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Dumb Leadership

“No leadership is better than dumb leadership - at least they can learn to lead themselves” - David Deane-Spread

I saw my new client’s complex leadership model laid out in graphic detail, with arrows pointing in all directions, lists of values and their meanings, scripts for behaviours at various levels, survey results depicted throughout, expectations galore, all introduced by an almost sonorous philosophy about what it all meant.

The date on the model launch was three years old.

It had been designed by a consortium of consultants, their HR team and leaders from across the business.

I had begun coaching senior executives, two levels down from the CEO.

No-one referred to the model. Alas, it was just an event. It had been done, shown; now they continued the drive for more production, answering stakeholder demands, growing profits, putting out fires.

Nothing I saw in reality matched the model. The model reminded me of the blending of about four academic books on leadership. Have you ever looked at the leadership faculties at any university? Have you noticed how well they are running? Have you noticed the quality of leadership exhibited there? You can’t master leadership from books, classrooms or theory. You can only master leadership through practice.

Their resistance to measurable training and coaching was hard-wired into the culture, from the top down. Training and coaching, for them, appeared to be just the tip of the performance management process – remedial and punishment oriented actions. Not pathways to sustainable excellence, to effective efficient production, innovation and talent retention.

Their leaders were selected for their technical or operational skills and internal political relationships, not their people skills. There was only one way to advance – become management, then more senior management.

As the tenure of the CEO became terminal, the next two levels down exhibited a flurry of frantic intervention and micro-management, all seeking to be noticed, to shuffle themselves upwards, in the game of ascending musical chairs.

Personal agendas, thinly disguised as corporate goals, confused the army of doers, as they were redirected and misdirected to highlight the brilliance of their bosses.

The leaders expected their teams to be high performing, yet the leaders themselves were not even a team, just highly driven individuals. Definitely a case of “do what I say, not as I do”.

I recognised that the originating cause of the leadership not being the primary example of a high performance team, was the competitive nature of budget planning. They had stayed with the dinosaur method of departmental planning, then aggregation and uniform slicing of the total by executives too far removed from the action. They had failed to utilise technology to engage in integrated planning from the outset.

Their leadership and thus their corporate behaviour was at consistent odds with their model. Therein lay their dumbness.

Then I found an anomaly.

There was this formal leader who was passive, non-aggressive, even introverted, who let her team do what they thought was best. The only guidance she gave them was absolute clarity of the results expected. Her only intervention was to demand honest feedback about their progress, demand resolution (themselves) of any problems, and approving adjustments to both strategy and execution to deliver acceptable results. Beyond that she let them get on with it.

They were the best team in the business. They were left alone because the formal leader always reported their progress in ways that stopped external intervention.

When I interviewed the team about their leadership, they asked “What leadership?”

I soon dismissed myself from the client. I was being used as a lead-in to their idea of performance management. When I put the case for coaching at the top instead of at the upper middle, I was told “No need for that, we’ve already been coached”. All the executives I coached soon left for better positions in a better led culture. My client just didn’t get it.

I took responsibility for this and have since elected to screen my prospective clients carefully, offering my service and testing for authenticity of intent.

The biggest lesson I learned was this: “Whether as a prospective employee or contractor, make sure that the quality of leadership intent is evidenced by their behaviour, not their documents.