I'm puzzled.
I just read yet another post, this one by Jack Zenger here on Forbes, citing more than a decade of research showing that the single most effective way to increase the revenues of an organization is to increase the skills of the organization's leaders. If you Google the phrase "impact of good leadership," you get 5,810 results, all touting the various ways in which good leadership positively affects organizations, from increases in profitability and productivity to improved employee engagement and satisfaction. DDI's Global Leadership Forecast for 2011 has some particularly compelling data about the business impact of higher quality leadership on employee retention, financial performance, and customer satisfaction.
So, given that both the data and all our human instincts are screaming at us that good leadership is a key business driver, why are there still SO many mediocre to bad leaders, and what can we do about it?
I think there are two core problems:
1) we know what bad leaders look like, but we seem confused about what makes a good leader
2) we don't consistently require and support people to be good leaders (tough to do, given problem #1)
What's a good leader? At the risk of being accused of extreme hubris, I am now going to condense the premises of eight kazillion leadership books into one sentence: Good leaders get consistently excellent results while building capable and committed teams and organizations. Seriously. I know there's lots more to be said about how that happens (I have, after all, written a few of those books), but isn't that the heart of it?
We don't consistently require and support good leadership. This is where, I believe, the real problem lies. Senior executives allow leaders in their organizations to get away with not doing the two things I noted above. If leaders can keep their jobs while not getting great results, while not building capable and committed teams or - worst of all - while doing neither one, why would the rest of the people in the organization think that's not OK? (And, just so you know, you can bluster all you want about how important this stuff is - if there are no real consequences for behaving this way, nothing will change).
In order to improve the standard of leadership throughout an organization, you have to bake it in. You have to get really clear what it looks like (and make the definition practical, clear and doable), and then you have to hire for it, develop it, promote for it, clarify again and again why it's important and what it looks like, celebrate when people demonstrate it, and fire people who don't demonstrate it even after you've consistently supported them to do so.
I know of some organizations that do much of this very well, and others that are on the path to it. But, on the other hand, I also know of some organizations that are weirdly oblivious to this whole realm, and still others that are downright awful at it.
I'd love to hear your experiences and ideas: What do you think - what will it take to move the needle on this?
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17 days and counting - Erika's new book, Leading So People Will Follow, will be in stores (and on e-readers) October 9th.
Follow Erika on Twitter @erikaandersen.
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