The Squirrels Are Watching

Loyalists and Sycophants

Mark Penn was essentially fired today, and the only real question is: what took so long? For those unaware, Mark Penn was Hillary Clinton’s “chief strategist,” deeply disliked by event those within his own campaign. The conventional wisdom was that Penn was an idiot, and the only reason he was kept around by the Clinton’s was his sense of loyalty — an argument also applied to Clintonistas Patti Solis Doyle and Ira Magaziner.

Bush was accused of making the same mistake — rewarding loyalty over competence — with appointments such as “Brownie“. These mistakes are, to some degree, pretty understandable though. In a cutthroat environment like politics, where you have to suspect that everyone is, to some degree, plotting to backstab someone else, loyalty is an incredible valuable virtue. We all like to extoll the virtues of a meritocracy, but after a few months in the start up world, I can tell you that while individual ability is certainly important, the ability for a team of individuals to work together is also important — and in order for individuals to work together, they need to trust each other — trust that each person in the group is loyal either to their fellow group members or to some larger purpose for which they’re working. Given that, I wouldn’t blame Bush or Clinton for rewarding loyalty.

The real problem, I feel, isn’t rewarding loyalty per se but rewarding sycophancy. Loyalty emphasizes a genuine allegiance to and concern about the wellbeing of the person you’re loyal to. Sycophancy, on the other hand, is focused on the person demonstrating loyalty. More often that not, this person is not genuinely loyal but is simply making a show of loyalty to win favor.

True loyalists are willing to sacrifice themselves if that furthers the cause of whomever they are loyal to because that person’s cause is also their cause. True loyalists are not afraid to offend those to whom they are loyal because they trust that their relationship with that person is strong enough and deep enough to withstand such rifts. True loyalists are not offended if they are tossed aside without reward because they swore allegiance without any expectation of quid pro quo. In contrast, the sycophant is self-serving. They curry favor and use that favor to dominate others, to establish their own little fiefdom, and to elevate the perception of their own importance.

In times of crisis, loyalists will help when they can and remove themselves when they cannot. Sycophants however will demand some favor when their assistance is required and simply get in the way when they are no longer needed.

A leader who surround him or herself with sycophants instead of loyalists is either so stupid they cannot distinguish between the two, so insecure about their own abilities that they constantly need someone to reaffirm them, or so paranoid that they confuse the lack of fawning with a plot to usurp their authority.

Ideally, leaders could simply surround themselves with the most qualified individuals and expect that each individual would work to the best of his or her ability and get along with all the other individuals. This is rarely possible in environments where trust is lacking — e.g. those involving power and substantial amounts of money. In such cases, loyalty should be rewarded. The trick is distinguishing the loyalists from the sycophants.

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