From Pages 40 & 41 GOOD SUCCESS: Learning Good Lessons from Bad Leaders

Many, many possibilities can make bad leaders bad. For example, an inability to create or communicate a compelling vision that is widely adopted throughout the organization may cause a bad leader to be viewed as bad. Perhaps, inattention to the basics makes a leader bad. Maybe it’s a lack of diligence, resilience, innovation, or discipline. It could be a lack of adequate external or internal environmental scanning for threats. Perhaps the leaders just don’t learn, or they learn too little too late. A personality culture, rather than a performance culture, that allows the bad leader to persist may be the cause. The reasons are myriad, but I believe at the heart of the matter is the fact that . . . Leaders are bad because they are allowed to be so. Boards of directors, superiors, friends, and allies enable a bad leader to remain bad, because they give up helping the bad leader become good by becoming accountable. Fatigue, inattentiveness, or a lack of proper modeling by supervisors are additional causes for defaulting to bad leadership. The greatest concern and biggest caution is directed at bad leaders who continually prove to be bad people. Good lessons learned from good people performing badly are important, but they are not the anxiety-producing, career-busting ones about which you should worry most. Certainly, from time to time, an imbalanced person may exercise good leadership behaviors. But good leaders manifest positive personality characteristics such as trustworthiness, diligence, creativity, ability to influence and motivate people who can execute and succeed when measured against organizational goals and mission. Bad leaders are those who perpetually don’t do these positive things.

I’m not writing about good leaders who cause an occasional setback or have an infrequent flop. I am writing about those leaders who continually flop and don’t meet the standards and expectations of the organizations they were hired to transform. These same people, for reasons known only to a few, get promoted to higher positions where they manifest even greater incompetency. These are the lucky nincompoops of the workplace. A no-fault mentality allows these bad leaders to flourish. By no-fault, I mean a lack of accountability for general well-being, success, and/or profitability. No-fault policies may work in marriage dissolutions or in car insurance policy claims, but they do not work in organizations intent on meeting their vision and mission statements—those striving to achieve the benefits for which they were created.

To what behaviors do bad leaders default? Often, they default to nice behaviors in public and not-nice behaviors in private. Nice is nice, but what most organizations need are effective leaders, not necessarily nice leaders. I’m not writing about basic civility but about bad leaders who are inclined to default to not-nice rather than nice.

Nice is too highly rated. Effective is not rated highly enough. If you work with nice leaders who are also effective, that’s desirable, and you should consider putting down roots and learning from them. But working with not-nice leaders who are also
ineffective should cause you seek employment and fulfillment elsewhere.