Why do unproductive leadership styles and toxic cultures still exist?
It happens when power impairs a leader's search for disconfirming evidence, and leaders no longer question their own assumptions. Experience can lead to a false sense of confidence about one's own performance. It can also make a leader overconfident about their own level of leadership effectiveness. The more power is granted to the leader, the more likely they are to misjudge their own skills and abilities, including their level of self-awareness.
A leader's own self-perception can seem out of touch with reality, compared to how they are perceived by others. This single factor might be one of the most significant propellers when it comes to inefficient or “bad" leadership in business. This trend still prevails at an astoundingly high level. According to research by Robert and Joyce Hogan and Robert B. Kaiser, at least half of all leaders and managers (maybe even as many as 75%) derail or underachieve significantly.
Reputation Versus Identity
As mentioned in research done by Hogan Assessment Systems, which I often use to help serve my clients, our reputation is how others see us, while identity is how we see ourselves. This very often overlooked distinction has a critical impact on leadership and its effectiveness. Although it is instrumental to become aware of our identity — the person we think we are, including our values, fears, thoughts, feelings, behaviors, strengths and weaknesses, drivers and motives to get along and get ahead — it is our reputation that matters more and plays a substantial role when it comes to our job performance, organizational success and leadership efficiency. It's others who decide whether we get hired, evaluate our performance and determine our promotion.
Ineffective Leadership
According to Hogan: "Although there is little consensus regarding the distinguishing characteristics of good leaders, there is substantial consensus regarding the characteristics associated with bad leadership. There are more bad managers employed today than many people realize. Robert Hogan suggests that the base rate for bad managers within organizations ranges from 65% to 75%. One recent survey of managers and executives suggests that as many as 27% of their subordinates, despite being rated high in potential, are at risk for being demoted or fired for performing below the level expected of them."
Why?
"Leaders may derail because they lack the key personal characteristics needed for success, but more often, it is because of undesirable qualities such as bad judgment, an inability to build teams, a failure to relate well to others, or an inability to learn from their mistakes," according to the report.
Negative behavioral tendencies derive from deeply ingrained personality traits. Only when an individual is tired, pressured, bored or complacent then he/she is inclined to exhibit certain risk factors which can erode the quality of business relationships. Those, not everyday behaviors, have a powerful impact on our authenticity and leadership brand.
Personality And Leadership
Our personality shapes our leadership style.
Our leadership style creates our leadership culture.
Our leadership culture creates our organizational reality.
Our leadership style translates to specific behaviors that impact staff morale, personal goals and motives. Those influence company culture.
Our decision-making style affects strategy and vision, which then governs the performance of the person, team and organization.
It's an art to find a subtle balance between openness and reservation, extraversion and introversion, confidence and arrogance, emotional intelligence and insensitivity, passive aggression and confrontation and micromanagement and delegation. Set solid boundaries to execute the bigger-picture vision. Leading to be liked doesn’t always inspire confidence, while leading by terror almost always demoralizes and spews cultures with poison.
In the Wall Street Journal article The Two Contagious Behaviors of a Great Boss, Sam Walker calls on George Washington’s consistent leadership behaviors, which he called relentlessness: "a combination of seriousness, courage, tenacity and outsize effort."
Instead of following the styles that work only sometimes, or swapping between some depending on the situation, leaders should adopt the attributes that are more likely to deliver aspired results. Leadership is a choice. That choice becomes a function of consistency, persistence and emotional stability.
Why Does Effective Leadership Matter?
Ineffective leadership is costly. It impacts the bottom line, staff morale and organizational productivity.
Poor leadership culture contributes to low retention rates, emotional well-being of employees and it plays a factor in employee engagement. People don’t leave organizations, people leave other people.
Where To From Here?
The gap between one's own identity and reputation is the exact space in which leadership development happens. By delivering unbiased data regarding one’s reputation, whether through personality assessments or 360-degree feedback, individuals and teams have an illustrative view of how others view them and what consequences their behavior has on their ability to attain expected results.
Reactive solutions heal only “the symptoms” and lead to short-term results. However, an opportunity to give and receive — or rather, "feed-forward" — feedback tailored to individual needs yields different results.
Past performance is a good indicator and predictor of future performance and delivers a strategic self–awareness and understanding of the power behind one's own personality.
Organizations should promote the importance of constant feedback and the observation of one's own strengths and weaknesses. This instills a mindset based on our strategies and decision making based on the results we deliver. Selecting talent should become a thoughtful process to match individuals with organizational culture rather than mindlessly hiring based on availability.
When organizations diligently appraise a leader's needs and skills and consistently conduct formal and informal evaluations to deepen strategic self-insight, new outcomes are created and a new level of awareness is achieved.
