The 10 Commandments of Effective Leadership #3 – Don’t reward nepotism

The 10 Commandments of Effective Leadership #3

The third of the 10 commandments of effective leadership says, “Thou shalt not reward nepotism.”

If you break the second commandment of effective leadership by surrounding yourself with people who look like you, you will eventually create a nepotistic and a preferential treatment culture within your organization where you reward people for their personality instead of their performance.

Nepotistic environment is counterproductive

When you surround yourself with people who are like you and reward only your relatives and friends in your organization, you teach people who are not your friends or relatives that in order for people to be promoted around you, they have to be a kiss up to you.

A nepotistic environment within the culture of your organization is counterproductive to the growth and development of your organization. For example, you don’t want an accountant who is trying to get you, the leader, to like him. Because such an accountant will tell you what you want to hear until the Internal Revenue Service come to arrest you.

Great organization, toxic culture

No matter how good or talented you are as a leader, no matter how great your sermons are as a pastor, you will have a toxic organization if you reward nepotism. When the culture becomes toxic, the people in the organization become a gang.

For your organization to grow, outsiders and foreigners need to come into your organization, but if you breed gangs and cults in your organization by rewarding nepotism, the gangs will kill anybody who is different because they feel threatened and your organization will never grow.

Read  The 10 Commandments of Effective Leadership #1

It’s not your heart, it’s the environment

Sometimes leaders wonder what they are personally doing wrong when their organization is not growing but it might not be what you are personally doing wrong; it might be because the environment in your organization has become toxic for things and people to grow.

You might have a good heart as a leader, but if you reward nepotism, everybody will feel obligated to drive out anybody who is different. When people in your organization don’t like one another for no reason, you have a virus in your organization.

When the culture becomes toxic, the people in the organization become a gang.

Drive out nepotism

To fulfill the third commandment of effective leadership, you have to drive out nepotism and you can drive it out by rewarding people for their performance instead of their personality. People do watch who you reward—who you give a raise, who you smile at, who you eat lunch with, who you talk to, who you turn around to look at when something is good.

They pay attention to what you feed and if you reward people because of who they are instead of what they have done, others will transform who they are to what you like to the detriment of what you need.

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