Why leaders fail – 2

In an ideal situation, it should be abnormal for ineptitude to be identified with leadership. However, it is a known fact that many a leader found themselves in position of leadership by promotion, favoritism, boardroom politics and other factors except merit. Such leaders don’t come with the disposition of seeing leadership as responsibility and a platform for higher service. When a leader consistently demonstrates ineptitude in a way that patently betrays his lack of capacity to handle the demands of his office, his followers lose respect for him. In time, his function is hijacked by opportunists who portray themselves as mavericks but whose only interest is to advance their own causes, taking advantage of the leader’s foibles.

Resource management is a skill that sets effective leaders apart from the pack. Give a resourceful leader an organization with lean resources and he will grow it to the level of his vision, using resourcefulness to produce required resources. Conversely, if you give abundant resources to a leader who lacks resourcefulness, he will fritter away the resources and reduce the organization to the level of his myopia. A wasteful leader is a disaster to any organization. Such a leader is more concerned with the perks of office, the flashy cars, the luxurious accommodation, the expensive suits and shoes, etc., than he is with the actual function.

In the mid-eighties, I worked in a company that was into the manufacture of soft drinks. The company had great products but the Chairman/CEO was a different story. His office was a huge expanse of needless space with white furniture and white Persian rugs. There were six – yes you read that right – air-conditioners in his office and they all worked at the same time! At that time, the Mercedes V-Booth was the latest and arguably the most expensive in the Mercedes range in Nigeria. He imported three, brand new, from Germany. All the cars arrived the same day! A water tanker that was bought with company funds and branded in company colours was put to no other use except supply of water to the Chairman/CEO’s house! When he celebrated the funeral ceremony of his father who had died a few years earlier, he pulled no plugs in the spending of company resources. It was only a matter of time before the company went under.

Teachability is a hallmark of effective leadership. Great leaders are also great learners. As long as a leader keeps learning and remains teachable, he constantly reinvents himself and is open to new ideas. By so doing, he remains relevant and on the cutting edge of his function. A leader who finds it difficult to learn soon ossifies mentally and is impervious to change and the dynamism of his operating environment.  A leader’s apathy to learning is akin to a lack of desire for growth.  The result of this is leadership or executive inertia. When inertia characterizes leadership, the leader takes the entire organization with him on a sure downward spiral.

Success without successors is cataclysmic failure. I have come across leaders who are so insecure that they cannot trust anyone else with responsibility. Their mantra is that if there is any work you consider very important, do it yourself. Such leaders micromanage to a fault. Constantly breathing down their subordinates’ necks and supervising their every function, the leaders live and function with a Messiah complex that expresses itself in a sense of indispensability. Because they always live in the megalomaniac delusion that they are the only ones with capacity, they fail to recognize that the job of a leader is not to do everything but to get everything done, using the combination of his efforts with those of others. Through a mastery of the art of delegation and delegate empowerment to perform, a leader not only replicates himself in his subordinates, he is able to get more done in shorter time and very often, at less cost. The Messiah Complex is what breeds insecure, sit-tight leadership. Any leader bitten by this bug can hardly go on a holiday because he believes that things would collapse if he ever stepped aside. Unfortunately, by the time he has worked himself to a grind and ultimately to a halt, the reality dawns on him that his name was never Omnipotent! When his failure becomes evident to all, he is in line for replacement, the very thing that he feared! If as a leader, you cannot step aside for more than a week from the organization you currently lead without having nightmares or jitters, you are a time-bomb both to yourself and the organization.

• Opposition in Oyo resorting to violence for fear of electoral defeat ― APC

Every establishment has its fair share of in-house politicians who derive their legitimacy from a patent ability to play one person against another. When such people see insecurity in the leader, they simply position themselves accordingly. Gossip is the fuel of office politics. While pretending to be his loyalists, they tell him largely cooked-up stories about other people in the organization who constitute a threat to his authority. The intention is clear though not evident to the now serenaded leader who has literally been captured in a bubble of his own inadequacies of character. It is to demonize others so that they can ingratiate themselves to a leader who not only waits for, but hangs on their every word. The consequence of this is a leadership that is so afraid of its own shadows and can hardly venture outside the ring drawn around him by his “loyalists”. To such a leader, suspicion takes the place of discernment in dealing with his followers. Not knowing exactly who to trust apart from his sycophantic “inner circle”, everyone is seen as a potential threat to his office and position. As this progresses, he begins to lose confidence even in his team members. Even when he delegates duties to them, he does not relinquish authority to them to enable effective function! This lends credence to the words of the sage Solomon in Proverbs 29 verse 12 that if a ruler listens to falsehood, all his officials will be wicked.

Every successful leader is a study in emotional intelligence. Great leaders become so, largely because of their capacity to get along with people, the basic components of their function mix. To be effective therefore, a leader must learn to control his temper. When a leader flares up in a fit of rage every so often, he may be feared by his subordinates, but he can hardly command their respect. A leader who is given to unbridled temper outbursts is generally seen as unstable, egocentric and inconsiderate. Anger may sometimes be a healthy thing especially when it is directed at things or situations that could potentially hamper the achievement of a collective outcome. However, when it is simply to assuage the ego of a conceited leader, it becomes counterproductive and his subordinates soon see through the smokescreen of his irrationality.  Leadership failure is the natural outcome… continued.

Remember, the sky is not your limit, God is!