While some decades ago, the common successful leader was autocratic, controlling, and power-driven, today these leaders are considered to represent bad leadership.
What can be considered as bad leadership? Can bad leadership be unintentional? What are the reasons that lie behind leadership failures?
Although this is a topic worthy of a long novel, we’ll try to explore the key aspects of these questions with this 5-minute blog.
1. Elements of Bad Leadership
Bad leadership can be defined differently by different people; after all, not all leadership styles suit all organizations, situations, or people. To get started, we looked at recent resources and gathered a few common traits of bad leadership.
Well, we got more than a few—here’s what they proposed:
And probably there’s more to it… However, you can most likely agree with at least some of the issues listed. In short, bad leadership could be considered as the kind of leadership that doesn’t help the organization and its people to grow and succeed but rather hinders progress.
2. Bad Leadership is Often Unintentional
When hearing the words “bad leader” you might think of someone mean and selfish, but bad leadership is often unintentional. Executive advisor and author Liz Wiseman refers to “bad leadership” as “diminisher leadership”. According to Liz, diminisher traits are very similar to the ones we listed above: micromanaging, blaming, bad communication, not listening, etc. But what Liz underlines is that most diminishing leadership comes with good intentions.
“The vast majority of diminishing happening inside our workplaces is done by the Accidental Diminishers—managers with the best of intentions, good people who think they are doing a good job leading. Accidental or not, the impact on their team is the same: Diminishers only get ½ of the true brainpower of their people.”
Liz has identified 9 traits of an “Accidental Diminisher”:
As you can see, there can be a fine line between good and bad leadership practices. These seemingly well-intentioned traits Liz has identified can actually cause harm to organizations and teams.
3. Reasons Why Leaders Fail
Now that we’ve established some general ideas of what bad leadership is, it’s important to take a look behind the curtains. Are there some general reasons for leadership falling short?
Firstly, it’s good to keep in mind that the job of a leader is not an easy one. As a recent article by the HBR states, the number of direct reports for an average manager has increased by 2.8 times over the last six years and the operating environment has required leaders to make a series of pivots. Leaders are reported to suffer from stress and fatigue, and almost half feel they can’t offer support to their direct reports. These factors are already causing many leaders to fail.
But are there some other common issues that could predict the risk of a leader’s failure? The same article in HBR suggests the top four predictors of risk of manager failure are:
Again, it’s good to keep in mind that there are numerous reasons why leaders fail and they are very dependent on the company and situation in question. For example, an article in Forbes lists that leaders fail 1) when they surround themselves with ‘yes’ people, 2) when they’re too enamored with their ideas, 3) when they refuse to admit when they’re wrong, and the list goes on. However, it could be concluded that leaders often fail due to a fundamental disconnect between their personal management style and the actual needs and dynamics of their teams and the organization.
But the next question is: how can you avoid those pitfalls and become a better leader? That’s a topic worth exploring more in-depth, so we will do that in our next blog. Stay tuned!
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