5 important leadership lessons from the The Walking Dead

If you are aware of the poplar AMC TV series The Walking Dead (TWD), chances are either you are a diehard fan of the series or you hate it. Nevertheless the series offers an interesting perspective of life in a post-apocalyptic world. A world where there is no government, no police and you are on your own. The zombies are not even a concern for survival, they just add a reason for the apocalypse.

Among many other good things, I was able to learn a lot of leadership lessons for the storyline, the rise and fall of leaders, the impact on their team and in their success in the ultimate goal of survival. This essay is an attempt to summarize my learning from this great TV series.

Lesson 1: A leader needs to standup for his team.

This lesson was observed many times in the series, for example when Rick (Andrew Lincoln) goes to bring Glen back in season 1, going back to school bus for Shane etc. He displayed team building when he carefully added the 2 prisoners to the group. If I tie this to corporate world, successful leaders bring in key people from outside or within the organization to key positions and they stand behind their decisions, support them in every way they can.

 Lesson 2: The team needs to have moral ethics.

There was always a character that would talk about moral and ethics within the TWD team, be it Dale or Herschel, they talked about keeping the humanity of the group alive in those difficult times. In corporate world, when everyone is rushing towards meeting the bottom-line goal, if the organization loses its moral values, that organization is heading towards what I call it as path to another Enron.

Lesson 3: Team should stand up for your leader and each other.

In TWD this was evident when Rick lost his senses after his wife’s death, his entire team gave him time to heal, covered up for his work and duties and helped him come out of the loss. In corporate world, you may encounter phases of your leader or team member is not at their best. If you have worked with them long enough you should be able to sense this and must act appropriately to help the other.

Lesson 4: The stronger team survives, the weaker phases out.

On several occasions, Rick’s team had encountered other people and have always won, while sometimes they suffered heavy losses, for example – their encounter with the governor. The corporate word currently works similarly when 2 teams /leaders are competing against each other to win something, either a promotion or an award or business from client. The team with strong ties, support of their leader, having moral ethics and motivation to achieve the goal would win.

Lesson 5: You need to drop bad apples to save the team.

This was very evident when Rick had killed Shane and had to let go Carol. In corporate world, when you have a team that is functioning well, you need to save them not just from outside but also from the insiders. While other department can slow down some of the team progress, the inner member can do bigger damage like impacting team motivation and morale. This needs to be handled diligently.

In a nutshell, there are many similarities between the post apocalyptic world shown in TWD and today's corporate world.  

Perfectionist!! Is that what you are?

In my day to day life, I couldn't help but notice these two distinct species of manager, one being the perfectionist and the other being a people's person, for lack of the right word, I will refer the people's person as the leader. Let's quickly describe these two: Perfectionist manager is somebody who has been very good at what he does(did) and is involved in minute details of day to day work.  He more than likely rose to rank based on Peter's principle(for more information on Peter's principle, see wiki). A leader on the other hand is loved by his people, he has acquired his team's confidence and rose to rank based on their support and appreciation.

So what are the differences in various aspect of business when you have one manager over the other? Let's try to answer this question by analyzing each involved group:

Team: The team working with the leader is motivated and happy while the one with perfectionist is always under pressure to perform at a certain expectation. Both managers would review their teams  work at some point or the other. The perfectionist would criticize  the work and the leader would provide feedback.  The success factor really depends on team morale and there is no doubt that the leader will always win over perfectionist.

Customer Unit: Internal or external customer, they are impacted by the team that will be delivering results from both managers. The perfectionist manager try hard to get to higher quality but his team fails to deliver it and the leader relies on the motivation and team morale to produce high quality results. In the end, a highly motivated can make the difference where each individual is contributing to the success while only the perfectionist is contributing to the results on the other end.

Organization Health: A high team morale and a motivated team is always good for an organization than a stressed out trying to realize perfection. A motivated team usually influences other teams within organization to produce similar kind of results.

As it appears, the leader is so far scoring better than the perfectionist. So, is there a balance between the two, can someone be a great leader and perfectionist at the same time. In my opinion, it is possible but very rare.  the question would be can a perfectionist succeed without being the leader? and the answer is same, it is possible but very rare. There are only a few Steve Jobs like profiles around the world where you can be a perfectionist and be a very disappointing boss to work with, and you still succeed. I think then there are other attributes of the leader like Vision, political outreach within organization etc.. that contribute to the success.