The Complete List of Reasons Leaders Fail
Top 12 reasons leaders fail:
- Neglecting culture. Culture building is job-one for all leaders.
- Lack of paranoia. The paranoid think about what could go wrong and make contingency plans.
- Bitterness, grudges, and resentment. People fail. Successful leaders allow fresh starts.
- Task rather than people focus.
- Accepting complexity.
- Lack of political awareness. Successful leaders build relationships with powerful players.
- Failure to sell successes and accomplishments with humility. If the right people don’t know your value, you aren’t valuable.
- Trusting the untested. Talent without a track record is dangerous.
- Fearing great talent.
- Postponing tough conversations.
- People pleasing.
- Refusing to adapt. Adaptability is the greatest ability.
Bottom 20 reasons leaders fail:
- Stagnant pool of friends. Keep your current friends and develop new.
- Disconnecting with others due to the blindness of power.
- Failure to build strong teamwork.
- Neglecting to develop skills, both theirs and those of others.
- Needing to outshine others rather than letting others shine.
- Confusing leadership with management.
- Cowardice. It takes courage to lead. If you don’t think so, you haven’t led.
- Brown nosing those above and neglecting those below.
- Too much doing and not enough helping others do.
- Withdrawal.
- Over-promising.
- Fence sitting.
- Lack of clarity.
- Lack of follow through.
- Favoritism.
- Blaming.
- Rejecting uncomfortable ideas.
- Excluding themselves from accountability. “Do as I say, not as I do.”
- Lack of alignment with board members and organizational values.
- Relying on authority.
Bonus material: “Ten Reasons Leaders Fail, Plus ONE” – Based on a conversation with the CEO of Circuit City.
What’s at the top of your list of reasons leaders fail?
What should be added to the complete list of reasons leaders fail?
In the Spirit of recent posts about keeping it simple.
People only fail for one reason and one reason only, they GIVE UP!
I Concur!
Shifterp OUT!
Simple enough!
I think the top reason they fail is lack of awareness about themselves.
This then extends to the culture in which they are functioning, and the people they are attempting to lead. Unless we are honest about ourselves, we cannot be open and honest while we are looking at situations outside of ourselves with a less-than-jaundiced eye, or make plans that fit in with where we are trying to lead people to.
Know thyself, and know where the heck you are trying to go.
🙂
Good post, Dan
Martina,
Good thinking. I continual work on the leaders world view at first often finding it deeply unexplored. Form there the leader can see their orientation is often poorly align and can shift it without the unexplored baggage getting in the way. Once completed there personal expectancy rises, ego reduces and they find themselves on solid footing.
Love it Martina.
Your connection between self-knowledge and connecting with cultures and individuals is powerful and important. Isn’t it funny how knowing ourselves precedes knowing others. We can’t even know what we like until we have some level of self-knowledge. Nailing it!
I understand what you mean by paranoia and I have seen it play out in CEOs and it is a very unattractive leadership quality in my book. I recent to a motorcycle train program and they use the acronym SEE. Search, Evaluate, and Execute. I am planning on doing a post on this in the next couple week. My thinking is this my be more constructive than paranoia. The act of having the search radar on Constantine looking and evaluating.
Additionally, in my work I find trusting others is at the top of the failure list. Leaders must trust their teams.
Culture at the top of the list – so agree and so under used by so many leaders. When I interviewed Mike Harper former CEO and Chairman of ConAgra he said he thought effecting culture was the best tool in theCEOs tool box.
I’m admittedly pushing the use of paranoia in order to push the point. Definitely a down side to paranoia…the belief that “there’s an enemy behind every desk…” drains and destroys leadership because it destroys connecting.
Love the Harper quote. Tony Hsieh, CEO of Zappos said his leadership focus is build culture. Cheers
Hey, my two favorite leadership voices in the same blog! You have both significantly influenced me, so thank you. Speaking of failure, I recently took Gary’s “Just Ask Leadership” test and, no other way to say it, failed. I’m really looking at that and doing some self-re-evaluating. My team and I look and feel successful, but I want to dig deep to make sure I am seeing reality and not just what I want to see. Thanks again, and keep up the good (not always easy) work!
I concur with Martina. The lack of awareness of self is where all progress or lack of it begins. Before one can even have perspective one has to have awareness. With awareness comes perspective, with that perceptions and provision needs can be assessed to gain processes and procedures. But it begins with leading self.
thanks for jumping in, Sweetie. Martina always adds great insights. It took me a long time to realize leadership was more than methods, strategies, and techniques.
Typically we look at these items from the positive side…on what “TO DO” to be a good leader as opposed to what NOT to do. It always increases understanding to clarify what something is “NOT.”
As I read these 2 lists, I thought about how many of these behaviors I could associate with people I’ve worked for in the past. I can only aspire to make sure I don’t fall into those same traps.
Neglecting Culture seems to be the biggest in my book because that signals a lack of awareness of oneself and the feelings/needs of others and ties into several other behaviors on the list including being task focused instead of people focused, lacking empathy, grudge holding, fearing talent, postponing tough conversations and building relationships.
I wrote the list mostly from the perspective of things that I have done wrong. 🙂 I’m a slow learner. “Culture building” wouldn’t have even made the list a few years ago. Best
Hi Dan, I just did a presentation to a group of physicians last week on the importance of creating a great workplace culture. Each business has a culture whether or not you are trying to create one. The problem is if you are not trying to create a good one, what type of culture does your business have?
Great post!
Dan,
I couldn’t agree more with the Number 1 item. Establishing a culture is so crucial. If we don’t have an identity of who we are and where we are going the destination of the vision will never be reached. Great list! Thank you for sharing.
Take care,
Mike
Regarding church leaders, all of the above could be categorized in two issues:
1. lack of integrity
2. lack of (real) connection to Jesus
Complete. Love it.
#10 fits with “always run AT problems and challenges, not AWAY from them.” A must for great leadership.
Great job, as always, Dan.
Nicely whitewashed. I strongly agree with items 1 & 2 on Dan’s “Top 12 reasons leaders fail” list. This is not to say that I agree with their rankings as number 1 and 2, nor that I necessarily disagree with all of the remaining items on Dan’s list(s). Better readings, however, on leadership (taking over control within competing dynamic cultures and doing so while facing significant opposition from within and without) are perhaps: (1) The Prince by Niccolò Machiavelli (I recommend Tim Parks’ translation: ISBN: 978-0-14-310586-2), and (2) U.S. Army/Marine Counterinsurgency Field Manual by General David Petraeus (ISBN: 978-1-56852-688-1).