Are Companies promoting friendly-guys or finding leaders?
Effective Leadership is critical for success of any organization. Leaders play an important role in shaping the culture in the organization, they provide the glue to generate synergy within team and between teams that leads to extraordinary results. Often, these leaders are selected/elected, groomed, and assigned to lead teams by the organization themselves. Additionally, before becoming a leader, these prospective leaders spend a significant amount of time in the organization displaying traits that organization feels to be valuable in their future leaders.
In every organization, a vast majority of leaders (at all levels) are promoted from within with respect to very few that are roped in from outside yet about 77% of businesses report that leadership is lacking (a statistics I recently read somewhere but can’t recall the source). This number is a clear indication that either organizations are not promoting the right people, or they are not able to provide the right grooming to the raw talent that they have identified.
I actually believe it combination of both. That is why we see big flamboyant names getting hired from outside for the most visible positions for large corporations. Every time I hear such news I wonder “Why were they not able to find one leader among the thousands of people working for them around the globe that spans every possible cast/creed/ethnicity?”
I understand that there are many other reasons for doing this over and above finding a leader who can deliver. In this article I would like to keep my focus on those hundreds of leaders created and promoted within the organization and yet businesses keep reporting the lack in their leadership year after year.
So, what is exactly lacking in these leaders that organizations are able to identify in the years following start of their leadership roles (resulting in further promotions) but fail to see during the first identification of them as leaders.
In my 2 decades of professional experience working for different corporates, delivering value to various clients across the globe, spending a lot of time on client premises, managing different sizes of teams (partly collocated and partly scattered across cities/countries) with members of different values system, culture and beliefs, I have concluded, if you pay attention, it is visible if someone is taking a lead or trying too hard and not able to identify the right course. In short, it is natural to be able to identify who needs guidance or who can provide guidance (without the question of actual promotions in picture).
In my understanding, the reason of such a trend uniformly unfolding across the globe for decades is the Wrong Understanding of Leadership and in turn wrong process to find leaders in corporate world.
In most organizations, promotion to leadership role is fully or partially democratic process of annual appraisals, peer review and/or some other kind of established process where more than 90% of feedback actually is about likeability. This essentially ensures that in most cases only likeable to the surrounding are becoming leaders with little focus on other important traits of Leadership. As I see it, Likability alone is not a good criterion for evaluating leadership.
The leaders generally follow some sort of vision or a call from gut and try to achieve it without too much care of likeability. Their vision is so grand that slowly but surely people start coming together. So, true leaders don’t Rate too high on this parameter.
Another point, in IT industry, the floors are filled with skilled technical people who chose technical space over anything because of some specific reason like extreme love for technical stuff, introvert nature or specific un-interest in human interaction etc.
As per above mentioned process of promotions, generally one of these technical or sincere or hard worker or yes-man (in short likeable guy) gets the promotion and start leading. This process keeps on repeating on the subsequent layers of hierarchy and that I believe it is the main reason for such feedback from the companies themselves.
The technical people, on other hand, also keep agreeing to lead because promotion means better pay and benefits, so they switch to roles that they are actually less passionate (remember leadership, people management was not their subject of choice when they had the chance).
Before, I go ahead, it is mandatory to mentioned that the range of adaptions by these leaders can vary the full spectrum of becoming a great leader to not able to overcome management blunders like micromanagement during lifetime. But on simple average basis, the Organization do not get the leadership team that they aspired for bringing transformational changes in business, profits and future. This is because what Organizations actually need are people operating from gut, but they are getting something different.
Here, I would categorically like to mention that a leader who is not affected by likability may not necessarily be rude, insulting or careless towards others feeling. It only means that true leaders are assured enough in their gut that people working with them may not digest their vision initially, but they ensure that their team members maintain the trust and stick with them long enough to see the miracles happening. So, their overall strategy and execution may not build around convincing.
So, organizations need to find out another approach in addition to fitting everyone in the bell-shaped curve that is not skewed towards likeability. They need to give equal weightage to not yet quantified/measurable traits like gut feeling and handling pressure.
I feel there can be whole new system designed around behavioral science to identify leaders whose strongest trait is something more than likeability. That system for sure will not be based on quantitative comparison of people.
