Integer Leadership Consulting

For the next few web logs, I want to share my thoughts on Leadership Failures. I define a leadership failure as a strategic, tactical and personal lapse in judgment originating from the leader’s disconnection form his/her emotional and intellectual framework. These failures are strategic because they affect an entire organizational system. They are tactical because they affect the leader’s ability to lead in the day-to-day. They are often catastrophic because they often “close the door” on the leader’s role within a specific organizational context.

Leaders can also experience indirect failure, that is, a failure that ends up “in their lap” but is the result of the failure of others. Leadership failures can also be the result of organizational and even cultural anxiety. These leadership failures are inextricably connected to the level of anxiety within a culture. In anxious cultures, people are generally anxious, weary, protective, fearful, protective and demanding. This collective anxiety is easily focused on the most vulnerable and the most visible within society: those who lead publicly and privately. Take, for example, the following news report that appeared in the Huffington Post on December 13, 2005.

The American Red Cross, facing criticism for its Hurricane Katrina relief effort, said yesterday that its chief executive, Marsha J. Evans, has resigned — the latest in a string of leaders who have struggled to guide the giant, often troubled charity.

Red Cross senior executives insisted that Evans’s departure, effective at the end of the month, was voluntary. But others in the organization said that Evans was forced to resign after her relationship with the 50-member board of directors deteriorated over issues of control of the $3 billion organization.

I have no idea about the actual performance of Marsha J. Evans. However, with the stress and anxiety caused by the aftermath of hurricane Katrina, it comes as no surprise. When people and organizations are anxious they take it out on their leaders. We see it at every level within an organization from the private to public sector. Systemic organizational and cultural anxiety often makes victims out of gifted and talented leaders who get embroiled in the maelstrom of deeply embedded social-organizational-cultural anxiety.

My focus is not on the leaders who are the innocent victims of external anxiety but rather, those leaders make faculty choices which profoundly damage their own capacity to lead. In my next entry I will explore why, contrary to what we read about leaders who experience personal and professional failures, leadership failures are rarely the end but the beginning of REAL leadership.