"Being selfless can make it seem like the weight of everything, and every person’s wants, is on the ... [+]
Entrepreneur Mike Malatesta likes to say: “Selfish comes before selfless, in the dictionary and in life.”
He says most leaders don’t want to be called selfish. The word has a bad reputation. But if you want to attract high-paying clients, you might want to make a new decision about being selfish.
“Since we’ve been little kids, we’ve been taught that being selfish is bad and being selfless is good,” says Malatesta. “In the business world, most of the accolades, the awards and the books are presented to, and written about, leaders who are held up as being selfless and a servant.”
Indeed, some excellent books have been written about being a servant leader, from authors such as Ken Blanchard. Malatesta takes a contrarian view as the key to growing a high-performance organization, something he has done more than once.
What Malatesta calls selfish, I call focus. Perhaps a better term is extreme focus. Author Bud Harris coined the term sacred selfishness, which I take to mean taking care of yourself so you can take care of others (like the warning the flight attendant gives that in case of emergency, put your mask on first and then help others).
To help other entrepreneurs, Malatesta wrote the book Owner Shift. He started his first business in 1992, seven months after being fired from a company he had dreamed he might lead one day. Over the next two dozen years, he founded and sold two eight-figure waste management companies. In his book he talks about how getting selfish got him unstuck.
“But there’s a dangerous trap to being selfless and a servant that doesn’t get talked or written about much,” says Malatesta. “If you don’t know about the trap, you will likely end up in what I call the valley of uncertainty. That’s the place where we end up stuck, wondering what we did wrong and wishing someone would tell us what to do to get out. It’s the place leaders end up when what they’ve been doing stops working or breaks them.”
The creator of the How’d It Happen? podcast, Malatesta’s mission is to help as many entrepreneurs as he can to create companies that improve people's lives and, maybe, the world.
“The trap is that selflessness, putting everyone else first, can easily become a leadership crutch,” says Malatesta.
Malatesta offers three tips to avoid this trap:
Putting everyone first can be a way to put being liked above being effective. “It can create a hero syndrome,” says Malatesta. “That’s when all the company’s systems lead back to the ‘all knowing’ leader and makes them feel like the most valuable person in the organization. Ultimately, being selfless can make it seem like the weight of everything, and every person’s wants, is on the leader’s shoulders.”
Taking the selfish track is the way to avoid the valley of uncertainty. Malatesta says, “The leader’s most important job is to create a vision of the future that the company wants to own and make its property. That’s job #1. Creating that takes selfish space, thinking, attention and time. It can’t be done by squeezing in time after everyone’s else’s needs are met because that time never comes.”
A new world opens when a leader chooses to be selfish first. “They see things with a new perspective, through a lens that can often be capped by selflessness,” says Malatesta. “Being selfish challenges the leader to focus on the maximum impact and clarity that they can being to their organization. That’s the leader’s job. It removes the distractions that make so many selfless leaders busy but not effective and liked but not loved.”
While an open-door policy might sound like a good idea, it can leave a leader with no time to focus. Leaders need to carve out this time and space and protect it vigorously. A leader can feel constantly ambushed and taken advantage of because of this. One talk show host famously lashed out about this in a memo to his staff, and then had to walk his comments back and admit he should’ve handled the messaging differently.
“It may seem a little like going against gravity by putting selfish before selfless,” says Malatesta. “It will make you a better leader and your company a higher performing organization.”
