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Leadership is about the dynamic interaction of people’s consciousness across levels that create a conducive configuration of consciousness-space-time for impactful events to occur. “Impactful Events” denotes the three Ps (People, Profits, and Planet). Those interested in having a deeper understanding of the emerging concept may refer to the article entitled “Blending Greek Philosophy and Oriental Law of Action-Towards a Consciousness-Propelled Leadership Framework”. The link to the article is  Blending Greek Philosophy and Oriental Law of Action: Towards a Consciousness-Propelled Leadership Framework | SpringerLink

While a large and growing body of literature has investigated what makes leadership effective, the current discourse on leadership pays little attention to why leadership fails. This article aims to provide a few factors that make leadership fail.

Leader and Leadership

A distinction between a leader and leadership is important to understand. While a leader is an individual phenomenon, leadership is an organization-wide property and includes leaders across levels, the social system, and organizational design, structure, and processes. At a higher level of abstraction, the configuration of consciousness-space-time subsumes leaders across levels, the social system, and the organizational design, structure, and processes.

Factors that Contribute to Failure of Leadership

Not Having Leaders in Leadership Positions:

When firms do not select leaders deliberately and with caution, they have people in leadership positions who, being aware of their incompetence, focus their energies and resources on their own survival. Their modus operandi is to unleash a flurry of activities in the organization, have many meetings with well-drafted and ill-delivered agendas, and make excessive use of social media to plant distorted information to influence perceptions. While these methods satisfy the promoter of the ‘good work’ happening, the employees as well as the market know the reality! Such myopic methods boon boomerang and the firm suffers. Therefore, it is essential to have competency-based leadership selection and deployment at all strategic positions.

Not Developing Leaders:

Having the right leaders in strategic leadership positions across businesses, functions, and geographies is just the first part of effective leadership. Firms often do not invest in leadership development. Often leaders are so immersed in operational issues that they do not get the time to renew themselves. Therefore, firms need to objectively assess the strengths and weaknesses of leaders and have a milestone-based development plan that is monitored and implemented.

 Absence of Shared Vision:

Leadership is about developing a futuristic vision that is compelling, bold, and therefore inspiring. It often goes beyond the regulatory requirements, as the regulators aim at improving the performance of many firms. Hence, these standards are not stretched. Aggressive firms need to create benchmarks by dreaming big and bold! A shared vision surcharges the firm with positive energy that unlocks the innate potential of employees and results in breakthrough performance of the firm.  

Extrapolating the Past to Present instead of ‘Intrapolating’ the Future to Present:

Leaders across levels try to be guided by the past to work in the present in the hope of shaping the future. It does not work. An effective approach is to visualize the future, and then work in the present to shape the desired future. Learning from the past is different from being hooked on the past!

Misalignment of the Social, and Processes to the Shared Vision:

Firms that fail to work on the social systems and organizational processes do not manifest leadership. Unless all relevant parts of the organization do not work synchronously, effective leaders will not manifest leadership.

This short article shares five basic principles for exercising leadership. The fifth point has more to do with management than leadership and brings out that without effective management, good leaders will not manifest into effective leadership.