Integer Leadership Consulting

I find myself asking why organizational leaders tend to replicate the same or similar failures as other leaders who have preceded them? In other words what are the reasoning and/or rationale that explain the ongoing duplication of failures committed by those who are responsible to lead and/or manage organizations? To put it plainly, what keeps leaders from learning from their failures?

Resilience, we say, is the difference. As the argument goes, some leaders are more resilient than others…some are able to overcome personal and professional barriers. But, upon closer examination of the experience of resilience, we discover that there is much more to this issue of “overcoming” barriers. Someone can be resilient while at the same time they fundamentally resist changing the fundamental-structural issues that led-up to the need to exercise resilience. Thus, while they “recover” from a professional setback through resiliency (they scratch and claw their way back into the organization or to some position of organizational leadership), they remain unchanged at a deeper cognitive level which is the very seedbed which gave rise to the failure in the first place.

In my next blog, I will speak to the issue of cognitive or “schema” change as a key marker or signpost of resilience in leaders.