The Ingredients of Failed Leadership
The real value of this list is as an alert for leaders themselves and those around leaders. Those around leaders who witness negative or risky circumstances need to get and inform leadership immediately. Time and time again, leaders excuse their misbehavior, shifting the blame for their intentional mistakes to, “those around me who should have alerted me or caught me”. Leaders who become perpetrators are prepared and practiced at shifting blame, if exposed or caught. There are recognizable prior events that signal existing or pending misbehaviors.
1). Established values and cultural systems and norms are gradually ignored, neutralized, or displaced by whatever become accepted yet questionable behaviors.
2). A management-imposed emergency or attitude of urgency that goes unchallenged. The phrase, “Do whatever it takes,” is among the most prevalent of excuses for breaking, changing or ignoring rules. This phrase is taken as an order and an authorization to literally ignore all rules and constraints to achieve whatever the objective happens to be.
3). A sense of ongoing top management pressure to “get on the program”, without challenge or without reporting through compliance channels. Too often, in today’s organizational structure, goals are taken as permissions, authorization, or orders to ignore the rules. Those in charge (through their own behaviors and stated or implied expectations) change the rules or establish new ones unilaterally outside of normal compliance channels. Crises rarely start, “in the mail room”, or by “a bunch of rogue employees", or by junior people. Crisis behaviors and attitudes start at a much higher level.
4). Early warning symptoms are ignored, deferred, or actively defended. Who wants to be the first to vocalize something negative about a boss or point a finger? Invincibility and omnipotence triggered by incivility are among the major features of management behavior these days. Male or female, getting an MBA and the MBA culture confers the ability to leap tall buildings, become inherently smarter than anyone else, and to treat rules and cultural norms as options.
5). An atmosphere of invincibility that overshadows or simply blinds participants to infractions, questionable decisions, and stuff that should work but doesn’t.
6). Corner–cutting. One of the most common starting places for leadership failure to begin.
7). Increasing resistance to or minimizing compliance and oversight. There is a natural tendency to resist compliance and oversight. The greatest resistance generally comes from the sales and marketing sectors of a business organization and that resistance is induced by the pressure to perform, the pressure to succeed, the pressure to beat the competition, and the pressure to beat peer organizations.
8). Decreasing responsiveness to regulatory requirements. Once an organizational culture moves away from responsiveness to regulatory requirements and begins selectively ignoring or degrading the importance of these requirements, the pattern of failure grows on itself.
9). Persistent, rigid, disciplined silence. The implied or direct order to remain silent is powerful and toxic.
10). Risk addiction, continuously making ever larger compromises to accommodate or cover up previous intentional misbehaviors. Once a manager decides to cross a line which is always intentional, they become a perpetrator. Still, they are surprised that there is no real reaction, the tendency is to cross another line to see if that works too. Surprise, surprise, it also is ignored. All too often, when an autopsy is done on failed leadership, a crucial element in the pathology sounds like, “I took a chance, nobody noticed, so I took another, nobody noticed, so I took another, and it became a habit,” “Why didn’t those people say something or do something when they found out about it?” and, “It’s really their fault for not catching me and warning me or turning me in that all these bad things happened.” The description that best describes these expanding intentional executive misbehaviors is Risk Addiction.
