Some of you may have read my recent blog about applying the
fine art of emotional intelligence in business.
If you haven’t, you can find it here - http://tinyurl.com/q8nju62
Anyway, as a reference point I thought it’d be worth contrasting
it as a desired approach to management and relationships directly with the
behaviour of two extreme entrepreneurial and management personality types which
may be particularly familiar to those working in fast moving industries. I’m
talking about the psychopath and the narcissist.
A surprising number of successful people in business and
other walks of life exhibit one or both traits.
Successful, that is, until the explosive cocktail of ego-driven behaviours
that helped them bully and/or connive their way to the top in the first place
finally blows up in their – and potentially your - face. So how might you know if you are dealing with
one, the other, or even both? Here are a few of the clues.
Psychopaths vs.
narcissists
Psychopaths fundamentally lack conscience. They seem not to worry about the usual minutiae
that occupy others. They never appear to
be nervous, stressed or in danger of losing their bottle. Competitive, risk taking and thrill seeking,
they take command and are the noisy, heroic win-at-all-costs merchants. They are also capricious, unreliable,
manipulative, abrasive and ignore the lessons of experience. They are often
huge cheats, big fat liars and think stealing is part of the job. They are
angry. They are looking for a fight. Yet despite the gung ho carapace they can
be sensitive souls, vulnerable to criticism from others, but once they get over
it typically seek revenge.
Narcissists too have an astounding and mostly misplaced belief
in their own talent, desperately wanting others to acknowledge their gifts as
`players`. But in reality being fundamental needy and self-centred they tend to
have shallow, unsupportive relationships.
Convinced they are essential to everything, they feel slighted as a
result of others’ failure to appreciate this situation. But as they have Olympic-standard passive-aggressive
capabilities they tend not express hostility and resentment openly but create buckets
of back-stabbing sullen negativity, playing the blame card at every opportunity
until things go their way again.
Entrepreneurial wheat
and egomaniac chaff
Given both the psychopath and narcissist’s tenuous grip on
normality, the heady atmosphere of boom times appears to be the oxygen of their
duplicity. This should start alarm bells
ringing for investors and M&A outfits trying to sort the entrepreneurial wheat
from the egomaniac chaff.
As George Santayana, the polymath poet and philosopher, noted
`those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it`. So as the new
upturn gathers pace, I wish I’d recorded as a warning more of the Kafkaesque
meetings I had with overwrought and over-invested who thought they were going
to be the next digital squillionaires of the dot.com bubble but subsequently
disappeared without trace.
The inevitable hubris aside, once you recognise the signs of
fundamentally psychopathic or narcissistic behaviour it’s easy to assume smugly
that you are devoid of such traits. But
the reality is when frustrated or in full flow all of us can exhibit various
forms of unpleasant and destructive arrogance, scepticism, avoidance and brittle
emotions. They key, as ever, is self-knowledge and caring to do something about
it. Happily that’s where the emotional intelligence comes in.
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