How Psychopaths Become CEO’s (Pt 3) – Preferred Trends

Psychopaths often become CEO’s because we ask them to do so. We usually do so unknowingly, but circumstances around events encourage us to seek their personality traits. The introductory post of this mini-series summarized the trends found in these events:

• Adding more organization, processes and rules
• Establishing or enforcing fiscal discipline and cost containment
• Tackling difficult political decisions regarding businesses, staff and other relationships
• Fast-growing companies in need of organization and processes to scale

As companies grow, the trends adding more organization, processes and rules become necessary for scalability, for ensuring all know their function. Such structure establishes the rules by which all follow and by which psychopaths seek to acquire power by circumventing. Psychopaths need predictable behavior; policies, processes, rules and procedures are excellent tools for curtailing spontaneity.

About this time, slower growth develops as another trend. Competitive, economic and scaling pressures naturally slow growth and encourage shifts to fiscal and operational discipline from internal relationships. In fast-growing companies, natural resistance quickly arises when employees are accustomed to “just getting things done.”  Working through the multiplicity of relationships to bring about this discipline is difficult and often emotionally burdensome to sensitive individuals.

To avoid this burden, we often seek people who can make them unencumbered by these relationships. Psychopaths are ideal since they aren’t emotionally troubled by relationships. This is what charismatic Lenin and intelligent Trotsky did when entrusting the security forces to Stalin; he enforced the operational discipline needed to entrench and scale the Russian Revolution’s gains (and with Lenin’s death seized its leadership).

In the end, trends toward structural, fiscal and operational discipline aid the advancement of psychopaths when sensitive leaders shirk and delegate the tough relational decisions. So, we check ourselves by asking, “What tough relational decisions are we delegating today?”