The Pernicious Indifference of Leadership

Nobel Peace Prize laureate Eli Wiesel said that “The opposite of love is not hate, it’s indifference.”

How right he is! Wiesel was referencing racism, yet his comment applies to leadership as well. When a leader hates you, it shows in their actions and body language. I had a boss once who hated me. The look in her eyes when she saw me unexpectedly one day literally stopped my companion in her tracks, and I heard the croaked “oh!” and intake of breath from a pace behind me.

My boss’s hatred of me meant she saw me. I was important to her in some way, albeit not in a pleasant way. Indifference is far worse than that.

An indifferent leader doesn’t even see people as employees, team members, colleagues, peers. To them, you are little more than an abstract entity and as long as you don’t disturb the waters around the leader, you aren’t important.

The indifferent leader doesn’t see you as a person, doesn’t care about your success, doesn’t see any need to support you. The indifferent leader doesn’t value you, your abilities, or your strengths. You are merely part of a mass of faceless people with plenty more where you came from. You are of no consequence. If you do disturb the water, the indifferent leader might take some action to beat you back into mediocrity, to once again be someone of no consequence to the leader.

Mediocrity—that’s the outcome of indifferent leadership. You soon learn not to disturb the water, to do just as much as you need to do to get by. And your fellow employees do the same. It becomes part of the workplace culture—a culture of mediocracy.

Recently, a news story reported about an employee in Italy who didn’t show up for work for 15 years. Fifteen! Yet they still paid him all that time, not far off half a million dollars.

Now THAT is emphatically indifferent leadership. Where were they, his leaders, his bosses? Clearly, nobody ever checked his performance, set performance goals with him, had a performance discussion. Nobody noticed his work wasn’t getting done.

Yes, the employee is likely guilty of fraud, but what about the leaders? They seem, to me, to be guilty of creating that culture of utter mediocrity. In my decades of work in the public sector, where this man worked, I’ve seen such a culture so many times. Leaders avoid making decisions, reward people who don’t perform by not taking any action, provide performance appraisals that have miniscule meaning, and more. Yet never to the extent of this case. And, apparently, there’s more than one such case in Italy.

Being an ineffective leader and fostering mediocrity by accident is one thing. Not even noticing for 15 years that an employee hasn’t shown up once at work is far more than ineffective—it’s utter indifference. Any leaders and bosses involved clearly don’t care about employees or their peers or the organization. And this has to run through several levels of leadership, not just this one employee’s boss.

Mediocrity in an organization is truly pernicious. It infuses the workplace culture. When people know the only reward for standing out is to be flattened, they give up performing beyond the minimum required. When people learn not to come up with innovative ideas, change and growth become stifled. There’s only one reason for a culture of mediocrity; leaders who don’t lead. Maybe they manage the work, to some extent at least.

Outstanding leaders actually lead. They work to bring out the best in people, to create the conditions that enable people to perform and deliver results. The care about their team members, recognize and value each person’s unique suite of strengths, work hard to help people activate and optimize their strengths, give feedback in a way that empowers people and builds self-confidence and self-esteem, and they focus intensely on doing the best they can to help others succeed. Outstanding leaders love their followers.

What will you do to stamp out indifferent leadership in your organization?