This Study Reveals Why Leaders Derail

This article summarizes a study that identified four main reasons why leaders derail after being promoted. The study found that leaders often struggle with relationships, fail to build and lead effective teams, are unwilling or unable to adapt to change, and as a result fail to meet business objectives. The article provides examples for each reason and argues that self-awareness is key to avoiding derailment by understanding how one's leadership impacts others.

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This Study Reveals Why Leaders Derail

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This Study Reveals Why Leaders Derail 10/28/19, 5*55 PM

5,806 views | May 16, 2018, 07:54am

This Study Reveals Why Leaders

Derail
Jeff Boss Contributor
Leadership Strategy
I write about leadership, adaptability and high performing teams.

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There’s only so much change you can affect yourself if you’re not aware of what
 needs changing to begin with.

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There’s nothing worse than having the right person in the wrong role. I saw this
problem often in the military: operators who were promoted to the next level only to
become slugs on a wheel. They were great individual contributors, but not so great
team leaders.

I see the same phenomena occur in business as a leadership coach today: people who
excel at executing tasks but once their focus becomes more relationship-oriented, they
get lost. It’s true that what got you here won’t get you there but the larger question is,
how does your organization prepare leaders to get there?

Too often employees are promoted based on how well they’ve contributed in the past
rather than how well they’ll collaborate together in the future. They’re
promoted based on subject matter expertise rather than their ability to build
relationships or ask powerful questions that spur insight and innovation.

One study found the following factors that contribute to a leader's derailment after
being promoted:

Today In: Leadership

They struggle with relationships.

If business is about relationships and a leader lacks the emotional intelligence to build
strong relationships, then reason would have it that he or she won’t be doing business
much longer. Nobody wants to follow somebody who’s emotionally volatile,
manipulative or intellectually elitist (this is the worst). At the center of this is self-
awareness, because if that leader knew how they showed up as leaders and how they
impacted others (and knew their jobs were on the line because of it then they’d likely
make a change. There’s only so much change you can affect yourself if you’re not
aware of what needs changing to begin with. 

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They fail to build and lead a team.

This is the single biggest challenge I see in organizations today. When I coach teams,
for instance, I ask members—on an individual basis—to think about the last great
team they were a part of. What made that team great? Who was on it? What did
members do or not do? Unfortunately, respondents usually have to think back to high
school to answer the question—and that’s no way to work. Teams are at the crux of the
individual and the organization. Without people working together--in groups or
teams, for that matter--there’s only so much that can be accomplished.

You fail to build a team when you don’t know what a strong team looks like. You fail to
lead a team when your entire understanding of how teams function is based on a
leader-led model only, which is the notion that a single person--the same person--
makes all the decisions. The truth is, leadership in teams doesn’t stay the same.
Rather, it rotates to the person with the greatest context; the person closest to the
problem. Anything else and you’re leading a group, not a team.

Inability to adapt.

I see this more as an unwillingness to adapt rather than an inability to do so because,

after all, humans are adaptable creatures. We’ve had to adapt over the years to
survive. When we don’t adapt it’s because we don’t see the need to do so. There isn’t a
compelling why yet.

The same is true for companies. One article reveals how “since 2000, 52% of
companies in the Fortune 500 have either gone bankrupt, been acquired or ceased to
exist as a result of digital disruption.” Of course, it’s not the companies that fail to
adapt but the leaders who lead them. They fail to adapt to a boss’s new leadership
style, they don’t adapt to internal changes, they over-rely on past skills to carry them
forward or they refuse to learn new skills.

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The culmination of the above three challenges leads to the fourth which is failing to
meet business objectives.

You can’t do everything alone (believe me, I’ve tried) which means you need to be able
to build relationships, aim and align those relationships in the same direction and
adapt along the way if you want to reach business objectives. The good news about
derailment is that it offers valuable insight into an organization’s culture, beliefs and
values—insight that can be used to refine existing leadership models.

Follow me on LinkedIn.

Jeff Boss

I share leadership lessons and insights from the military and translate them to the business
world.

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