Leadership Lessons from Living in a Cult

A management consultant draws wisdom from his youthful misadventures as a member of a doomsday cult

By John P. Schuster

I am 99 percent over my embarrassment at choosing to live in a cult when I was in my late 20s. Of course, I still cringe when I hear end-of-world predictions like last month's doomsday forecast by Harold Camping of Family Radio Worldwide, but there is often something we can learn from even the most bizarre experiences.

I joined the cult because I was disillusioned with, and poorly connected to, the world. Located in the farmlands of the Midwest, the cult fascinated me, for a time. And it was intense. I was vulnerable, and the extreme views in the cult acted as an elixir. The followers believed that the axis of the earth would shift in 27 years due to planetary alignment. The world would collapse, and those living in the cult, and about 144,000 others, according to their interpretation of a passage from Revelation, would survive. I needed a new world view and settled on this ridiculous one in my immaturity.

The group of 200 was a rich amalgam of ex-hippies, young families, construction workers, artists, and a federal executive. Most were college educated, and they came from all over North America to the flat farmland. The men and single women would go off to work in the morning. I did an 85-mile commute to my office job in downtown Chicago with another cult member who was a salesman for IBM (IBM). Mothers saw their children off to school. It was a weird combination of Leave it to Beaver tradition while preparing for the end of the world.

I abandoned the cult within a year because I started to do my own thinking. I may not have known where I was going next after my brush with this pseudo-reality, but I knew it was not there. Despite the weirdness, the cult provided a hothouse of ingredients for several life-long leadership lessons. The ingredients: big mission, strong personalities, lots at stake, and dysfunctional leadership.

Lesson One: Take risks and make mistakes, lots of them.

The first thing I learned, of course, is that you can take useful knowledge away from just about any experience, even mistakes. The best leaders I have worked with know this and encourage experimentation and taking reasonable risks. The biggest enemy of any enterprise is complacency and conformity, not risk-taking and mistakes. As long as risks and mistakes are not horrendously stupid, they will advance the enterprise in some way even if things don't work out as planned.

Lesson Two: Don't soft-pedal the truth.

There are endless times in the busy, often conflicted life of a chief executive when it would be so convenient to gloss over the truth—or worse, to ignore it and explain it away. Bubbles, busts, and various disasters get built around our natural tendency for soft-pedaling. Think the mortgage meltdown, for example.

I learned this at the cult. When our efforts were stagnant, falling far behind the stated goals, the leader "reinterpreted" the results. One glaring example was that the cult stayed the same size for years—about 200 members—instead of growing to the big number initially predicted. Its membership was more a revolving door than an accumulation. We would look at the data of nongrowth and swallow the leaders' explanations for staying tribal-size. He facilitated a comfortable group rationalization so members would stop questioning themselves.

The best leaders don't gloss over mistakes or make excuses. When something doesn't work, they admit it, try to learn from it, and move on. "We made a mistake" and "I made a mistake" are power-engendering words. Candor multiplied by honesty is a huge source of leadership power. It builds the platform on which the foundation for the future can take shape.