Leading With Success

Effective leadership demands concerted efforts to keep failures at bay.

- John Colley

Leaders fail for a wide variety of reasons; however, some failures could be avoided by considering these five points:

Activity is not always progress

Many businesses are characterised by almost frenzied levels of activity among their senior and middle managers. Senior management meet most days with the objective of planning initiatives for coordination and progress. However, real progress may be difficult to achieve and ultimately the business struggles to stay ahead of the game. There is a satisfaction in being busy and fixing problems. Indeed, people who can do firefighting by fixing problems such as troublesome customers, logistics issues, plant failures, and quality problems are titled as heroes. In manufacturing plants, maintenance engineers prefer fixing failed plants and becoming the hero who saved the day rather than undertaking planned maintenance, which they may view as unexciting. We see similar issues in the medical industry too, where public health and preventive healthcare are seen as unexciting avenues, and poor relations compared to surgery and ground-breaking research. Many doctors would rather perform organ transplants than fight obesity and inactivity.

Much of the problem lies in not having a clearly stated direction for the organisation; a clear vision upon which to focus activity. Without absolute clarity on where a business is heading in the medium to long term, the management becomes obsessed with fixing detail. Managers focus downwards rather than on the vision, and in doing so they constantly undertake the job of people working with them. The business ends up drifting rather than making clear progress.