We Can Admire Leadership But Do Awards Help Anyone?

The recent HuffPost article San Francisco Fosters, Nurtures and Honors A Different Breed of Leadership reported on the Most Admired CEOs Awards, sponsored by the San Francisco Business Times.

It seems like they did a good thing, honoring a diverse mix of companies with different products and services — someone from the Girl Scouts, the CEO of Kaiser Permanente, the head of a family company that makes chocolates and the CEO of the Golden State Warriors.

But why a competition? I realize it’s happened with singing and cooking on TV, but since when does it have to be that way with CEO admiration? The article was almost silent on that issue, aside from identifying a common theme that these CEOs recognized the importance of hiring and empowering employees, service to a broader mission and fearlessness, which pretty much everyone would agree are good things, but not really a distinguishing factor among companies.

What’s wrong with this?

1. It puts “being admired” on a par with excellence in playing a sport, singing or cooking.
2. Making it a contest forces leadership into the same temporal mold as one-time efforts like a game, song or meal when it ought to be relationship that develops and matures over time,
3. Singling out the CEOs rather than the company and its entire work force embarrasses those it’s meant to honor. It sounds like the honorees themselves understood that at some level, and that may be why they sheepishly gave a “shout-out” to employees in their speeches. They were probably so intent on taking the embarrassing spotlight off themselves they neglected to highlight some of the great things their employees actually did that helped the company and its customers, and which were instrumental in making the CEO look good!
4. Calling them the “Most Admired” disrespects the CEOs of other companies not so honored and the employees who admire them. There have been other lists of “Bests” among Bay Area companies, including Hot Companies, Coolest Companies, and Best And Brightest Companies. But people are used to those adjectives being used euphemistically. Putting “admired” in with that group seems strained.
5. Giving an award for vague and unspecified accomplishments appears disingenuous and smacks of some kind of consolation prize, particularly in the Bay Area which is home to 24 of the 200 highest-paid CEOs in the United States.

If they wanted to give an atta-boy to some companies, this was a missed opportunity. If someone did something special, they should have said what it was. If it was to give some genuine positive feedback to the employees of those companies, they could have done that too.

People work hard in every company, and singling out any of them or their leadership for public recognition should be done with careful regard to how it’s going to be perceived by those honored and others looking on.