•When success enlarges a man’s office but fails to enlarge his character
By Ken Ihedioha
History is full of powerful men whose public stature was diminished by private frailties. Richard Nixon, Warren G. Harding and Dominique Strauss-Kahn tell different stories with one lesson: possessing power does not confer the temperament to exercise it. The distance between occupying an exalted position and deserving it can be surprisingly wide.
Humility is among the hallmarks of great leadership. Lao Tzu is often credited with the observation that the person who puts himself last becomes a leader among men. The secure leader has no need to announce his importance, diminish those around him or demand constant affirmation. But humility is not insecurity, any more than confidence is arrogance. A leader can be modest without being timid, assertive without being overbearing, conscious of his authority without being intoxicated by it.
Over the years I have reached an inescapable conclusion: the intrigue and skulduggery of the corporate world can rival those of politics. The scramble for the few seats at the top exposes the vanity and insecurity of people whose camaraderie had seemed genuine. Proximity to power, it turns out, can be a more compelling currency than years of friendship.
Consider Kola, as we shall call him.
He came from an exceptionally modest background, and poverty, rather than embittering him, seemed to instil a remarkable work ethic and integrity. He began as a schoolteacher until a fortuitous interview, and the composure he showed there, won him a place in a multinational. Through discipline and the support of colleagues who shared his journey, he rose to Managing Director, a post long the preserve of expatriates.
It should have inspired magnanimity. Instead, success began to alter his relationship with those who had made it possible. Eager to impress his new foreign superiors, he turned dismissive of his closest former allies. He questioned their motives, undermined their contributions and cultivated admirers whose chief qualification was proximity to the new centre of power. His old colleagues had become reminders of a history he wanted erased.
The irony is that in proving his worth to his benefactors, he surrendered the independent judgement that had carried him upward. He replaced trusted colleagues with flatterers and mistook sycophancy for loyalty. In time his foreign allies moved on, the relationships that had sustained his ascent had unravelled, and a remarkable career ended in an undignified fall. He had acquired the office but lost the wisdom to occupy it.
Then there was Rajiv, as we shall also call him, an expatriate who arrived as Commercial Director of a fast-growing consumer goods company posting double-digit growth. The attractions were considerable: a chauffeur-driven SUV, an apartment on Banana Island, domestic staff, premium schooling for his children.
But the trappings of privilege are no substitute for competence. Rajiv struggled to master the market. Rather than draw on his local team’s experience, he sustained the image of the all-knowing expert. Sales forecasts grew ambitious and detached from performance. Figures were presented to suggest momentum the business could not sustain. The language of can-do leadership replaced the harder work of understanding the consumer, the distributor and the competition.
The company lost significant revenue, Rajiv was relieved of his duties, and restructuring brought further job losses. Those who paid for executive misjudgement were not necessarily those who made it. His tragedy was not that he was foreign. It was that he could not recognise the value of the local knowledge around him and mistook the privileges of position for proof of superiority.
These stories differ in detail but share a pathology. Call it the ‘little man syndrome.’
It is not a clinical diagnosis, but a recognisable disposition: the insecurity of a person whose external achievements have outpaced his inner development. It is the compulsion to prove one’s importance by making others feel small, and the fear that one’s authority might be questioned, or one’s position threatened by people perfectly capable of contributing to one’s success.
Nigeria offers no shortage of illustrations. We see it in the official who, having taken high office, cannot receive a former colleague without elaborate protocol, and who once rode the same bus as his associates but now requires a convoy and a choreographed reception. We see it in the politician who becomes inaccessible to the constituents whose votes put him there. We see it in the chief executive who demands that every presentation begin with acknowledgement of his presence or cannot bear a subordinate being praised for an achievement that does not bear his signature.
A new appointment can bring a peculiar transformation: a different vocabulary, a different gait, sometimes a different accent. Former friends become ‘those people.’ The office door becomes a fortress, the secretary an unofficial border-control officer, and even the parking space must announce the new order. Then there is the ‘oga syndrome,’ the belief that leadership is best shown through distance and the manufacture of fear. Some executives cannot hold a conversation without reminding everyone who signs the cheques. Some appointees treat disagreement as disloyalty and honest counsel as insubordination, surround themselves with people who say “Yes, sir” to everything, then wonder why nobody warned them when their decisions went wrong.
The tragedy is that those most eager to show they have arrived are often least secure in their arrival.
Not every demand for protocol signals insecurity. Institutions need order, and leadership sometimes demands hard decisions. The problem begins when the symbols of authority matter more than the substance, and respect is demanded rather than earned.
The syndrome destroys because it breeds fear. Talented people withdraw. Honest feedback disappears. Meetings become performances in which everyone guesses the boss’s preferred answer instead of interrogating the problem. Bad news travels slowly, good ideas die quietly, and mediocrity finds a comfortable home.
The leader, meanwhile, inhabits an artificial world where every decision is applauded and every mistake explained away. He believes he has built a loyal team when he has merely recruited people whose survival depends on agreeing with him. This is how organisations lose institutional memory and administrations lose touch with the governed. Capable professionals are discarded not for lacking competence but because their competence threatens someone else’s fragile ego.
Many who behave this way seem to have forgotten the circumstances of their own ascent: the teachers who encouraged them, the mentors who opened doors, the colleagues who covered their weaknesses, the family who sacrificed while they chased their ambitions. Nobody rises entirely alone.
The truly accomplished have no need to disown their beginnings. They can sit comfortably with people who knew them before the title, the convoy or the corner office. Great leaders know that authority is not diminished by listening, that a competent subordinate is an asset and not a rival, and that the best people to keep close are not those who offer the loudest praise but those with the courage to say what needs saying. The late Chief M.K.O. Abiola is often associated with the maxim that the man who knows it all knows nothing. The moment a leader decides he has nothing left to learn is the moment his decline may begin.
Leadership is not a reward for having arrived. It is a continuing responsibility to make the journey worthwhile for others. The measure of a leader is not how many people rise when he enters a room or how long his motorcade is. It is how many lives and careers are enlarged by his presence.
There is a world of difference between being elevated and being enlarged. One is a change of position; the other is a growth of character.
A small mind can occupy a very large office, but no office, however exalted, can make a small mind great.
