Lead by the tail

Leadership lessons come in all sizes and from all places. This morning I was surrounded again by the incessant talk about Tiger Woods and his crash. Ruth Marcus in her Washington Post column was imploring Tiger to remain silent and maintain his privacy. A satellite morning show was using him as a lesson to all would-be cheaters that if you want to cheat in this day and age you should know you will get caught.

Through my leadership lens, the Tiger Woods saga presents an interesting lesson on human behavior. The expectation that some would like to have that everyone would leave Tiger alone while his actions seem mysterious is naive. We are meaning-making machines. I recall how quickly I went from "Thank God he is okay," to "What in the world was he doing backing out so crazily of his driveway at 2:30am?" and "his wife had to break the back window with a golf club to get him out?" Our brains are programmed to seek out rationales behind actions. As Linkin Park sings, "Give me reasons..." We will not stop until something - really anything - makes the story fit together.

We could look at this as our morbid fascination with all facts and an insatiable quest for smut. Or, we could recognize our natural human curiosity. As leaders, I think the latter is more valuable. In Judaism we use this curiosity to encounter texts and draw deep lessons from them. In the Bible, Moses receives an incredibly harsh punishment for hitting a rock. For centuries people have debated what it was that warranted this reaction by God. The text is missing something. Moses had hit rocks before. Even if it was a mistake, it doesn't seem that bad. Yet, God's reaction is swift and unrelenting. There are many theories about Moses' mistake, some that place it squarely on that particular action to those that look blame other incidents to even those that state this was not a punishment at all but a realization that Moses was not the leader to take the Jews into the land of Israel. Where there is a rational gap, our minds feel the need to fill it in. We struggle with it - sometimes with obsession - until we can align the two pieces. This is the way we are programmed. It's called cognitive dissonance. We use it for good, in the case of scholarship and also in creating new realities for ourselves by forcing our brain to help realize the vision we put into it. Of course it can also cause us to relentlessly pursue a man who's only public error was one of omission.

Here's the lesson to take with you. Silence doesn't always pay. If you don't provide an answer, people will fill one in for you. You might cry privacy! but what people hear is mystery! and their wheels won't stop turning until they find or make up something that makes sense. As a leader you have relinquished control of your own and possibly your organization's destiny.