Success On Your Own Terms

Most everyone wants to be successful, and most everyone wants to be happy. It is possible to be successful and unhappy, however, if your success is achieved using methods that are incompatible with your core beliefs. In management, it is tempting to achieve success on someone else's terms -- your boss told you to get that project out the door as quickly as possible or you won't get a bonus this quarter. Solution? Round up your people, whip them into shape, keep them working all hours of the day and night and--voila--you've got a bonus and your success is assured. But at what cost?

I learned early in my management career that it is possible to achieve short term results by being a jerk. Since being a jerk comes very natural to me, this was an easy way to get things done. Be demanding. Manage with anger. Fire people if they make a single mistake. Pit people against each other by providing them with conflicting information. Malign your coworkers when they aren't around. Send emails with carbon copies to 42 senior executives so all of them know that someone on your team has failed and you sure aren't going to take the blame for the project not being done on time. Some people become very successful using these unfortunate techniques, along with a host of other manipulative backstabbing tools conceived by the Board of Regents at Jerk University.

In 1974, Stanley Milgram designed a fascinating experiment to determine how people responded to authority. In the experiment, a researcher would pretend to receive electric shocks. A volunteer would be told to administer shocks of increasing voltage, and the volunteers could see the effect the apparently real shocks had on researchers, who cried out in pain as the shock intensity increased. An authority figure would give quiet prompts to the volunteer such as "Please continue" and "The experiment requires that you continue." The results? An amazing 65% of subjects administered a lethal voltage to the researcher. Milgram's conclusion was that, when ordered to do things they would normally disagree with, people simply obeyed and continued the experiment.

Does this happen in the workplace? When an executive sets an unrealistic deadline and demands compliance, do subordinate managers--responding to the authority figure--forget their personal convictions and abuse their employees in order to satisfy the authority figure? Perhaps it happens more than we would like to admit. An effective people manager is not afraid to challenge his employees, but he understands reasonable limits and wants his people to enjoy time at home and an occasional uninterrupted vacation. It is one thing to pull an all-nighter, another thing entirely to ask people to work 60, 70 or 80 hour weeks for months at a time.

Author Anna Quindlen said, "If your success is not on your own terms, if it looks good to the world but does not feel good in your heart, it is not success at all." If you work your way to the top by stepping on others, you are little better than an organizational parasite who subsists by feeding on other people. Success doesn't always require fancy cars, important job titles and exotic llama farms.

Successful managers knows that you get power by giving it away. Successful managers achieve success on their own terms, and don't treat subordinates as personal slaves. Successful managers know that they will and won't do to achieve their goals. Perhaps most importantly, successful managers know when to walk away. When asked to compromise morals or hurt people, successful managers refuse or find an alternative. Successful managers recognize that it takes effort to build relationships of mutual respect with employees, and this will yield far better long-term results. This is the foundation of effective leadership. People will follow you because they want to follow you, not because they have to. If leadership is truly your goal, if you really want to bring about permanent change in an organization, then involve employees in decisions, empower them, hold them accountable and let them have life outside of work.

Success can lead to happiness, but only when it is achieved on your own terms. It may take more time and effort to find, but the journey will be as enjoyable as the destination.