7 Reasons Leaders Fail
Around two-thirds of workers say the most stressful aspect of their jobs is their immediate boss, their line manager (Hogan, 2006
A recent article published in American Psychologist beautifully explains why so many people experience their managers as piping hot geysers of stress (Vugt, Hogan & Kaiser, 2008). What emerges is that bosses aren't inherently bad people (mostly), but that the modern culture of work sets them up to fail. Here are the seven main reasons I've picked out from this article for why leaders fail:
1. Strict hierarchies.
For Mark Van Vugt of the University of Kent and colleagues a large part of the problem with many modern organisations is their hierarchies. Leaders are at the top of the chain and are assumed to have all the answers, so they make most of the decisions. In reality knowledge and expertise is spread across people in organisations. But it's the leaders who must be seen to lead and so followers get frustrated because their superior knowledge and expertise is frequently ignored. This leads to:
2. Poor decision-making.
Leaders often don't make any better decisions than followers, and frequently make worse ones. This is another consequence of strict hierarchies. Rather than setting up leaders to fail, Van Vugt et al. (2008) argue it's better to agree that leaders are not always the best people to make the decisions. Spreading the responsibility around, or using more participatory strategies for decision-making is often more effective. But this isn't the way things generally work, part of the problem is:
3. Huge pay differentials.
Followers often hate their leaders because of the huge difference in their salaries. It's hard to feel any sympathy for someone whose pay is stratospheric (average CEO pay is 179 times that of average workers). And, because more pay means more status, leaders can quickly come to believe they really deserve the God-like status their pay suggests, resulting in their thinking they have all the answers and that they have the right to treat their employees less than fairly. In the bosses' defence, though, there are:
4. Impossible standards for leaders.
Perhaps because of the huge pay and incredible demands, followers expect their leaders to be almost superhuman. The leadership literature identifies a whole range of personal qualities thought important for a good leader. These include integrity, persistence, humility, competence, decisiveness and being able to inspire the troops. While a leader may be high on one or two of these, they are unlikely to have the full set. Followers are almost bound to be disappointed by what is, after all, another fallible human who is just trying to:
5. Climb the greasy pole.
If the boss is nice to you, it's a bonus, because it's not required for them to get on in the organisation. Leaders are promoted by those higher than them, not those below them - so it's only necessary for bosses to impress their bosses. This is a recipe for disaffection amongst the followers. Talking of which, forget the psychology of leadership, what do we know about the:
6. Psychology of followership?
One of the best points Van Vugt et al. make is that although it's leadership that has been most extensively studied and discussed, most of us end up as followers. So really the psychology of followership is more important than leadership. What is it that makes us follow someone else? And, more subversively: do we need leaders? For example, some research shows that when people know what they're doing, they resent having leadership imposed on them. Generally, though, there's little known about followership, and how to avoid:
7. Alienation.
As a result of the strict hierarchies, huge pay differentials, poor decision-making, greasy-pole climbing and feeling powerless to change huge bureaucracies, followers naturally develop feelings of alienation, and alienation kills motivation and productivity, along with any hope of job satisfaction.
Talk is cheap
By implication the way to rectify these perceived problems is to do the reverse. Don't instigate rigid hierarchies, discourage huge pay differentials, democratise decision-making and don't set impossible standards for leaders. Some organisations are already managing this - presumably those in which followers don't find their bosses the biggest sources of stress - but most are not.
Of course talk is cheap and recognising the problem is quite different to knowing what to do about it, or having the courage to do it. Anyone wanting to make these types of changes across an organisation would have to be a really great leader - and there are truly few of those around.
What do you think?
Do you recognise these problems in your organisation? Has anyone tried to do anything about it? Are there other major reasons leaders fail?
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This so utterly resonated with me it nearly made me cry. Having had about five years out to bring up some children, I went back in at the wrong level for my age and experience, and boy did I suffer. I was kicked out of much needed jobs twice - not for incompetence, but for exposing the incompetence of those above me which was horrendous. It was unbelievably stressful sitting in meetings listening to twits talk rot at great length (I left that job voluntarily because of the torture of those meetings). Scum rises to the top and then ossifies....
I have actually never really had this problem.
In my own personal life I am confident and capable of making my own decisions.
In my working life, I appreciate having someone to defer to.
In my workplace at least, when there is a hard decision to be made, it is not so much a question of who has the expertise to answer it, but who is willing to take the resposibility when the answer is wrong and the situation goes pear shaped.
I suppose that I am lucky in that my bosses will generally listen to my views on a subject (if I have any)before making an ultimate decision. But even if they don't listen, or listen but then choose to do something I wouldn't - I appreciate not being the one who is to blame when something goes wrong.
I identify with the single fundamental reason for it all here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_principle
This just reminded me of one of the two biggest mistakes of my life. It was just after we were married and moved into our new home, and my wife asked me what I wanted to do that weekend. Well, I was running my own company, and said, "You know, honey, people ask me to make decisions all day long. When I come home, I don't want to make decisions anymore, I just want someone to tell me what do do."
And she's been telling me what to do ever since.
I think I witness these 7 things almost on a weekly basis at my job.
Personally I think the point about followership is the more important.
I always say to those who care to listen that… since I started working, 20 years ago age 17, I have never had a bad boss.. and I mean it.
From the very beginning I understood that my boss needed me more than I needed him, since I could do my job without him but he couldn't do his without me, unless he did my work himself/herself as well as his own. I also understood (as pointed out in the article) that my boss would be the conduit for my carrier progression and improvement of my conditions at work.
I put the above points to every boss I have had in a very simple format... I told them (in slight different words) that "I would make sure that no one would pull the carpet from under his/her feet as long as he/she made sure that I had what I needed to do my job well and be reasonably happy". So far it worked every time, but it does take a lot of effort to keep bosses from being tripped or tripping over their own feet.
Today I am myself the boss of a team of highly skilled engineers, each one a lot more intelligent and smarter than me, meaning that I couldn't do their jobs even if I had to save my life and they know that. I apply with my team the same philosophy that I apply with my boss but in reverse and it works most of the time, which is more than can be said for some other approaches to managing followership.
There is a lot of truth in this article. In the long run, leaders and organizations are successful because of what the individual contributors create, so I disagree somewhat with #5. Also, I don't think that many leaders are held to superhuman standards. Maybe a very few high profile leaders.
I don't think you can say that employees don't need managers as much as managers need employees. Everyone is critical to a successful organization. They all have different jobs to do and they are all important.
Yo, management is not equal to leadership.
Alexandre,
I appreciate your insight and experience on followership and agree with your perspective. I believe there are far too many that do not understand the salient point you raise, that bosses need us and perhaps more than that, they need to now they can trust us. Of course, the reverse is also true. When we reduce the fear and anxiety from the equation (on both sides), we can all be a lot more productive. I too believe there needs to be more taught at the followership level. Both leaders and followers need to better understand the arch-typical followership roles and the interaction between.
Thank you for a thought provoking article.
Richard
personally, with my exprience as a student in an organisation, i tend to believe the main reason many become followers is their ignorance or lack of understanding-that to be a leader is not as difficult as it looks.
leaders fail because of improper and rude behaviour with the subordinates or followers.
"Leaders are promoted by those higher than them" explains it all. The phenomenon of negative selection insures the suppression of talent by those who fear their positions of authority will be usurped.
Leaders fail not because they don't have the right answers, but because those with the right answers are not rising to positions of leadership.