10 Lies Managers Tell Themselves

I’ve had the priv­i­lege (and the good for­tune) of hav­ing good supe­ri­ors (we call them lead­ers of ours “supe­ri­ors” when I was a Jesuit) and man­agers over the past years (except for the bad egg or two here and there). So I never really had prob­lems with my bosses. But I know many other peo­ple who have. And I’ve encoun­tered some in my deal­ings with dif­fer­ent com­pa­nies all over the Philippines.

Here is some­thing that exec­u­tives, man­agers, or lead­ers in gen­eral should read. You may already be falling into the trap of com­pla­cency and you prob­a­bly have thought these out in your head or said out loud. Check your­self. Is this some­thing you would say (or think) yourself?

10 Lies Man­agers Tell Them­selves
By Steve Tobak

We all lie to our­selves. Why, I don’t know. Guess self-delusion is part of the human con­di­tion, what­ever that means. I’m sure a rel­a­tively com­pe­tent shrink can explain it, but who needs all that psy­chob­a­b­ble, right?

What got me think­ing about this was some­one on Michael Finney’s con­sumer watch­dog radio show explain­ing 5 lies peo­ple tell them­selves so they can buy stuff they can’t afford: I could have bought some­thing more expen­sive so I’m actu­ally sav­ing money, it’s an invest­ment, I deserve it because some­thing good hap­pened, I’m com­fort­ing myself because some­thing bad hap­pened, that sort of thing.

Now here’s the thing. Usu­ally when we lie to our­selves we’re only hurt­ing our­selves; worst case, our fam­i­lies. But with man­agers, it’s a whole dif­fer­ent ball­game. When man­agers lie to them­selves they can hurt a lot of peo­ple. The big­ger the title, the more peo­ple they can hurt. CEOs can hurt share­hold­ers, employ­ees, and cus­tomers by the thou­sands. Hell, they can take down a whole company.

I’ve seen self-delusional exec­u­tives destroy once-great com­pa­nies lots of times. Sad but true.

But wait, man­agers are only human, right? They’re allowed to make mis­takes. Sure. Mis­takes are one thing. But say­ing things to com­fort your­self and prop up your frag­ile ego so you don’t have to face the truth because it scares you or some­thing is an entirely dif­fer­ent thing.

1. I know what cus­tomers want. CEOs often think they know what cus­tomers want. Actu­ally they don’t. They just know what they want, and they’re usu­ally not even in the tar­get demo­graphic.
2. We have the best (fill in the blank). Tech­nol­ogy, mar­ket­ing, cus­tomer ser­vice, what­ever. Typ­i­cally self-delusional BS, boast­ful­ness, or ego trans­fer­ence (if there is such a thing).
3. It’ll fix itself. When they don’t want to do some­thing that’s a pain in the you-know-what.
4. Our cus­tomers love us. Usu­ally a way to keep peo­ple from ask­ing ques­tions they don’t want to hear so they don’t have to learn the truth that they don’t want to know.
5. My employ­ees love me. Same thing as with cus­tomers.
6. Out of sight, out of mind. AKA solv­ing a prob­lem by ignor­ing it, fir­ing it, or oth­er­wise mak­ing believe it doesn’t exist.
7. It’s prob­a­bly for their own good. Also “they’ll land on their feet.” Usu­ally when they demote or fire some­body, or dur­ing a lay­off.
8. The ends jus­tify the means. Com­fort­ing them­selves when they’ve done some­thing ter­ri­ble to oth­ers.
9. I know what the execs want. He prob­a­bly doesn’t; he’s just afraid to ask or doesn’t want you to go over his head.
10. It’s my com­pany. In a small busi­ness, this is often true, but for CEOs of cor­po­ra­tions, almost never. So why say it? I don’t know — is there such a thing as ego extension?

So, what’s the solu­tion to the prob­lem? You really need to ask? If you’re a man­ager, don’t do that! Grow a pair and face the truth. Board direc­tors, beware of self-delusional executives.

Any­way, those are my 10 lies, but there must be hun­dreds. I know you’ve got a few so, come on, spill it.