<h1 style="text-align: center;">Leadership Challenge: Why Business Leaders Fail</h1>
There is a huge amount of sector and functional data which could help tackle some fundamental leadership challenges businesses face daily. One of particular interest to us is why historically excellent and successful professionals fail.
Using executive search/senior recruiting data, it has long been recognised that the reasons why things do not work out (barring gross error) are more often a function of interpersonal factors than other issues (such as technical incompetence etc.). This has been the pattern for the last 10-15 years. In 2014 however, one study highlighted the following additional reasons:
- Approaching leadership with the wrong expectations.
- Lack of training in the right skill set.
- A lack of motivation to lead.
- Ignoring the need to build relationships/teams.
- A failure to grow trust.
- An inability to apply effective interpersonal skills.
- A failure to listen, and jumping in quickly rather than learning and building on what they see.
- The pathological leader: narcissists, bullies or similar.
- The inflexible leader: failure to adapt their style and strategy in an ever changing world.
- The over-reaching leader: bending the world to their will, stretching their vision to breaking point.
- The lopsided leader: an unbalanced portfolio of skills, but no re-balancing of co-leaders and teams.
- The unlucky leader: a failure to prepare and succeed in unforeseen or extreme circumstances.
- Choosing the wrong personnel: Often this is due to leaders who cut corners. For example they allow others to make key selection or development decisions, they avoid using best practices, and do not exit problematic hires soon enough.
- Delegating, but not effectively monitoring subordinates: empowering but failing to monitor and review them.
- Getting too confident in decision making: overconfidence and complacency leading to not involving others in the decision-making, and critically not evaluating alternative courses.
- Neglecting organizational politics: failing to understand, and learn how to navigate, political situations, or use those processes to their and the business’s advantage.
- Under-communicating and lack of transparency: avoiding criticism by failing to be open and transparent and not using that criticism, acknowledging when the input is valuable, and explaining when and why it may not be relevant.
- The tendency to grow stale in the saddle.
- Responses to stress and success.
- Top management team problems.
- Inadequate board vigilance.
- Scandal.
- Poor performance.
- One is assessment for selection and development.
- The second is supporting a business in identifying their talent requirements.
- The third falls into the broad category of “talent management” such as devising succession plans, conducting 360 reviews, conducting pre-restructuring functional reviews and profiling the predictors of high performance in commercially pivotal roles.