Leadership
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5/28/2013 @ 9:45AM |25,611 views
6 Reasons Leaders Make Bad Decisions
Employees are growing noticeably more frustrated with their leaders. Employees want their leaders to have their backs and listen to their concerns; to provide clarity of purpose and performance expectations; and to chart a roadmap for the future. They expect leadership from their leaders – but instead many employees are finding themselves being led by people that lack focus and vision, mismanage resources, and get caught-up in corporate politics. Leaders need to step up their game and begin to provide the required strategic support and direction to keep their employees motivated and their teams inspired.Leadership is not for everyone and this quickly becomes evident when leaders make bad decisions. Unfortunately, many organizations promote people into leadership positions – where they don’t really belong – for the wrong reasons. Employees can sense this. They know when someone is not ready for leadership responsibilities and increased levels of accountability. Employees are aware of those that assume the role of “corporate watchdog” (to assure the workplace culture that is being dictated from the top is being adhered too) versus action-oriented leaders with real authority.
Employees are inspired when their leaders are empowered to make good, thoughtful and smart decisions. They respect leaders taking calculated risks, not those merely serving as another layer of management – an additional “go-between” that stunts growth and opportunity. Furthermore, when leaders make bad decisions, their employees begin to lose confidence in them and trust decreases, especially when their poor decision-making patterns don’t change.
I once reported to a leader that “played the part” – but didn’t trust himself enough to serve in the role of a leader you could consistently rely upon. This person spent a lot of time observing what the more tenured leaders did in the organization, mimicking their ways and styles. You could see it during meetings, even when the other leaders were not in the room. He didn’t appear to be a natural leader and had a difficult time establishing his own identity and leadership credibility.
Of course, this made everyone on the team uncertain about how to approach him and made the lines of communication disjointed. As a result, he began to make bad decisions, people lost confidence in his ability to lead and top talent was lost along the way. Needless to say, performance declined rapidly and the team became uninspired. Employees began to question senior management because of their decision to support a person that brought the team down and never made the effort to build the right kind of relationships with the people that mattered most: his direct reports who could help him make better decisions and be successful for the long-term.
This person focused more on trying to impress the leadership incumbents, satisfying political agendas and building internal networks that didn’t matter to the performance of the team he was responsible to lead. His tenure ended after a long drawn-out 6 months of wasted time and poor leadership.
Employees want leaders that can help them grow professionally and that have the influence to advance their careers over time. These are the types of leaders that know how to advance themselves naturally and become part of the high-potential establishment. They are leaders that know how to organically manage from within the corporate culture, maximize resources, motivate, inspire and – most importantly – make good, sound decisions.
Leaders that are focused on their own hidden agendas lose sight of the bigger picture, quickly get disconnected from their employees and fail to build a team that lasts. They make bad decisions on complicated issues with the intention of advancing their own agendas and career ambitions first.
To help you identify those leaders that are not ready for their leadership roles and are prone to fall into the trap of making bad decisions, be on the look-out for the following six behavioral patterns:
1. Rely Too Much on Past Experience
Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business professor Sydney Finkelstein has studied decision-making and written about it in his book, Think Again: Why Good Leaders Make Bad Decisions and How to Keep it From Happening to You. Mr. Finkelstein says in a 2009 Wall Street Journal article that, “Leaders tend to rely on past experience that seems useful, but is actually sometimes dangerous. We always talk about how important experience is. I think we overstate experience, because it doesn’t exactly fit the situation you’re in. You’re liable to rely on it in a way that’s just not going to be that helpful.”
This explains why leaders have a difficult time transferring their prior success to a new company. Just because you have a track record of prior success doesn’t mean that it will apply within your current organization. As such, leaders need to be mindful of the workplace conditions, co-workers, resources and how to create momentum in a new environment. They need to know where the potholes are located and how leaders have been historically successful in the organization they are now serving.
Don’t force your methods expecting the same results from the past. Respect your current employer and the dynamics of the workplace; otherwise you will make bad decisions.
2. Addicted to Corporate Politics
Do you have a leader that is politically motivated? Unfortunately, this is all too common and results in bad decision making and a short-lived tenure. Political motivations make it difficult to make objective decisions and manage the core responsibilities at hand. Those leaders that have fallen victim to the political trap lose their identity and get sucked into other people’s agendas and motives. Most of the time these motives don’t align with their beliefs and thus over time they find themselves making poor decisions to keep a bad relationship alive (though at the time the leader believes it is a good decision to enhance a politically-connected relationship).
In an attempt to advance themselves, leaders can get addicted to corporate politics. They become blind by the addiction and lose sight of their primary role and responsibilities as a leader, in many cases unknowingly putting their direct reports and teams into quicksand – making it almost impossible to revive any positive momentum and trust from the employees that depend upon them.
3. Lack Clarity of Purpose
When you don’t know what you stand for, it becomes more difficult to make good decisions. Much like falling into the trap of corporate politics, when you “feel in your gut” that you have lost touch with your core values and believe they no longer align with your senior leadership team – you begin to make bad decisions.
Clarity of purpose allows you to make decisions that are true and consistent with the mission at hand. When purpose becomes disrupted, you lose touch with your instincts and begin to make decisions without the right dependencies and resources you need to make sound decisions.
Don’t let your decision making capabilities erode because you have allowed yourself to lose touch with your values.
Gordon Seymour I believe many leaders make bad decisions because they lack emotional intelligence. They may cope when things are moving along just nicely, however when th [...]
Victor Lipman, ContributorGood topic, nice analysis. And I’d only add that they can at times be driven by ego more than genuine concern for the greater good of the enterprise.
billy Zi Agree with most of those points, but it depends on which level of leaders they belong to.
Walter Helwich I think that bad decisions mostly start with errors of judgment. Great post BTW.
Glenn Llopis, ContributorGreat point, Walter. Agreed. Thanks for your comments. Glenn Llopis, ContributorThank you for your comment, Ravi. Much appreciated. My point is that many people serve in leadership capacities, that shouldn’t. Thanks for contributing to [...]
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I believe many leaders make bad decisions because they lack emotional intelligence. They may cope when things are moving along just nicely, however when things get a little rough their emotional response to situations results in outward behaviour which disengages and de-motivates people. They lack self awareness and self control and lose the ability to engage and communicate effectively with those around them. Research has so often found this to be the case.
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GREAT ARTICLE! A leaders success at one company, may be foundationed on people he/she did not hire or train. People that supported the leader and made this person look good. At the new company, those people are NOT there. Leaders that do not develop good people, at least their top 6 reports, cannot expect good scores. Best Ball Playing results from Functional playing. Design and Control systems are developed and operated “from the hip”. Successful leaders must know their best organizational designs, and how to create & operate them. Cash deposits are metrics and best scores have to translate to this, before investors feel good about the actionable CEO. There is a science to management often pushed aside, due to lack of glitter, but in the long run, its that science that will build the best scores. GREAT READ!
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Good topic, nice analysis. And I’d only add that they can at times be driven by ego more than genuine concern for the greater good of the enterprise.
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Agree with most of those points, but it depends on which level of leaders they belong to.
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I think that bad decisions mostly start with errors of judgment. Great post BTW.
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- AuthorGreat point, Walter. Agreed. Thanks for your comments.
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- AuthorThank you for your comment, Ravi. Much appreciated. My point is that many people serve in leadership capacities, that shouldn’t. Thanks for contributing to the conversation.
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Excellent post!
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Skills in general have been put out of commission in America in the last few years. Leadership skills included. Everycompany USA has dropped the drive towards being the best & subliminally fallowed a utopian narrative that promotes (subconsciously of course) a radically collective agenda.
Pushing for minorities, anything rather than equality among all as far as advancements. Companies today, as do all political parties, artificially put forward losers in an effort to be utopian. While at the same time passing over those who would be better leaders, who might in fact be a dreaded white male.
America is a pretty sick place to live today. But don’t take my word for it, look at our debts. & our denial of them all. We have simply abandoned sanity.- Called-out comment
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Good read, Glenn!
#3 and #6 go hand in hand, in my opinion. A confident leader will inspire organized and effective productivity, and will help lay a solid foundation for a leader to grow from.
To echo my fellow commenters, it takes a special something to thrive as a leader. Poorly assessed hires and promotions could put a weak leader in over their heads!- Called-out comment
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