3 Stupid Things Leaders Often Think
Leaders begin their role with the best of intentions. No one starts out by thinking, “I want to make everyone’s lives miserable and undermine their performance.” Yet, we know many do just that. Most are thrust into the role, with very little training or development, because they were good at something else or there was simply a hole to be filled.
In Good Boss, Bad Boss, organizational psychologist Bob Sutton writes, “Devoting relentless attention to doing one good thing after another—however small—is the only path I know to becoming and remaining a great boss” and that’s good advice. But before you can become a great boss, you first need to stop being a bad one.
The first step? Letting go of the beliefs that undermine your leadership effectiveness. While nobody sets out to adopt counterproductive ideas, certain myths creep in over time and shape decision-making. These misconceptions lead to poor actions that harm both leaders and their teams. Here are three of the most common stupid things to watch out for:
1. “We Need Better People”
In 1997, McKinsey published a landmark article declaring a “war for talent.” The firm argued that due to demographic shifts, recruiting the “best and the brightest” was even more important than “capital, strategy, or R&D.” The report was enormously influential and continues to affect how leaders manage their teams even today.
I once worked at a company where senior leadership meetings on Friday mornings were meant to discuss critical issues. But no matter the agenda, the conversation always seemed to turn back to talent and the need for “better people.” They would look at our current staff and wish that they could find others who were smarter, more skilled and more ambitious.
Each time I remember thinking, “You recruited these people. You trained these people. And you manage these people. If there’s a talent problem it doesn’t lie with them. It lies with you.” As workplace expert David Burkus puts it, “talent doesn’t make the team. The team makes the talent.” Their people weren’t failing them, they were failing their people, which is why our employee turnover rate was roughly twice the industry average.
The truth is that we don’t need the best people, we need the best teams. Researchers at MIT and Carnegie Mellon found that group performance is more based on factors such as group dynamics and social sensitivity than anything else. It’s how your team builds trust, psychological safety and collaboration that will determine what they can achieve.
If you feel you need “better people,“ you should probably focus your efforts on becoming a more capable leader and creating a better, more supportive culture that empowers people to achieve their potential.
2.“I Need To Create A Sense Of Urgency”
Another stupid thing that a lot of leaders think is that it is their job to create a sense of urgency. Most probably, this idea originated with the work of John Kotter, a Harvard Business School professor who conducted case studies in the 1990s with executives who successfully led change. Apparently, they told him that creating urgency was key to success, and that idea has influenced how many leaders approach initiatives.
But if something was truly urgent, why wouldn’t anybody besides the leader know about it? Was there a lack of transparency and everybody else was kept in the dark? Or did the leaders that Kotter interviewed just surround themselves with dullards who were unable to understand basic things about their business environment?
The truth leaders rarely need to manufacture urgency. Over 15 years in challenging business environments in Eastern Europe, I led organizations through countless crises and never once did I have to explain that the matter was urgent. What people needed from me was clarity and direction. They wanted to know someone was taking charge and leading somewhere.
Leaders like to place themselves at the center of the narrative, so it’s no surprise that when Kotter asked them about successful initiatives, they credited themselves and shared dramatic stories. Wise leaders create a sense of safety, not urgency. They build strong, ambitious teams who create their own urgency
3. “We Had A Great Strategy, But Couldn’t Execute It”
One of the most annoying things I hear from leaders is that “we had a great strategy, but just couldn’t execute it.” The reality is, good strategy takes capabilities into account. If you couldn’t execute it, you didn’t have a great strategy to begin with. Most likely, it was a fantasy you cooked up, based on some false assumptions and enshrined in PowerPoint.
What people usually mean when they say a good strategy failed because of poor execution is that they had a plan, but couldn’t put it into action. But a plan isn’t a strategy. A strategy goes beyond a set of objectives and actions. It’s about identifying a problem and crafting a logical approach to solving it, one that mobilizes resources to address challenges.
Ray Kroc didn’t invent the Egg McMuffin at McDonald’s, but his strategy of empowering franchisees to experiment gave birth to it and many other things as well. Charles Lazarus started with a baby furniture store, but his quest to find repeat customers led him to create Toys “R” Us and pioneer the “category killer.” Thomas Watson Jr. bet the company on the IBM 360, but it was the firm’s long-term strategy of investigating in research that made the breakthrough possible. It would dominate the industry for decades.
None of these were planned for. They arose out of what the underlying strategy made possible. They built up relative strengths that could be brought to bear against relative weaknesses of their competitors. All of this had to develop over time. Strategy is not a game of chess. It’s a process of discovery. It’s never “right” but hopefully gets less wrong over time.
When people say “We had a great strategy but couldn’t execute it”, what they mean is they came up with some really smart ideas in a conference room, but the people who were responsible for doing the work out screwed it all up. It’s an attempt to avoid accountability.
The Power Of Asking “Why?”
The term paradigm shift has become so common that we scarcely stop to think about where it came from. When Thomas Kuhn first introduced the concept in his 1962 classic The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, he described not just an event, but a process that he noticed had pervaded the history of science.
It starts when people begin to notice that an established model, the kind we learn in school or during initial training for a career, is falling short. First, the shortcomings are seen as anomalies, and some other source of failure is blamed. But eventually, someone comes along and creates a new, better model that shifts perceptions and practices.
Yet, even in the face of evidence, paradigms don’t always shift. Old myths and folklore often persist, and people cling to outdated practices. As physicist Max Planck put it, “a new scientific truth does not triumph by convincing its opponents and making them see the light, but rather because its opponents eventually die, and a new generation grows up that is familiar with it.”
At any given time, we find ourselves in that middle space, when failed paradigms persist and better models have not gained wide adoption. That’s why we need to develop the discipline to keep asking, “Why?” Why are our people falling short? How can we support them? Why don’t they feel a sense of urgency? How can we clarify the situation for them? Why did our strategy fail? What did we miss?
Smart people think and do stupid things all the time. There are formal processes that can help, such as pre-mortems and red teams, but most of all we need to own up to the flaws in our own brains and stop believing everything we think.
Greg Satell is Co-Founder of ChangeOS, a transformation & change advisory, a lecturer at Wharton, an international keynote speaker, host of the Changemaker Mindset podcast, bestselling author of Cascades: How to Create a Movement that Drives Transformational Change and Mapping Innovation, as well as over 50 articles in Harvard Business Review. You can learn more about Greg on his website, GregSatell.com, follow him on Twitter @DigitalTonto, his YouTube Channel and connect on LinkedIn.
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