defective the current model, people en masse resist the inconvenience and uncertainties of innovation with the hostility you’d expect them to reserve for immediate threats to their survival. Heated debates over public health care in the United States provide a glaring example. The average working man or woman isn’t trained or even encouraged to engage in cathedral thinking. And really, why should people be willing to sacrifice their own hard-earned comfort without an injection of the same 220-volt shot of inspiration that got the original innovator going? Acting as both lightning rod and transformer is part of the skill and thrill — and inevitable burnout — visionary leaders must learn to manage if they plan to achieve anything consequential.
Sacrifice and Renewal
As Mother Teresa once inscribed on the wall of her children’s home in Calcutta, “If you are successful, you win false friends and true enemies; Succeed anyway. . . . What you spend years building, someone could destroy overnight; Build anyway.” Pull this off, and you hit the PhD level of leadership development. Or maybe we’re talking sainthood here. Yet even those of us still working on the necessary prerequisites for great leadership — inspiration, innovation, communication, and emotional and social intelligence — need to understand how to navigate what Boyatzis and McKee call “the Cycle of Sacrifice and Renewal” if we plan to align our God-given talents and hard-won knowledge with long-term goals.
In the old pyramid-building days, slave labor ensured that generations would be conditioned through dominance and demoralization to act as drones for an agenda they were forced to support. This system, active in the United States less than two hundred years ago, “evolved” into the assaults on mind, body, and spirit that factory workers endured regardless of the lip service paid to their status as free men and women. Labor laws and unions protecting workers eventually emerged. Yet once you graduate to a significant leadership position, particularly one with entrepreneurial elements, the rules change. There are no government regulations to protect you. You must suddenly learn to advocate for yourself while also organizing, motivating, and inspiring others. To raise the difficulty level, some people will rave enthusiastically about whatever mission you represent while covertly undermining some aspect of the plan, often unconsciously, sometimes for reasons even they don’t understand. As the vision expands and takes on a life of its own, you must constantly modify your original expectations and strategies to align with unforeseeable challenges and opportunities, or you too will compromise the dream. And no one ensures that you receive fair pay for working no more than a reasonable number of hours, either. In the most daring, potentially paradigm-shifting fields, you’re likely to spend years compensating others before yourself. All the while, employees will assume you’re raking in the bucks, a throwback to the old robber-baron days, when the resentment was truly justified. Mass media reinforces this age-old mistrust, offering far more coverage of CEOs flying in private jets to receive government bailout funds than of innovators who sacrifice time and money while supporting a worthy vision. In the public mind, leaders are, quite simply, guilty until proven innocent. This is why, even though people are conditioned to at least feign respect for anyone in a supervisory role, authentic trust and compassion must be won, sometimes slowly over time, sometimes as dramatically as a warrior running a gauntlet of tribal abuse.
In 1999, Mike Judge, of Beavis and Butthead fame, satirized egotistical yet clueless bosses and insipid management practices in the film Office Space. A decade later, after running his own increasingly successful media enterprise, he couldn’t help but take the opposite position in his film Extract. Here Judge explored, with his usual brand of twisted social commentary, what the founder of a company deals with on a daily basis. In a radio interview with Fresh Air’s Terry Gross, he revealed the reasons behind this change in perspective:
I’d worked just dozens and dozens of jobs before I started my animation career. And by that point, I was pushing thirty. So I’d always been the employee. I had never had anybody work for me.. . .And then suddenly, when Beavis and Butthead started, I had anywhere from thirty to as many as ninety people working for me. And so, I just suddenly became sympathetic to my former bosses. You know, I was just, like, God, these people don’t appreciate anything. I’ve got to baby-sit them. They’re always fighting with each other and me.
One eye-opening experience involved hiring someone to color in his line drawings. In a good-natured attempt to share the little bit of wealth he was finally accessing, Judge offered what he felt was a generous, above-minimum-wage rate for a job that didn’t require any significant thought or creativity. At that time, mind you, he was working within a limited budget for an untried series of MTV shorts. Even so, Judge overheard, along with so many unprintable expletives, his employees complaining that he was getting rich at their expense. “I was, like, God, I can’t win,” he told Gross, obviously still surprised by the irony of his position.
This is the dark side of leadership. No one talks about it much, perhaps because most people would refuse to be