How Leaders Fail

Failure. That’s a thought-provoking word. It connotates negative feelings for most, but in reality, it results from most efforts of those beginning their journey as a leader. Think about it – if everyone could do everything perfectly on their first try…the world as we know it would not make sense. We’d all be Olympic athletes, Captains of Industry, or simply the best at whatever profession you’d want to pursue. But the reality is that the average human, even after extensive training, is highly prone to making errors.
Research from NASA suggests that human error is responsible for 60%‐80% of failures, accidents, and incidents in high‐risk industries.¹ For example, those in transportation, medicine, or law enforcement can see the immediate effects of their errors in real-time through accidents, injuries, or death. But what about nascent business or education leaders whose errors are less readily apparent? Leadership decisions that plant latent errors ultimately causing degradation of performance or lower standards can be insidious and profoundly destructive. So, how can those poor leadership decisions be observed, identified, analyzed, contextualized, categorized, corrected, and perfected, without immediate feedback?

Every military force in the world sends its officers through basic leadership training. Young officers are taught to identify and establish goals, evaluate resources, assess risks, formulate plans, anticipate resistance, and apply learned decision-making skills to achieve sometimes audacious objectives. They have cadres of seasoned senior leaders guiding them from day one of their careers. Junior officers are given small tasks at first, and afforded resources, time, and achievable goals as they develop their skills and build confidence before they are given increasing levels of responsibility. It may take years, if not decades, of training and practice to become a proficient military leader. And their rope is short – mistakes are rapidly corrected by their superiors, and their failures are unmercifully dissected through individual and group debriefings followed by corrective actions. Throughout their careers, military leaders are indoctrinated with core tenets of unit cohesion, team morale, esprit de corps, individual morals, and professional ethics. That’s the historical reality of military leadership and the modern profession of warfighting.

But what about the corporate world? Where is the Acme CEO Leadership School? Where do business managers or education supervisors go to school to train for actual leadership? Only in the past decade or so has the proliferation of higher education degrees focusing on leadership gained a small niche in the psyche of the corporate world. Young leaders today focus primarily on their technical, or hard skills – usually working within the IT paradigm. Sure, they may be technical wizards, but where are they gaining the critical soft skills required to effectively lead people? How are we, as a society, inculcating our nascent leaders with emotional intelligence (EQ), social intelligence (SQ), and cultural intelligence (CQ) to effectively lead in today’s multidisciplinary world? The answer, unfortunately, is that we are not doing a very good job at teaching the vanguard of today’s emerging workforce those critical soft skills sufficiently to become successful leaders. In fact, we are setting them up for leadership failure.

What happens when an employee is promoted to a managerial position and brings along their collective emotional baggage of experiences working for a toxic boss, or their inability to recognize the detrimental effects of their undeveloped communication skills? The negative effects of the Law of Primacy can be long-lasting. We now live in a world where many younger employees have lost (or never learned) the social functionality of conversing via a telephone. Or writing an effective letter. It can be
argued that this is a systemic failure indicative of ineffective leadership (if not education). From government agencies to the corporate world, to academia, failures in leadership have manifested in the most insidious ways. Examples of leadership failure include workers being ghosted by their supervisors, employees purposefully neglecting to answer their ringing telephones stemming from permissively insular company cultures, frivolous complaints launched by employees against their supervisors who have simply asked for job descriptions to be met, graduate students lacking personal responsibility in meeting scholastic requirements while demanding undeserved passing grades, to human resources officers failing to screen out applicants despite the candidates’ obvious lack of social skills, ultimately leading to workplace violence. It’s no wonder that workplace conflict is at an all-time high.² We’ve lost a significant degree of effective social interaction – through a combination of reliance on ubiquitous unidirectional social media, pandemic isolation, and the unique constraints of an evolutionary job market permitting the rise of pseudotransformational³ leaders devoid of critical soft skills.

The Great Resignation describes the current mass exodus of teachers from academia due, in no small part, to their lack of organizational support from toxic administrators.⁴ It’s no secret that the specter of employees fleeing inept leadership in dysfunctional organizations and institutions is endemic in today’s world. Unethical leadership has been exposed as anathema to employee satisfaction and organizational success throughout businesses and academic institutions, yet poor leadership persists.⁵ And this begs a delicate question: How do we tell ineffective leaders that they are, indeed, ineffective leaders? In some instances, they are promoted out of their current spheres of influence to minimize corporate damage. Problem solved, right? Nope. The problem is simply exacerbated and reflects poorly on senior leadership and the organization as a whole, while employees look for the exits. What about being fired? Guess what happens when toxic managers resurface in a leadership position with a rival organization, emboldened by a lack of learned consequences from their previously unchecked unethical, unprofessional, or even illegal behavior? The cycle of leadership failure repeats itself.

So, what’s the answer? Speaking truth to power only works if leaders are self-aware enough to step back, self-reflect, and ask for help. HR tools such as the 360-degree feedback assessment can be a good start – but only if senior leaders are willing to apply it to themselves, and not just disingenuously impose it on their managers as a demonstration of their transitory grasp of what they observed in their monthly lunch-and-learn workshop on Leadership 101. If you are a senior leader facing budget cutbacks and consequent employee layoffs, you might also wish to reassess your publicized raise in annual compensation, or else deal with the repercussions of employee resentment, if not revolt, through loss of trust, loss of loyalty, and increased workplace conflict, not to mention self-examining your integrity. And managers – ask yourself if you are fully supporting your senior leaders’ vision and (hopefully ethical)
strategic goals. Are you speaking truth to power, exercising your integrity, and doing what’s right? If not, then perhaps it’s time to re-assess your position and tenure in your organization. Perhaps you’re not a right fit – not everyone is capable, or wants, to be a leader. And that’s ok. Not all strategic organizational goals apply to every employee. It’s also ok to re-evaluate what’s important in life, and which pathway you should take on your career journey. Forks in the road are a good thing. They remind us there are
many interesting routes to choose from in your quest for success. Looking over your shoulder at regular intervals can give you a vastly different perspective of your landscape. It’s like turning around and walking backward – it affords you a 180-degree perspective of where you’ve just been, what you experienced, and how that applies to the journey ahead.

Learning to be an effective leader is not easy. It’s a non-linear, multidimensional process, driven by unanticipated events, both good and bad. It can be a very long, and sometimes arduous journey, fraught with challenging obstacles that rarely repeat themselves. Generally, those obstacles and events focus on other people. Interacting effectively with people is the basis of leadership. Colleagues, supervisors, followers – they all shape who, why, how, where, and when we lead. Working with people requires soft, or non-technical skills. Many managers, supervisors, and CEOs spectacularly fail at leadership because they lack soft skills, yet still manage to fumble their way through organization after organization leaving a trail of corporate destruction and disgruntled employees. Just read the news headlines to see the latest expose excoriating people in leadership positions who lack honesty, integrity, loyalty, or adherence to the law or relevant professional standards. That is leadership failure.

Alternatively, those enlightened leaders pursuing leadership success must recognize the critical importance and applicability of soft skills, namely, emotional intelligence (EQ), social intelligence (SQ), and cultural intelligence (CQ), and appreciate the need to practice self-awareness, reflection, and the development of superior communication skills. Inexplicably, these key soft skills are rarely recognized, let alone emphasized, in many of today’s corporate or educational settings. Industry and government should require a degree of leadership expertise before placing their exceptional employees in positions of authority and power. Before taking on any position requiring effective leadership, ask yourself – have I been adequately trained to lead with confidence? Or, am I unintentionally loitering around the social component of Dunning-Kruger’s Peak of Stupidity?⁶ What mentorship in effective leadership have I received to ensure my success? Who can I turn to for honest, unbiased, constructive, timely, and confidential feedback when I make a mistake? What do I do if I think I need to shift my strategic
decision-making processes? Am I an effective communicator? As a leader in my organization, who’s got my back?

If you don’t have immediate and tangible answers to these and other questions, leadership coaching might be your best solution. Effective leadership avoids unnecessary failures by building a foundation of leadership competencies comprising soft skills in emotional intelligence (EQ), social intelligence (SQ), and cultural intelligence (CQ). Combined with the learned ability to clearly communicate your written and spoken ideas and actively listening to your followers, you’ll be on the right path to becoming an effective leader. Turning failure into success. That’s what Leadership Coaching can do for you.

Dr. David Ballinger
The Leadership Coach

References

1 DeMott, D.L. (2014). Human Reliability and the Cost of Doing Business.
2 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9902267/
3 https://link.springer.com/referenceworkentry/10.1007/978-3-319-23514-1_204-1
4 https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S0742051X22003675
5 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8238029/
6 https://psycnet.apa.org/doiLanding?doi=10.1037%2F0022-3514.77.6.1121