There are people in every organization you know whose titles indicate they are leaders. Often, and unfortunately, their employees beg to differ. Oh, they don’t say it directly, not to the boss’s face, anyway. They say it with their ho-hum performance, their games of avoidance, their dearth of enthusiasm. Leaders — real leaders who have mastered their craft — don’t preside over such lackluster followers. If reading this makes you squirm with recognition, you may have a problem lurking.
You’re really just masquerading. You haven’t yet earned the right to lead.
When times are good, not-so-great leaders can get by. They’re cushioned by a surplus of cash, and their missteps are covered up by the thrill of top-line growth, which hides a multitude of sins. But when the cloak of prosperity falls away, their mediocrity is ruthlessly exposed.
Real leadership equity is only earned, not bestowed. Just because you have been granted authority doesn’t mean you’re getting the full, collaborative engagement of your employees. You may have their bodies and time forty or fifty hours a week, but until you earn the privilege, from their point of view, you’ll never have their hearts and minds.
I’ve spent my career studying the practitioners of great leadership via my work as a venture capitalist, board member, high-level consultant, and professor of leadership at the Leavey School of Business at Santa Clara University. In Unusually Excellent, my new book, I share what I’ve learned and bring those lessons to life with real-world stories.
Unusually Excellent is a back-to-basics reference book that offers both seasoned and aspiring leaders a framework for understanding and a guide for applying the battle-tested fundamentals of leadership at every stage of their careers.
These aren’t radically new ideas. Human nature hasn’t changed that much over the millennia, so neither have the core laws of leadership. It’s just that in the heat of the day-to-day battle, leaders inevitably lose their grip on the basic principles of leadership. In other cases, they never learned these fundamentals or mastered them earlier in their career. And finally, sad to say, some people just aren’t cut out to lead and need to understand why.
“Normal” leadership is a complex system of behaviors that can tolerate a lot of little mistakes. Extraordinary leadership cannot.
Think about it this way: Anyone can snap a photo that looks okay or cook a meal that satiates hunger. However, when an award-winning photographer takes the picture, or a five-star chef prepares dinner, anyone can tell a master has been at work. The same is true of leadership. The small deficiencies in how the novice leads, as opposed to the unusually excellent professional, create a radical difference in the outcome.
So how can you tell whether you really are a great leader in the minds of your employees — or whether, to paraphrase the old television commercial, you’re just playing one on TV? Unfortunately, the depth and breadth of the mistakes you make often tell the true tale.
Below, excerpted from Unusually Excellent, are 10 of the most common, deeply destructive mistakes organizational leaders make:
