If I Were Your Enemy

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January 2016

If I Were Your Enemy

If I were your enemy, I would see to it that 2016 came in as a loss for you. If I were your enemy, I think I would arrange it so you would do it to yourself, perhaps unwittingly. The best case scenario might be you living and leading in deceit, taking yourself down along with others.

In opposition to you, feedback of all kinds would need to be kept from you so you could not course-correct and adjust. The more blindness the better. It would be better if you were closed off from diverse points of view and resources like financial experts, industry experts, executive coaches, consultants and others with advisory offerings. Only your eyes and ears with which to plan strategically and make judgments.

If I were truly your adversary in total opposition to your progress and success, I would try to get you to lose your sense of equilibrium. I would try to get you to struggle with the relationships around you and decrease your ability and your willingness to communicate with others. Your empathy towards others would need to be diminished if not stripped away from you, making you increasingly self-focused and calloused.

Or conversely, you would need to be overly sensitive, perhaps hyper self-aware to the point that you would struggle to offer bold leadership to those around you for fear of offending someone or causing them too much challenge. If you spent an inordinate amount of time replaying prior interpersonal interactions, speculating about potential scenarios you would surely be utilizing much of your creative energy with little left over to lead much-needed creativity in your organization

You would need to possess an above average appetite for certainty and role clarity. Everything would need to be spelled-out and reigned-in. You would take virtually no risks. Fear of failure would rule the day as failure would be seen as the key indicator of your identity, not merely an “incomplete result”.

Turnover around you would need to be high so that a piece of you and your efforts would be walking out the door with every voluntary exit, keeping you and your people feeling depleted. You and your Team would be so busy reacting, that succession management would, sadly, seem as a far off luxury to be afforded at some latter time.

If I were your enemy, I would want you to be duped into thinking that the only thing that matters is technical competence. Technical competence, a very good thing, would need to be seen as the ultimate thing. And your emotional intelligence would need to be low or in decline…

… but there is an ancient Aramaic word for the above mentioned, and that word is “baloney!” The truth is that much opportunity lies ahead in 2016, a year demanding leadership as never before. May this year be your most victorious year ever.

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