Cracking the Leadership Code

Chapter 2YOUR INHERITED LEADERSHIP LEGACY

Progress, far from consisting [of] change, depends on retentiveness… Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.

—George Santayana

How did we get here?

How did we get to the point that employees have such low confidence in their leaders? How is it that more than half of employees don't trust their colleagues, leaders, and companies? Why do we have such a failure of credibility? How did we wind up with such a crisis of leadership? Consider the following story:

A young woman decides to host a holiday dinner party in her own apartment for the very first time.

She's planning to cook her family's traditional meal: a holiday roast. The recipe has been passed down from mother to daughter for generations.

She buys all the ingredients and looks over the recipe. She notices something a bit odd. The last step of the recipe says, “Cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven.”

This makes no sense to her. So, she calls up her mother.

“Mom, I'm cooking the family holiday roast, and the recipe says to cut the end off the roast before you put it in the oven. I didn't know you're supposed to do that. Why do you do that?”

Her mother replies, “That's a great question. You know, I don't really know. That's the way my mom taught it to me. Why don't you ask grandma?”

So the young woman calls her grandmother and asks the same question about the roast. Her grandma answers, “I don't know. That's the way my mom taught me. Why don't ...