Exploring Great Leadership: A Practical Look from the Inside

Contents

Preface

Acknowledgments

Introduction

Great Leadership Defined

Our Mental Being

Relationships

Personal and Corporate Ethics

Corporate Culture

Employee Empowerment, Teamwork, and Education

Hiring and Pay Philosophy

Decision Making and Strategic Planning

Quality

Marketing, Public Relations, and Image Building

Accountability

The CEO

The Personal Challenge

Appendix A

Appendix B

Appendix C

Appendix D

Appendix E

References

Preface

This book is a combination autobiography, nonfiction book, and textbook. Since I have never authored a book before, I had no concept of what I was getting into when I started. My head was just full of stuff that I simply wanted to put into writing and publish. The amount of time, due diligence, and complexity involved was much greater than I had ever imagined. A friend of mine sent me a quote attributed to Ernest Hemingway that says, Write drunk; edit sober (quoted in Editor & Publisher Daily, 2011). I’m no Ernest Hemingway, but writing this book gave me an appreciation of what he meant. I quickly learned that I had to get very serious about the enormous commitment necessary to accomplish my literary goal or forget my goal and spend more time on the golf course, listening to music, and playing my trumpet.

I didn’t want to look back and regret that I hadn’t followed my heart, so I became totally committed; it became a labor of love. It was great fun to write about my career experiences, tell some of my more interesting stories, and share what I have learned and taught about leadership and about life.

This is not a mainstream book on leadership. There are already too many of those out there. You can find leadership books that give you the ten steps for success, the five things to never forget, and all kinds of leadership formulas. Leadership is not that programmable and simple. Many, if not most, of those authors do not have personal experience as a leader in the real world to support their teachings. This book is different. It is written by someone who had a successful career in leadership. I share with you what great leadership is, who can and cannot be a great leader, and the practical attributes it takes to achieve great leadership. I do it through theory, textbook application, my personal experience, and wisdom from others. This truly is a practical look at great leadership from inside the organization.

I didn’t write this book just to make money or to attempt fame. I wrote it for myself, my family, and my friends. I also wrote it for those who are great leaders, who want to be great leaders, or who want to know about great leadership. In addition to discussing the specific topic of great leadership, I have tried to provide many insightful thoughts regarding life in general. The two are inseparable. We only have one life to live. We don’t get a second chance, and no one can live it for us. This book encourages you to be all you can be and not wind up in life saying, I wish I would have … This book will not appeal to everyone. It is written for people who are comfortable with themselves, who thrive on relationships, and who are motivated and willing to pay the price to be successful in their professional and personal lives. If you are reading this with interest, I assume that describes you.

Thank you for reading my book. I sincerely hope that you find it worth your effort and that it has a positive impact on your life.

Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to my wife and soul mate, who encouraged me to write this book. After realizing what I was getting into, I questioned whether I wanted to devote the time necessary for such an endeavor. She encouraged me to do it, if for no other reason than for the children and grandchildren. Therefore, I dedicate this book to Katheryn and her husband, John, and my grandson Luke; Carolyn and her husband, Courtney, and my grandchildren Braden and Brianna; my son, Scott, and his wife, Lindsey; and any future grandchildren. I also dedicate this book to my wife, Robyn, who not only encouraged me to write this book but also was my best critic and adviser, my computer technical expert, my graphic designer, and my technical liaison between the publisher and me. Simply put, you would not be reading this if it were not for her.

I want to acknowledge those members of my teams over the years who were instrumental in my success and contributed mightily to the content and stories contained in this book. They are Craig Ames, Jennifer Lesoing-Lucs, Larry Elliott, Ken Foster, David Reese, Brad Sher, George Snider, Shirley Travis, Ron Wachter, Judy Miller, Debbie Fisher, Lou Glaser, Bill Sisson, and Susan Stout Tamme. I want to honor in memoriam two great team members, Arlan Stromberg and Gary Moore, who both left this earth way too soon. Additional acknowledgment goes to all the other members of my management teams and employees over the years who made my success and this book possible. I also want to honor in memoriam my last boss before graduate school, Elliott Jones, who was instrumental in my acceptance to graduate school and my obtaining the ticket for my wonderful career, which is the foundation of this book. I can’t thank enough the chairman, officers, and members of the boards of Bryan Memorial Hospital, BryanLGH Medical Center, and BryanLGH Health System, who gave me an incredible opportunity and unwavering support during my career as their chief executive officer.

Introduction

This is a book about great leadership ability and how putting that ability into practical application will give you success in achieving the goals and purpose of an organization. It was not written for everyone. There are those who will not read this book because they would find it unrealistic, naïve, and a waste of time. There are others who will read the book and find it introspective, challenging, and inspirational. This is not a book that is written only through research, interviews, and literary review (as many leadership books are) but rather inspired by the thirty-seven years of personal experiences, successes, failures, and common sense that I have acquired during my career.

The book concentrates on the human side of leadership and how great leadership ability is obtained by having the necessary psychological makeup, knowing one’s self, love of work, a drive to succeed, hard work, personal sacrifice, creativity, humility, honoring others, and having fun in the workplace. The book also looks at how ignoring, minimizing, or mismanaging the human side of management creates suspicion, fear, unhappiness, turmoil, stagnation, suboptimization, and failure in the workplace. I have no empirical evidence, but it has been my observation that, as easy as it is to be one, great leaders are few in number. How can that be? It really comes down to who we are, our life experiences, our acquired knowledge, and how we put it all together.

The one factor that has the most influence on our ability to be a great leader is our core psychological makeup, which I call our mental being. It’s what drives us, holds us back, and controls the way we relate to others and how we use our life experiences. By far the most important aspect of our mental being for being a great leader is how we relate to others. This includes those to whom we are accountable, those who are accountable to us, and all the other people in our lives whom we depend upon for our success, including family and friends.

Although I agree with the old clichés that it’s lonely at the top and the buck stops here, I also agree with the cliché that no man or woman is an island. Anyone who operates as an island is at best a suboptimal leader and at worst a failure. Even though we humans are the most intelligent creatures on earth, we are by far the most fragile emotionally. I have never met anyone who doesn’t fit that observation. It is just that some are more fragile than others. Our degree of fragility has tremendous influence on our ability to be a great leader.

As profound as having great leadership ability is for leading the organization toward achieving its goals and purpose, that ability alone will not get you there. There are many attributes that you need to learn and put into practice to be a great leader. Some people are more fortunate than others in that they inherently develop many of these attributes over time as a result of life experiences while others have to identify them, educate themselves, and work at it. It should be noted that many of the people who are without the necessary mental being for great leadership would not recognize or appreciate the importance of these attributes for success if the attributes hit them in the proverbial face. We will look in depth at how great leadership ability combined with learned attributes—some mainstream and some contrary to mainstream thinking—translates into successful great leadership practices. The learned attributes we will look at are relationships; personal and corporate ethics; corporate culture; employee empowerment, teamwork, and education; hiring and pay philosophy; decision making and strategic planning; quality; marketing, public relations, and image building; and accountability.

Life experiences, educational environments such as seminars and schools, written material, and electronic material are all ways to develop learned attributes. One of the most successful and enjoyable ways to develop learned attributes is to find personal heroes whom you can admire, learn from, and emulate. These may be people you know, such as a family member, a friend, an acquaintance, a boss, a coworker, or even a subordinate. It could be someone you have read about or seen in person from afar but do not personally know. It can even be an organization. I will share with you my personal heroes and what I have learned from them in the hope that you might gain meaningful insight from them as well. You might be surprised who some of them are. There are many options for sources from which to learn attributes for success as a great leader.

For those of you who are chief executive officers (CEOs) or who aspire to be one, I have devoted a chapter to the uniqueness of the position of CEO and how it differs from all other management positions. Yet—I want to end this introduction with the following thought: you don’t have to be a CEO to be a great leader. There are many great leaders in all aspects of management. There are many great leaders who aren’t even in management but provide great value to the organization as informal leaders.

I hope you enjoy the book. It is written not only to inform you but to challenge you to be all you can be and to find that success in life that is so ultimately personally fulfilling and rewarding.

Chapter 1

Great Leadership Defined

When most people hear the term great leader, they visualize heads of state, famous philosophers, religious leaders, and organizational CEOs. Do you have to be an organization’s CEO to be a great leader? There is a very simple answer to that question, and that answer is absolutely not. Do you have to at least be in management to be a great leader? The answer to that question is the same as the first: absolutely not.

So how can managers and especially non-managers be great leaders when they are not the Big Kahuna? One of the most enjoyable and exciting aspects of my job was to watch employees excel and demonstrate great leadership. So what defines a great leader? What distinguishes great leaders from the rest of the pack? Is it in the eyes of the beholder? Are there distinguishing traits?

We will begin answering the above questions about great leaders and great leadership by looking at Abraham H. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs theory. His theory was published in Psychological Review in a 1943 paper titled A Theory of Human Motivation. For those of you who are not familiar with Maslow, he was a respected research psychologist who died in 1970 and the first of my personal heroes in this book. His theory has been widely published in organizational-management and academic textbooks for many years. It is astonishing that Maslow published his theory sixty-nine years ago and it is still applicable today. Actually, basic human nature changes ever so little, if at all, over time. I have included his 1943 paper in Appendix A, and it is essential that you read it before proceeding.

Now that you are back and have read the paper, you know that Maslow divides human needs into the following five categories in ascending order: physiological needs, safety needs, love needs, esteem needs, and the need for self-actualization. I am amazed by the numerous interpretations, variations, and adaptations on his theory I have seen, and interestingly, none of them have compromised his basic premises.

It is also interesting that all the versions I have ever seen use a pyramid to demonstrate Maslow’s hierarchy of needs though his paper is only narrative and has no pyramid. That was a surprise to me, since the pyramid is the theory’s universal symbol. There is one adaptation of Maslow’s theory to organizations that I have always thought of as simple and relevant. It was published in a book written by Andrew D. Szilagyi (1981, 408–411), titled Management and Performance. Szilagyi is a professor of management at the University of Houston’s C. T. Bauer College of Business. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Szilagyi’s interpretation for organizational adaption are shown in Figure 1 and will be used for my discussion of Maslow’s theory and its importance to great leadership.

Before we proceed, I want to make a very important point: never confuse success with great leadership. If we use income, wealth, position, or status to define a successful person, then I have seen many successful people who were not great leaders. In fact, I would rank the majority of them as less-than-great leaders, and I would put some of them in the category of terrible leaders. In contrast, I have seen many great leaders who were not successful in terms of income, wealth, position, or status. How can that be? As we discuss in this chapter, it will become clear. Now back to Maslow’s theory to get a basis for defining great leaders and great leadership.

At the bottom of the pyramid in Figure 1 is physiological needs, which includes such things as adequate base salary and a reasonably comfortable physical working environment. The next level is safety needs, including safe working conditions, fringe benefits, general salary increases, and job security. It has been my experience that without having these two need levels satisfied, employees will actively look for a job at another organization that will meet those needs. This applies to management and non-management alike. You can find exceptions, but you sure don’t want those people working in your organization.

One can debate which of these basic needs is most important. Common wisdom would say it depends upon the person and his or her individual needs, but I have found that base salary— including base fringe benefits and job security—are paramount. If you can’t meet your basic financial needs, you have no option but to do something else or be consumed by emotionally charged financial problems. We’re not talking about buying a new Ferrari or a second home on the beach. We are talking about basic food, shelter, and other subsistence.

Figure 1

Fear of losing one’s job is also a strong motivator to leave, but that is a slightly different animal. It is not usually as immediate in causing an employee to leave as base salary and benefits, but it certainly can be. Lack of job security can result in many undesirable behaviors on the part of an employee, even from the best of employees. I have seen employees who fear job loss spend much, if not all, of their time exhibiting behavior, sometimes irrationally, that gets in the way of their usual good job performance. This is done in an effort to mitigate their fear and/or push attention away from themselves.

One very important aspect of job security is that it is not always black and white and is much more subjective than salary and benefits. Your boss or some other legitimate authority in the organization telling you your job is in jeopardy due to job performance or downsizing is not subjective, but many times employees have an unfounded fear because of rumors or comments made by less legitimate sources. Later in the book, we will talk about the importance of good and accurate communication, which is critical in mitigating unfounded fear. Fear is one of the most (if it is not the most) destructive force in the workplace.

The next level is love needs and is identified by Szilagyi as quality of supervision, compatible work group, and professional friendships. One should never underestimate the power of these relationships. Good employees will not stay if these needs are not met. They will leave as soon as they find a job that meets the lower two need levels and there is reasonable assurance that their new jobs will provide for their needs at this level and potentially beyond. Satisfying needs at this level speaks not only to the quality of managerial leadership but to the dynamics involved with informal leadership discussed later in this chapter. The significance of quality of supervision, compatible work groups, and professional friendships will become increasingly more evident as you continue reading and as learned attributes for great leadership are presented in practice.

Before we continue, I want to point out something very important regarding people ascending up the pyramid. Maslow’s paper says that, generally speaking, the need levels are in ascending order and that each level has to be satisfied before an individual can move to the next. In regard to self-actualization, his paper says that, often if not always, there is a restlessness to achieve more and become all one can be if all other needs are satisfied. But, as you read in the third section of his paper, he says that human behavior is more complicated than that and exceptions need to be recognized. He continues, saying that the impact of each level and importance of the ascending order can be different for different people.

It has been my experience that the line between the love needs level and the next level (esteem needs) is a significant line for many people with regard to their motivational needs. I have seen many employees in different job positions appear to be content while staying with the three levels I have already described and not ascend across the line to the next two levels. I say appear because my statement is an unscientific observation. The only exception to that hypothesis that I have observed, and it is a very big exception, is the need for peer/supervisory recognition that is in the level of esteem needs.

I want to share with you one of my most memorable and teachable experiences that is a case in point regarding the need for peer/supervisory recognition. I had a series of physical therapy treatments at the hospital campus where my office was located. One of the people who helped me was a physical therapy assistant who was a rather outgoing and assertive person. After my treatments ended, I ran into her at a retirement party for another employee. She enjoyed interacting with me at this event in front of others; I enjoyed interacting with her as well.

Because of the size of our organization, we had two annual employee-recognition events for years of service. One of them was that evening. We held our recognition events in a downtown hotel ballroom with a nice dinner and a ceremony in which each honoree walked across the stage to be recognized and receive a gift as his or her name was called. Long-term employees who had been in the organization beyond a specified number of years were given bouquets of flowers when their names were called and then escorted up to the stage. Those who had been there the longest received roses. This physical therapy employee was to be honored that evening and asked me in her assertive style what she would get at the recognition event. I told her she would get a bouquet of roses. She did not get roses. As she crossed the stage that night and I congratulated her, she quietly reminded me that I had told her she would get roses.

The next day, one of my vice presidents told me that he had seen her. He said she was disappointed and upset that I had told her she would get roses and then she got other flowers. I had made a mistake. An employee had to be there longer than she had been to get roses. The vice president asked me if we should get her a bouquet of roses and send them to her. I felt bad about my mistake, but I also felt it would be wrong to get her a bouquet of roses when others in her category of length of service didn’t; it would also detract from those who had. I suggested he get her one red rose and tell her that I had made a mistake and I was sorry. In retrospect, I should have taken the rose to her and apologized in person.

By serendipity, I saw her in the hallway the next day; I rarely did. She came up to me and, with tears in her eyes, told me that one red rose meant more to her than any bouquet of roses ever could. I was taken aback by the emotion shown by this woman, who had always appeared to be so self-confident and assertive. Wow! This story is a great example of how showing someone that you genuinely care about her or him (recognition) is so powerful. It is also a great example of my comment in the introduction about the fragility of people. More on that topic will come in the next chapter.

It is my observation that many employees who have the talent and the overt or dormant desire to move to the top two levels do so through encouragement and an enabling environment created by great leadership. There are employees who have the talent and maybe some element of desire, but who are better off where they are, without ascending to those top two levels.

Here is another story. We were working on a major project and had established teams to work on its specific aspects. It was our usual practice to put management and non-management employees on teams who did the work and knew the processes. When the teams working on this particular project finished their work, each project team was asked to report its findings in person to senior management. This was not our usual practice, but due to the importance and scope of the work, we thought this was a good way for senior management to recognize and thank the teams.

Each team picked one person to report its findings. When one particular team reported to us, it had picked an employee with whom I was familiar. I was surprised that she had been picked. She was a nice person but very shy and worked in a job that some would say did not require significant talent and responsibility. I make that last characterization for lack of a better one. I think all jobs require significant talent and responsibility, but there are those who would not agree with me. I was told that the employee was very nervous about giving the report but agreed to do it.

Well, she nailed it! She came to the meeting very nicely dressed for her role, gave a great report, and got tremendous applause from our senior management team. You could tell she was very proud of herself, as was her team. She had a lot more talent than she had shown in the past but was satisfied with where she was in the organization and continued to work in the position in which she was comfortable. We were told after the meeting that she hadn’t slept well the night before and had actually thrown up more than once. You would never have known it by her presentation. I often wonder how far people can go and love it if they are comfortable doing so. It is far better, however, to settle in where you are comfortable and happy. Happiness far outweighs achieving more and then being miserable outside your comfort level.

Now we are going to move on to the top two levels: esteem needs and the need for self-actualization. We will look at them together, because they are very interrelated. I have already pointed out the importance of peer/supervisory recognition. Let’s add to that need the importance of enjoying the work, having responsibility, being challenged, advancing in the organization, achieving personally, being creative, and being rewarded monetarily.

I have a couple of disagreements with Szilagyi at these two levels. I left out job title in my above list of needs, because an employee’s job title is a part of pride of accomplishment; job title by itself is not a motivator. We had a policy that no job titles were on anyone’s identification badge. People outside and inside the organization only needed to know that we were employees; they had no need to know what our positions were. People inside the organization who needed to know who we were already knew. If it was important for people inside the organization to display their titles, they did not belong in my organization. The only exception to this policy was for those people in direct clinical care who had specific licenses for their jobs. We thought patients should know who they were (i.e., RNs, or registered nurses).

My list also referred to being rewarded monetarily versus the use of merit pay increases. I believe in paying excellent salaries and monetary rewards, but I do not believe in merit pay. I feel it is destructive. We will discuss that issue at length in chapter 7.

I was always amazed (you will see in this book that I’m amazed a lot) by how the same employees always volunteered for projects that resulted in extra work for them, while others never volunteered or didn’t volunteer very often. Those employees who volunteered often never seemed to get enough and always enjoyed it. They were satisfying esteem needs and self-actualization. They only needed the freedom and support to do it.

In his paper, Maslow (1943) said,

Even if all these needs are satisfied [referring to his hierarchy up to self-actualization], we may still often if not always expect that a new discontent and restlessness will soon develop, unless the individual is doing what he is fitted for. A musician must make music, an artist must paint, a poet must write, if he is to be ultimately happy. What a man can be, he must be. This need we may call self-actualization.

Maslow continued,

This term, first coined by Kurt Goldstein, is being used in this paper in a much more specific and limited fashion. It refers to the desire for self-fulfillment, namely, to the tendency for him to become actualized in what he is potentially. This tendency might be phrased as the desire to become more and more what one is, to become everything that one is capable of becoming.

The employees Maslow is referring to here are the so-called stars in the organization. I will explain stars in chapter 6.

We just did a cursory review of Maslow’s hierarchy of needs and Szilagyi’s interpretation for organizational application. Are you ready to answer the big questions for this chapter: What defines a great leader? How do you identify him or her? Whether it has hit you yet or not, you are. As important as the answers are, I feel we should have spectacular fireworks or at least a drum-roll to introduce the answer. Obviously, neither is very practical within the confines of a book, so I will leave one or both of those introductions to your imagination.

Here is the answer to both questions plain and simple: Great leaders are leaders who have the ability to satisfy Maslow’s hierarchy of needs for those around them and channel that powerful energy toward successfully accomplishing the goals and purpose of the organization in an ethical manner. And, because great leaders do that, people will give them all they’ve got, follow them over the proverbial cliff, take bullets for them, and hold them up on a pedestal for all to see. It’s as simple as that, and great leadership organizations are those that are led by great leaders who infuse a corporate culture of great leadership into the organization.

Remember I said that success does not always equate to great leadership and vice versa? This is what I was talking about. No matter how successful you are in regard to income, wealth, position, or status, if you don’t have the ability to lead people in the manner described in this chapter, you are not a great leader.

Why is the distinction of great leadership versus successful leadership so important? As you read this book, you will discover that truly successful organizations are those led by great leaders and with great leadership practices pervasive throughout. We are going to get very philosophical. If I asked all of you reading this book what you feel is most important in life, I would probably get a plethora of answers. The most important thing in life is one’s personal relationships with others. Even if you don’t agree with that, I think you will have to agree that relationships are, at the very least, somewhere at the top of your list. I commented in the introduction that this book is not for everyone, and I don’t think you would still be reading this book if that were not true for you.

In order for this book to be meaningful, one genuinely has to care about people and his or her relationships with them. I remember studying transactional analysis (TA) in college. TA was based upon a theory of psychology introduced in the 1950s by a psychiatrist named Eric Berne. Even though I don’t agree with everything in Berne’s TA theory, I always have thought that TA provides a great method to look at human behavior in a very simple way.

TA theory promotes the idea that one thrives on warm fuzzies (positive strokes from others) and can survive on cold pricklies (negative strokes from others). However, because of one’s fundamental need for human interaction (relationships), one cannot function or survive without any strokes at all. I would encourage you to spend some time reading about TA for your learning and enjoyment; his book is titled Games People Play (Berne 1964).

I had always thought that the terms warm fuzzies and cold pricklies came from Eric Berne. After some simple research, I learned that these terms actually came from a friend and colleague, Claude M. Steiner, from a story he wrote titled A Warm Fuzzy Tale (Steiner 1969), a great little short story you can easily find on the Internet. It’s not a great piece of literary art, but I would highly recommend reading it for its simple and profound wisdom.

I’m not a particularly religious person, but I have said for years that the oldest and one of the best leadership books ever written is the Bible. If we lived our lives by the general philosophy of the Bible and had the necessary mental being and learned attributes, we would all be great leaders. My favorite biblical great leadership philosophy is the Golden Rule, which is simply Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Who can argue with that? Unfortunately, some do; I can guarantee you that they are not going to waste their time reading my book. So the bottom line here is that great leaders honor and respect their fellow man, contribute unselfishly to the betterment of the lives of others, and by doing so, lead organizations to success in unparalleled ways. Everyone wins—the organization, the employees, and the leader. I ask you, what is more important than that? That is what great leadership is all about, and it is built upon positive and effective relationships.

One of the most underestimated influences in any organization is that of informal leaders. They have no official authority, but they can have enormous influence in the organization. Since we are concerned only with great leadership in this book, I will focus discussion on those informal leaders who are great informal leaders. They don’t have the formal power to satisfy Maslow’s hierarchy of needs like those in management do, but they do acquire significant informal power to satisfy those needs through their participation in compatible work groups, professional friendships, and peer recognition. The less effective management is at meeting Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, especially in quality of supervision and supervisory recognition, the more powerful informal leaders become. All great informal leaders are ethical and aligned with the organization in loyalty, purpose, and goals and meet or exceed job requirements. You cannot demonstrate great leadership, informal or formal, in the organization and be otherwise.

The impact by great informal leaders on non-management employees and between non-management employees and management is profound. I ask you to draw upon your own experience when non-management employees informally led and their fellow employees followed that lead. Think of the times you have observed people who have no official authority but have fellow employees go to them for information, help, advice, and opinions pertaining to work and personal issues. Sometimes these individuals are known by management, and sometimes they are not. Great leaders in management always know who the great informal leaders are. It would behoove anyone in management to always know who these individuals are, give them the acknowledgment they deserve, and cultivate relationships with them. Not only do they have significant influence on others, but they are a great source of information and advice. This relationship can be a little tricky and must be done with openness, sensitivity, and sincerity. These informal leaders can have an invaluable positive influence on the organization. They may or may not be management material. They may not want to be. But they can have as much influence as or more than management. Any manager who thinks he or she can negate or minimize an informal leader’s influence is not realistic; any attempt to do so will almost certainly backfire in a negative way.

There is a distinct difference between management and great informal leaders, and this is very important. Managers are official representatives of organizational leadership and are held accountable to promote and achieve management’s cultural philosophy and the strategic goals of the organization. Great informal leaders do not officially have that responsibility and aren’t accountable for it, but their comments and actions can carry as much or more weight with employees. It is very important that managers ensure that great informal leaders unequivocally understand management’s cultural philosophy and the organization’s strategic goals through ongoing reinforcement. Comprehension of these matters should not be taken for granted. If managers don’t continually provide reinforcement, great informal leaders could significantly undermine the organization without meaning to do so. Unfortunately, there are many informal leaders, though not great ones, who do intentionally try to undermine the organization for a variety of reasons. Great informal leaders are invaluable in successfully countering this type of negativity as well as in being