Avoiding Leadership Dysfunction

With apologies to regular readers of my posts for the repetition, I have a point of view about the difference between management and leadership: 

• Managers work in a steady state environment and are accountable for getting the work done and for developing their people to get the work done and improving
• Leaders work in an abnormal environment, change, emergencies, and are accountable for direction and for getting people to follow, “Hey guys, this way, follow me!”

There’s a reason why the military always talks about leadership; they are preparing their workers for the ultimate abnormal environment, war. 

In business, management skills and leadership skills are often expected from the same person, your boss. Over my career the business press has progressed from talking about management skills to leadership skills. I think this is for three reasons:

• Nobody wants to be the boss or be bossed. Managers and supervisors are looked down upon; everybody wants to be a leader.
• We live in an increasingly abnormal business environment, constant change -changes in technology that change industries overnight, mergers and acquisitions and other structural changes, changes in societal norms, customer and worker attitudes and expectations. As someone said to me “There is no steady state!”
• In this environment influence, peer leadership, has  increased in importance, and direct lines of authority, have had to respond or as someone else said to me, “You can’t tell anyone what to do anymore!”

So everyone is a leader, even the boss and everyone has an opinion on leadership. If you read LinkedIn, there are some bad leaders out there. Here are a few of the dysfunctions of leadership:

• Unclear, poor, wrong direction: People will forgive a leader who is wrong, if he or she admits it or is transparent about what is a guess. Lack of clarity, confusion is less forgivable, especially if followers pay for the consequences. Symptoms include:
  • A vision that keeps changing. Some evolution is to be expected in uncertain times, but wild swings in the way a leader talks about the change implies the leader doesn’t know and hasn’t said “I don’t know.”
  • KPI of the week -most organizations have too many key performance indicators, but the change should have two to four at most that the leader keeps coming back to. At British Airways it was customer service (as rated by JD Power) and profit.
  • Tunnel-vision and trivia – for instance a leader who picks apart cost minutia in an innovation that will lead to doubling market share and profit.
• “He doesn’t want to lead you; he just wants you to follow him.” This was a quote about the villain Grindelwald from the movie “The Secrets of Dumbledore.” It describes a narcissist who craves the adulation of followers, but gives nothing back.  He sees no value for others, but feels entitled to their worship.  It is all about the leader when it should be all about the direction, the vison, the mission and the followers.  

In the movie, Grindelwald, is a psychopath, who manipulates people to obtain power for evil purposes. In your life, the leader may just be ego-centric, but glimmers of the expectation for adulation still exist.

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