Integer Leadership Consulting

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 and/or social 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 permanently “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 weary, protective, fearful and demanding. This collective anxiety is easily focused on the most vulnerable and the most visible within society: those who lead publicly and privately. When people and organizations are anxious they take it out on their leaders. 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 externally imposed anxiety but rather those leaders make faulty choices which profoundly damage their own capacity to lead. 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.

I am convinced that one of the primary reasons experienced leaders experience failure is that, at some point in the exercise of their leadership responsibilities, they become detached from reality. They become incongruent or divided in their personal and professional lives. Often times, this division is never the result of some sudden decision or crises but rather a slow and surreptitious process over time that slowly and almost imperceptibly drives a wedge between one’s core identity (the place of uncompromised wholeness and integrity) and one’s chosen behavior to appease transient desires. When we become divided at this intersection, the decisions we make can easily lead to significant failures. These failures lead inevitably and inexorably to brokenness, pain, loss and suffering.

One of the best books I have “ever” read on this matter of maintaining an uncompromised core as a leader is Anthony DeMello’s powerful book, Awareness. Most people, argues DeMello, suffer from a chronic state of unawareness or “sleeping” to use DeMello’s words. They are either unwilling or unable to perceive reality because they simply cannot bear the message of truth that reality would speak to them. As a result, they choose to live in a state of personal denial and find themselves stuck in what Bunyan calls “the slough of despond” or a severely compromised state of existence where the more you struggle to extricate yourself from your own deceptions and unrealities the deeper you slide into them and the deeper you slide into them, the further they are perpetuated and accommodated until you are literally drowning in a sea of sustained personal deception and chronic fear.

Though I am not a connoisseur of classical or modern movies, and though I rarely make it out to watch the latest release, there is one movie that stands out in my mind as the best I have ever seen. I classify this movie as quintessentially superlative not only because of the quality of the acting (James Stewart, Richard Attenborough, Peter Finch, Ernest Borgnine, George Kennedy, Alex Montoya, Peter Bravos, and William Aldrich just to name a few) but because of the timeless and poignant message the movie conveys. The movie, The Flight of the Phoenix, tells the story of a bush pilot, played by Stewart, who flew oil-company employees to Bengazi. The plane meets with a sand storm of immense magnitude and crashes in the middle of the Sahara. The surviving crew does everything they can to stay alive in the searing, relentless heat. One of the survivors, a model airplane designer, makes the audacious and inane suggestion that a new, smaller plane be fabricated from the wreckage of the old. The captain, Frank Towns, played by Stewart, is, at first, incredulous but eventually realizes that the model designer’s plan is their only hope of surviving. Despite the overwhelming odds and the constant infighting, those strong enough to work eventually fabricate the new plane that ultimately flies the remaining survivors to safety.

The Flight of the Phoenix has always been for me a metaphor for redemption, for resurrection, for renewal and revitalization. It has been for me a siren song for emerging out of suffering, intense pain and personal struggle in order to arrive at a place that is once again hopeful and joy filled yet deeper, broader and replete with new meaning and richer significance. In other words, the crashing and the resulting wreckage that happens in life is never the final word but rather the seedbed of the new, that is, if one can see through the wreckage of the old to the possibility of the new…of what could be. Unfortunately, because many fail to see the hope of renewal when they look into the reality of their own demise and failure, they cannot and will not make the attempt to rebuild. They begin a downward spiral that leaves them without joy, without courage and, most devastatingly, without hope.

We know the stories of these men and women do we not? They are the stories of people who cannot overcome the shame, guilt, fear and remorse of their failures as leaders. They choose humiliation rather than humility. They opt to be controlled by what they perceive to be the shame of their humanity rather than seeing and acknowledging their frailty as humans as a place of comfort, stability and awareness. As a friend of mine recently said to me as I wrestled with a deep sense of shame and embarrassment in the face of my own failure, “Jeffrey, welcome to the human race!” Up until that moment, the fact was that I did NOT want to be welcomed into the human race. As a leader, I wanted and needed to live above the fray, above the vicissitudes and common vagaries that plagued most men and women. My own failure was ironically an authentic invitation to join the human race. It was an invitation to deal with reality rather than live in a fantasy that ultimately could not be sustained even by my most heroic and virtuous of efforts. This failure was nothing less than a priceless invitation to experience a new way of living and therefore, a new way of leading. I had no way of knowing at the time that the house of cards I had built needed to collapse…needed to implode in order to discover my true freedom and joy as a leader.

Yet, despite having said this, experiencing failure as a leader is NEVER anything a leader would choose to endure. In fact, leaders do most anything and everything that is humanly possible to avoid “a meteoric-like falling to earth” even when that falling ultimately proves to open the door for a new way of living as a free, fearless and authentic leader. I am not suggesting that leaders, in order to be fully effective, authentic and transformational, must pass through the gauntlet of suffering and humiliation in order to be truly effective. What I am suggesting is that for many leaders, failure, whether personal or organizational, provides an alchemic environment whereby the leader can potentially become fundamentally grounded and congruent…two indispensable components to effective leadership.

Unfortunately, most of our organizational cultures have yet to learn to deal redemptively with leadership or executive failures. Once a public figure or organizational leader is revealed to be thoroughly human, they are summarily tossed aside as recalcitrant and inveterate failures. In the last two weeks I have read and heard the stories of two men who have become social pariahs almost overnight: world champion downhill skier, Bode Miller and the CEO of RadioShack, David Edmondson. These “incredible disappointments” who once held so much promise and carried the hopes of many upon their shoulders, have now been found to be, well, human…prone to compromise, hubris, indifference, slothfulness, lethargy and deceit like the rest of us. Their stars have fallen and, in many respects, rightfully so. Yet, like so many others, this deterioration of public reputation and perhaps loss of self-respect may, in reality, open the doors for new possibilities for influence and legitimate leverage.

I’m convinced that one of the primary reasons experienced leaders experience failure is that, at some point in the exercise of their leadership responsibilities, they become detached from reality. They become incongruent or divided in their personal and professional lives. Often times, this division is never the result of some sudden decision or crises but rather a slow and surreptitious process over time that slowly and almost imperceptibly drives a wedge between one’s core identity (the place of uncompromised wholeness and integrity) and one’s chosen behavior to appease transient desires. When we become divided at this intersection, the decisions we make can easily lead to significant failures. These failures lead inevitably and inexorably to brokenness, pain, loss and suffering.

One of the best books I have “ever” read on this matter of maintaining and uncompromised core as a leader is Anthony DeMello’s powerful book, Awareness. Most people, argues DeMello, suffer from a chronic state of unawareness or “sleeping” to use DeMello’s words. They are either unwilling or unable to perceive reality because they simply cannot bear the message of truth that reality would speak to them. As a result, they choose to live in a state of personal denial and find themselves stuck in what Bunyan calls “the slough of despond” or a severely compromised state of existence where the more you struggle to extricate yourself from your own deceptions and unrealities the deeper you slide into them and the deeper you slide into them, the further they are perpetuated and accommodated until you are literally drowning in a sea of sustained personal deception and chronic fear.

You would think, as does much of the “business” world (based on the way the business world treats organizational failures…they tend to shoot their own wounded), that these failures are terminal failures. Now, it is true that some failures in leadership are terminal failures “in that particular context.” But they are never absolute and terminal failures beyond that organizational context. In fact, as I stated in my previous blog, these failures become the seedbed for incredible new insights and growth potential for any leader-in- recovery. More on this thought in my next blog.