Page 178 - The extraordinary leader

Fatal Flaws Must Be Fixed • 155

6. Not a good role model (failure to walk the talk)
A highly predictable path to failure is to behave in ways that are clearly oppo-
site to the values and culture of the organization. Unfortunately, examples
of this abound. The leader announces that everyone needs to control
expenses and then proceeds to book the most expensive hotels and eat in the
highest priced restaurants. Or the leader publicly declares that people are
the most valuable asset and deserve to be treated with the greatest respect,
and then proceeds to publicly berate a secretary to the point of tears. Beyond
that, this is the leader who never thanks people for their contributions and
hard work.
As a rule, organizations tend to choose as their leader a person who per-
sonifies the values of the organization. The leader of a street gang is chosen
for being tough, fearless, and combative. The leaders of religious orders are
chosen because they represent the values of the order—selflessness, compas-
sion, service, and introspection. Similarly, we expect the leader of a business
or public agency to represent the values it proclaims. When leaders fail to do
that, this ultimately leads to their downfall.

7. No self-development and learning from mistakes
There is an extremely interesting body of research on derailed executives.
Morgan McCall, Jr., and Michael Lombardo have written extensively
regarding executives who were expected to go all the way to the top of their
organizations, but who got derailed. These researchers compared those who
were derailed with those whose careers took them to senior positions in their
firms. Their findings contain some extremely valuable lessons. Derailed exec-
utives made about the same number of mistakes as did those whose careers
continued onward and upward, but derailed executives did not use setbacks
or failure as a learning experience. They hid their mistakes from others, not
alerting colleagues to the consequences of how their mistake would affect the
colleagues’ activities. They did not take immediate steps to rectify what they
had done. Finally, they tended to brood about the mistake, constantly reliv-
ing it for years afterward. 3
Those whose careers continued to soar did exactly the opposite. They read-
ily acknowledged what happened to those about them, alerted colleagues to
the potential consequences, did their best to fix it, and then proceeded to for-
get about it and move on in their careers. Our research confirms that the
inability to learn from mistakes is a major cause of failure. We can only
speculate about the reasons for this. Is failure to learn from mistakes a