Your loyalty is misguided

Loyalty is a highly prized asset by many leaders. It’s earned by staff who have gone above and beyond, who have stayed when others have gone, and who have demonstrated that they care about the leader and the leader's cause as much as the leader does.

Loyalty is defined as ‘a strong feeling of allegiance’, and that right there starts to illuminate the problem.

What’s the issue?

1. Trust underpins everything, so surely loyalty – which sounds a lot like trust – must always be a good thing, right? Er, no.
   
   A strong feeling of allegiance runs the risk of people acting out of loyalty to an individual or a cause rather than in the best interests of the organisation. When the CEO defends a poor-performing COO out of loyalty born of the years they’ve worked together, that is a betrayal of the trust the board has placed in the CEO.
2. Loyalty creates cliques and silos. That can exclude high performers from fairly gaining access to the opportunities, resources and recognition they need to become higher performers. Unless you’re running a grain storage business, silos are generally bad (stay tuned for a mail on this soon).
3. Rewarding loyalty makes people prioritise things that build loyalty, not performance, such as supporting sub-optimal pet projects, not challenging weak proposals, and defending those elements of the status quo that help the emperor’s new suit shine.
4. Loyalty can make people do things they’re not comfortable doing, because the potentially detrimental effect on the relationship of not doing it outweighs the discomfort of doing it. That discomfort could result from anything from an infringement of personal values to working unhealthy hours.
5. Brands want your loyalty so that you will buy from them even when they're not the best buy. Mercedes survived a period of British Leyland standards of build quality in the early 2000s because of blind loyalty to the badge.

Activities to consider

1. Ask yourself why any leader would need to rely on loyalty to maintain the engagement of their followers rather than running a meritocracy. Is it just misguided? Is the need to rely on loyalty compensating for something else that’s missing? Is it a proactive control mechanism?
2. Loyalty can be toxic, whereas trust never can be. As soon as trust becomes toxic, it isn’t trust any more.
3. As a rule of thumb, your only loyalty should be to performance. This is really going to upset those who work so hard to get promoted and protected by prioritising what's needed to ride their boss's coat-tails.
   
   Sure, in the real world, you’re going to have a tiny bit a wiggle room to occasionally look after people who’ve looked after you even when those actions may not be purely in the company’s best interest, but this has to be the exception, not the rule.
   
   Note: Loyalty to friends and lovers is an intrinsic part of friendship and love – it's blind faith. That’s ok at home, but not at work. That difference is one reason that having friends and lovers at work can be a challenge.
4. Instead of loyalty, consider looking to build trust. That happens on a level playing field of equal opportunities, where performance is preferred to personalities. If when you started reading this you that thought loyalty was synonymous with trust, it can be. But it can also destroy trust for those who are outside the tent of loyal subjects.

Try this

1. Assess your workplace for signs of loyalty. That shows up for example, as leaders having an inner circle, making questionable decisions, and a lack of meritocracy.
2. Then qualitatively assess the extent to which it's affecting productivity. And then decide how to tackle it, by challenging leaders on their behaviour. For example: ‘why have you chosen x for this project?’ ‘Why does y feel like you’re ignoring their ideas?’ ‘Why haven’t you performance-managed z?’

At HPC, we developed Adaptability Based Leadership with the express purpose of raising productivity through more engaged, better led staff. If that approach resonates, contact me and let’s get you started on the next phase of your journey towards mastering leadership.