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SELF-INDULGENCE:
This is the fourth and perhaps the most wasteful of the deadly sins. Fear, procrastination and self-importance can be driven by factors beyond conscious awareness, and by forces beyond immediate control. They can lead you to act badly, in moments of great stress. Self-indulgence is always a choice. People are never overwhelmed by self-indulgence. It doesn’t happen without saying, on some level, “I’m going to say/do what I want regardless of the consequences.” It’s always predicated on a decision to act out just because it makes you feel good to vent your spleen. Sometimes leaders are just insensitive to the consequences. At worst, leaders choose to indulge momentary whims over the requirements of the company’s goals, or over the needs of the people who are looking to the boss for leadership. The costs associated with any particular indulgence are not always apparent. However, they’re always profound. They’re corrosive and caustic. They erode loyalty and authority. Over time, they’re devastating to the effectiveness of the organization as a whole. And, worst of all, the costs of self-indulgence are avoidable. Self-indulgence occurs in all businesses. However, given that the line between business and personal issues is more easily blurred in family businesses, I find self-indulgence happening more often, or more obviously, in family-owned companies. Two attitudes often fuel self-indulgence:
Both of these perspectives are based on the premise that, “I can do what I want to do, because I have the power to do so.” Some might say, “Might makes right.” It is not an attitude that inspires others, ties them to your purpose, or causes them to want to follow you. It puts your personal agenda ahead of that of the enterprise and it usually does so in a public way. A third attitude that contributes to self-indulgence is, “This little thing? It’s no big deal.” This attitude is expressed more often, though, by the person doing the indulging and less often by the one being indulged upon. An Example Of Self-Indulgence In Action: I was visiting a family business one day on a consulting project. I was in the office area, speaking to the office manager. The boss was in his office dealing with a problem that surfaced when an irate customer called to demand satisfaction. The air nearly crackled with the tension in the building. Suddenly, the paging system came alive and the boss’s voice, dripping with sarcasm, barked a summons to the warehouse manager: “Fred, if you can tear yourself away from your very important duties, get off of your fat, lazy *** and get into my office. Immediately!” Well, to say that you could hear a pin drop across the entire complex would not have been an exaggeration. Fred sheepishly made his way from the warehouse to the boss’ office. Some people stared. Others chose not to look at Fred during his long ignominious journey. No one knew what Fred had done, if he had done anything wrong at all, but everyone knew that the boss was ticked off. Once Fred disappeared into the boss’s office it took a long time for people to get back to their work. In pairs or in small groups, people gathered in hushed conversations. There were furtive looks thrown toward the office, as if the boss might emerge at any moment holding Fred’s bloody, severed head aloft. Everyone wanted to see, but no one wanted to be caught looking. My eyes were drawn to the sign in their public waiting room that proclaimed, in foot high letters that, “Our people are our most important asset.” It turned out that the night before, a second shift worker had loaded the wrong product in place of product that the customer needed for their morning production run. Fred hadn’t been there, and neither had the boss. Now, the customer was irate and threatening to take his substantial business elsewhere. This had always been a demanding customer, and now the boss was sure they were going to extract as many concessions as possible. It could be a disaster from the family business’s point of view. Regardless of how the immediate crisis with the customer is resolved, consider the impact of how the boss chose to handle his fear and concomitant anger. There were a lot of people learning lessons from what they saw. Since “to err is human,” people were going to make mistakes in the future. The leader’s reaction to those inevitable mistakes profoundly influences the capability of the company to respond successfully. Let’s consider this vignette from a cost/benefit perspective. A Cost/Benefit Ratio-The Price Of Self-Indulgence: Let’s consider Fred and the boss. The boss was embarrassed, ticked off, and probably a bit scared about the consequences of his company’s mistake. There is no doubt that this was a crisis. His instinct was to lash out, and so he did. Lets take a quick look at a cost/benefit scorecard for the boss’s reaction to the customer’s phone call:
Cost/Benefit Scorecard
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