Have you ever worked for a boss that was horrible? That’s an easy question to answer, isn’t it!
The person came immediately to your mind (for my staff reading this, if I came to your mind first, you’re fired! I tease – you’re not fired – just come see me after your done reading this…). Almost all of us, probably 99.99 percent of us, have worked for a boss/leader we thought was just gawd-awful. It’s the perplexing part of leadership.
I like to blame it on the entire leadership book industry. Someone gets a promotion to a leadership position and they instantly go online for the latest leadership babble that’s being sold by some idiot that was lucky enough to be in the right place at the right time at a successful company, and now she or he is going to tell us how to be a great leader using seven simple steps. BS!
But, really, why do we hire such bad leaders? CNN had an article recently that looked into this:
The short answer is, we focus on all the wrong things, like a candidate’s charm, their stellar résumé or their academic credentials. None of this has any bearing on leadership potential. And despite claims to the contrary, even a candidate’s past results have little bearing on whether the promoted individual will succeed once promoted.
At best, a “track record” tells only half of the story. In a new position, the candidate will have to face new obstacles, deal with a new team, manage more people introduce new products and do it all without a clear road map.”
Ok, so we aren’t focused on hiring the right traits that makes a great leader. The reality is, in most of our organizations, we hire using a “next-man-up” philosophy. “Hey, Jill, is the best producer in the group. Congrat’s Jill! You’re now the next boss!”
About 90 percent of leadership hires happen like this. Most of you will attempt to call that “succession planning,” but it’s not, it’s “convenience planning” — and it’s bad HR.
Can we all agree to one thing (this statement is a setup because I know we can’t agree to this!)? Being able to do the “job” (meaning the specific tasks of the functional area you’re a leader for) has very little to do with one’s success at being a leader.
Can we agree? And yet, it becomes the first thing we focus on when going to hire a leader. “Well, how good of a coder were they? How do you expect them to manage coders if they aren’t the best coder?” You’ve had this conversation haven’t you? Most of the best leaders of all time had very little functional skill in the leadership position they were successful in. What they did have were these things:
We pick bad leaders because we don’t focus on the traits listed above. It doesn’t matter if the person can do the job of those they are managing; great leaders will overcome that fact very easily. If that’s your biggest worry, they probably won’t be a good leader anyway.
When you have a great leader, the conversation never revolves around whether the person can do the job of those they manage – it’s a non-issue. They can lead, and real leaders know how to engage those who can do to make their departments great.
This was originally published on Tim Sackett’s blog, The Tim Sackett Project.
