Lessons on Leadership: Spin

Lessons on Leadership: Spin April 25, 2015

Spin is not a good thing for your organization and it has no place in any approach to leadership that takes the spiritual dimension of that task seriously.

It may make you comfortable.  It may buy you a certain amount of distance from criticism and it may transfer blame in some implicit fashion to your critics.  That’s certainly how it is used in politics.

But, as in politics, spin masks the real problems facing an organization.  It promotes dishonesty and equivocation.   It misleads stakeholders and it carries a high cost, diverting time, effort, and money in a search for the true nature of the challenges that face an organization.

It also alienates and disillusions those who would otherwise be drawn to your efforts.  People who are spinned and who know that they are being spinned will inevitably question your motives, withhold support, and eventually lose interest in your mission.

Worst of all, spin sets your organization on a collision course with reality.  You can spin your constituency.  You can even retell the story in a way that allows you to build your resume and find another, even bigger place to work.  But you can’t change the facts and the people you leave behind will suffer for it.

By contrast, leaders who are attuned to the spiritual demands of the leadership task know that the truth is their ally even when it is an embarrassment to them. They cultivate truth.  They tell the truth.  They allow their decisions to be corrected by the truth.  As a result they cultivate trust, they invest their actions with something larger and more enduring than their own careers, and they give their organizations a chance to thrive and succeed.

Spin does none of those things.  Crafted in the in the late Twentieth Century by Edward Bernays, the father of public relations, its use was predicated upon the conviction that the public was governed by a herd mentality, that the democratic process could not be trusted, and that society was best led by enlightened despots.  In other words, it was a term coined to avoid the use of words like “doublespeak,” “evading,” “dissembling,” “manipulating,” and “misleading” — in other words, “lying.”

 

 


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