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Wednesday, December 5, 2012

Loyalty Up, Loyalty Down

I was watching a friend get crushed by his incompetent superior. It seemed inadvertent, unsuccessful, and painful.

Actually, incompetent was too strong a word. The superior was overmatched by his environment, and didn’t take appropriate action. I see that happening a lot.

Which got me thinking about loyalty.

There is an internal efficiency to demonstrating loyalty down the chain. One action is communicated to all subordinates, behavior improves. Loyalty down is a force multiplier.

Loyalty up is for one person, may be appreciated, often not.

Loyalty down has more impact.

Please join us at the Capital Technology Management Hub on December 11 at 6:30 for 300 seconds of Rainmaker 17 – Breaking The Invisible Wall, What we learned at last month’s GMU Annual Startup Challenge Competition at TeqCorner, followed by Joshua Green explaining Cleantech OpenThe World’s Largest Cleantech Accelerator -Funding Green Technology Startups

1 comment:

Unknown said...

Loyalty is something given freely because it was earned in the eyes of the giver.

Perhaps we should have a separate term - like 'foyalty' to describe hollow loyalty based on fear - the instant the threat is gone, the 'loyalty' evaporates.

Since we're inventing new descriptive terms, another one would be 'cloyalty' to describe the boss's feined respect & 'loyalty' to the staff until not needed or remembered.

Even as kids, before we could see the ramifications of a lack of commitment and fair dealing, we knew we didn't like such actions.

Great post!