Can you trace it back to bad leadership?

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This week my boss arranged a call with some other people managers to talk about leadership. The group seemed somewhat hesitant for most of the session, I got the feeling we were unsure about what we could, or perhaps should, say. But by the end the group relaxed and gave generally good feedback. Some people couldn’t make it so we ended up as a group of 5 and shared answers to two questions:

1. What does leadership mean to you?
2. Who was the best leader you ever worked for and why was she the best?

I’m not going to divulge answers to these questions here, perhaps another time, but in part of my answer to the first question I said something along the lines of, ‘One of the things leadership means is responsibility and ownership. If things go wrong, or bad things happen, or mistakes are made in your team, you as a leader have to own it and take responsibility’ (within reason).

Now, while I believe this to be true, I know there is a lot more to leadership than just this and that there’s more nuance to this statement than I’m talking about here, but it reminded me of something an ex-boss once said to me that I’ve thought about and para-phrased a lot ever since.

If there is a fuck up, and you ask why, everyone will say lots of different things, and there will be lots of complexity, and there will be lots of nuances. But the answer will always be because there was a bad decision. Because there was a leadership decision that was wrong. Find it.

I’ve found that the vast majority of the time, this is true. The first time there is a fuck up, you can trace the problem back to bad leadership. It could be innocuous, maybe the fuck up was the result of a miscommunication or an overly ambitious timeline. Maybe someone did some bad research leading to an uninformed decision, or made a decision based on a whim or taken out of pride rather than knowledge. Or maybe someone made an uncaring or unthoughtful action which had serious repercussions. Or perhaps it was just plain negligence.

Think about a time you’ve fucked up. I’m sure you can if you think long enough. Now think about why? It’s possible that you’re the problem of course. That you made some bad decisions or did something wrong and it meant things went poorly. For sure. But the difference between a good leader and a bad leader in a situation like that is whether or not they own or take responsibility for the fuck up and do something about it.

A good leader is going to look at what happened, seek to understand it, support you in improving, and if you’re a direct part of their team, own the mistake and talk about what happened to other teams as if it was the fault of the team and not an individual. A bad leader is going to give you shit and deflect as much of the blame as possible and move on. Obviously there is a spectrum of responses between these two things and it’s easier said than done but I think you can see my point.

I’ve also found this to be a good way of spotting bad leaders. If something goes wrong or something fucks up in your team or even in another team, look at who’s getting the blame. Does everyone talk about John and how they lost the team thousands of euros by not being able to close a deal because they didn’t know the answer to important questions? Or is everyone talking about John’s boss Abi because her team lost a deal and she’s running training next week for her team to get better at closing deals and answering questions? Or an example more specific than that.

I can think of a few better examples of good and bad leadership by this measure that involve me or leaders I’ve known that I’ll share if you ask, or maybe I’ll write about another time, but for now this is all I’ve got. I’d be interested in reading your thoughts or opinions on this, if you’ve found it to be true as well or if you disagree.

I’ve thrown this article together because I noticed on Sunday that it’s been almost a month since my last published newsletter. I haven’t broken my habit of writing more often this year, don’t worry (I know you were), but I’ve been working on three large articles at the same time that have soaked up all my writing attention and I don’t think I’m going to get any of them out before the end of the month, so here we are.

I’m on holiday from work next week so I hope to wrap them up and schedule them for April. Hold onto your hats.

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