People don’t leave bad organizations, but bad leaders
Organizations are from people and not vice versa. Bad leaders can convert the entire vision of the organization into a nightmare. You will never love the organization if it is being led by worthless professionals and you will stick on to an organization’s worst phase if you have trust and respect in the leadership. It’s all about human relationships and camaraderie that makes the companies work and rise again after falls.
It necessarily separate bad leaders from bad organizations. In fact, low (or poor) performance culture organizations indicate lack of true real leaders even when they have lots of managers who are in reality some form of ‘robot’ administrators who apply policies and guidelines literally just to be on the safe side and play the game safely within preset rules.
This quote has been a topic of discussion in the US among those of us who are in the field of leadership development: “People join organizations and leave managers.” Both quotes point to the same issue, which research consistently validates that the most important influence when it comes to retaining employees is the person’s immediate manager. Unfortunately, companies tend to focus on training managers to manage tasks and projects, rather than helping them become successful at managing people. As a result, companies lose key talent, and don’t understand why.
The number one issue facing any organization is that of leadership. Very few people can be leaders, and we are seeing that from the most visible positions in our government to the numerous companies that are posting both major losses as well as ethical choices in the leading of companies.
Once there is a strong leader in place, it is then this individual who must insure whether the “followers” are also capable of changing the cultural environment for business success. Often it is the culture that is has ingrained behavioral issues that does not allow for a successful environment to encourage talented individuals. Without both a strong leadership direction and a cultural shift, most people will choose to leave the organization for greener pastures.
People leave organizations citing the chief problem with “leadership” is that it has to be in a direction people want to go. Just having leadership is not a panacea. A lemming is a lemming either from organizational dynamics, group psychology, or leadership of an uber-lemming. Cliffs are bad ideas when mixed with oceans unless a deep-sea stunt diver near Acapulco.
In an organization where leadership has always been weak, there really have never been any ‘team’ creation and the one motivating factor, money, if reduced one can see attrition crossing statistical points.
A bad boss can make your entire life stressful. Even if the organization pays you in gold, you want to cut and run in these circumstances. People leave good organizations because of bad leaders.
Organization need realize the problem and focused on training management teams to be “Good Leaders’” and not just good managers who were good only on accomplishing successful tasks.
Leadership is responsible to mold the organization, the quality of the organization is simply a reflection of the quality of it’s leaders. The quality of each can not be different in the long run. A good organization taken over by weak leadership will soon enough reflect that weak quality.
Any organization consists only of the people who belong to it and any behaviors that the members teach to new recruits to maintain its culture. Absent active leadership, an organization will develop a more or less bureaucratic culture, and those who try to fight that will be forced aside or out. With active leadership, an organization will come to reflect its leader, whether for good or ill. The rare, truly expert leader will co-opt the members as participants rather than ruling them as subordinates to the leader’s will, and such a leader only makes decisions that rise to the top, allowing lower echelons of the organization to handle whatever they can with the authority and resources provided at their own level. The better organizations do not answer most proposals with “I will have to check upstairs.” The ego-driven desire to be in charge, and to be seen to be in charge, is ultimately counterproductive, because the effectiveness of any decision is inversely proportional to the time and distance between it and the effect it is supposed to have. The closer the authority to decide is to the action, the better the decision will be. A good leader sets mission and general goals, and requires each level below to figure out and execute its own part in making things so. In fact, the best modern Army is more like a cooperative than a traditional, “do what I tell you” command structure, and so are the best corporations.
The issue is that “leadership” is often misunderstood by people who are given authority and abuse that borrowed authority; however, they don’t have authority by token of their own ethics, capabilities, experience etc., and a lot of people want or are pushed into leadership positions who are no good there; or where even no leadership is required.
For the world to move forward there has to be a strong vision of leadership as a competitive advantage in the marketplace. Many individuals believe that they are leading when in fact they are just making tactical decisions to continue doing business as they always have in the past.
Leaderships is both an art and a science of creating a vision for a future and ultimately being able to manifest that future through the resources that are available to them. And now, more then ever, is the importance of the “human resource” bringing innovative ideas and solutions to the forefront of an organizations existence. Leadership is the logical stimulus to success or failure.
