Do We Have Wimps or Leaders in Our Organizations?

A few years ago, I was leading a strategic talent planning session with the executive team of a large organization. We were brought in because the executive team could not agree on a strategy to keep their talent pipeline full. They just kept going around in circles, unable to hit on the right approach.

So we came up with a new plan. We created a visual with four categories: those identified as superstars and high-potential leaders; the solid performers, the questionable leaders on the cusp; and those who were so bad at their jobs that they needed to exit the organization. Being confronted by these numbers forced some very awkward conversations.

The most interesting moment came when the executive team started talking about the weakest leaders–the people who needed to be let go. Many of the executives spoke passionately about not giving up on those individuals, pleading that they just needed more time to help bring their overall performance up. In the end, it was pretty clear that the executives were very reluctant to make some hard leadership decisions.

Through all this debate, the CEO remained silent. Then he took a red and green marker, went to the wall where we had the poster up, and circled a number of names in green. He said to his team, “We have to do whatever we can to retain these individuals and grow them.”

Then he took the red marker and put an “X” across several names. As he did this, he said, “I don't care what we do with these individuals. We've been babysitting them for too long. I've written them off and no longer have confidence in them!”

The CEO's team was surprised by some of the individuals he marked off. When they asked for his rationale, he said, “I've seen enough to conclude they will never be valuable leaders in the organization.” It was almost as if, at that moment, the CEO realized he had privately written those people off for quite some time but had learned to tolerate and overlook their poor performance.

Those red X's may have seemed harsh, but they exposed the fact that the entire executive team was enabling mediocrity because they weren't prepared to have the tough conversations needed to deal with these poor performers. Maybe if they were truly accountable as a team and had the courage to have these talent discussions earlier, they could have helped some of those weaker leaders get stronger. But they didn't.

Far too many organizations suffer from the same problem. A lot of my clients talk about how their leaders don't seem willing to take on the hard work that comes with their roles. I often hear comments like, “Our leaders avoid managing poor performers,” “Our leaders don't give candid feedback,” or “Our leaders really struggle in making difficult decisions.”

Hearing the same themes over and over again, from client after client, I can't help but ask myself: Are there any real leaders in our organizations, or are we just surrounded by wimps? It seems like there are a lot of wimps out there—people who don't have the courage to take on the hard work of leadership.

I've seen what this looks like firsthand. At a recent client event, I talked to some supervisors and managers who told me they actually leave all the hard work of people leadership to their HR department. Let's think about that for a moment.

These leaders are actually “outsourcing” a key part of their jobs to someone else. At first, I was a little shocked. But the more I thought about it, the more it started to make sense. These leaders aren't really committed to their roles. So why not let someone else manage all the tough people issues—providing difficult feedback to employees, having the challenging performance conversations, and addressing poor performers?

Holding people accountable isn't easy. Managing poor performers isn't easy. Accepting candid feedback about how you need to grow as a leader isn't easy. Confronting your personal gaps takes courage. But instead of getting tough, too many leaders choose to wimp out.

You must accept this third term of the leadership contract. You can't take the easy way out. It's no longer good enough for you to be a bystander. You have to get tough. Everyone, including your team, your department, your boss, and your organization, is counting on you to be a leader and not to wimp out. This will also mean being tough with yourself.

The 10 Ways Leaders Make the Hard Work Harder

Through my own leadership experience and my work with hundreds of leaders at all levels, I've learned that not only is leadership hard work, but also a lot of us inadvertently make the hard work harder. How? By doing certain things that actually keep us avoiding the hard work (see Figure 7.2). As leaders, we need to be aware of how we do this so that we can become stronger as leaders and develop the confidence to tackle the hard work.

As you read this next section, reflect on your own leadership role and identify the ways you make the hard work of leadership even harder for yourself. I encourage you to be honest.

1. Getting in Over Your Head. Sometimes a situation changes and you're no longer equipped to manage it. Maybe you don't have the skills you need to be successful. Maybe your ego gets in the way and keeps you from asking for help. Maybe you are feeling inadequate and working hard to prove yourself to your colleagues and your organization. Maybe you lack self-confidence and everyone knows it. Your team can smell it, and it undermines your credibility. You start playing it safe and become an empty chair leader. If this sounds familiar, you may be in over your head.

I once worked with a struggling leader whose performance began to decline. He was well liked, but pretty soon that didn't matter because his poor performance started to frustrate his team members. He knew he wasn't cut out for the role he was in. But instead of admitting it and addressing it directly, he let his performance slide to a point where his manager had to terminate him. If you find yourself in so far over your head that there's a real risk that your projects will have bad outcomes, then you need to have the courage to ask for help. Otherwise, you'll keep yourself and everyone around you stuck at the level of your incompetence.

We create risk for our organizations when we lack the courage to admit that we're in over our heads. Asking for help isn't easy. Your ego gets in the way. You probably feel tremendous pressure to prove yourself to others. But in today's complex world, you need to continually monitor your own performance and make sure you aren't putting yourself and your company at risk.

It is important to note that at times getting in over your head is a great way to grow as a leader. If you are successful in managing the situation, it can take you to a higher level of performance. But what I'm talking about here is those situations when you are unable to take your performance to a higher level. You are in so far over your head that you are now creating risk for yourself and your organization.

Do you find yourself getting in over your head as a leader?

2. Confusing Tough with Rough. There aren't many really tough leaders out there. There are a lot of leaders who think they are tough, but they're actually rough. They're holding on to old ideas of leadership that tell them you need to be a jerk to show how tough you are. Many of these leaders regularly mistreat, disrespect, and insult others. They frequently tear a strip off their direct reports, even in public. Yelling at people is easy. Being genuinely tough is much harder.

A recent Washington Post article entitled “Is Your Boss Making You Sick?” lists a number of seminal studies showing that abusive leadership can, over time, contribute to higher rates of heart disease, heart attack, and angina among employees. These studies also show links to sleep problems, high blood pressure, and a wide range of mental health problems, including depression.

If you are one of these rough leaders who are prone to temper tantrums, emotional outbursts, or chronic moodiness, I have two words for you: Grow up! This behavior is understandable for toddlers but not for leaders. Your lack of professional maturity makes things harder for you. Your inability to keep your emotions in check puts everyone on edge. You're creating a climate of fear, and you'll never get the best out of your team and colleagues as a result.

A generation ago it was probably okay to mistreat people. Leaders could do it because they had power and the Boomers would put up with it. But if you take the rough approach today, you'll become a lonely leader pretty fast. The bottom line is that if you are a jerk as a leader, no one is going to want to work with you. It's that simple. Why? Because Millennials won't put up with you; they'll just leave. To make matters worse, Boomers are following their younger colleagues' lead and becoming less willing to put up with a rough leader.

As a leader, do you confuse tough with rough?

3. Mistaking Effort for Results. Vic was pretty angry when he left his annual performance review. He couldn't believe his boss, the company's chief information officer (CIO), had given him an unsatisfactory performance rating. Didn't she know how hard he had been working?

As the director of information technology, Vic's big project for the year was implementing a new cloud-based customer relationship management (CRM) system. He had run into problems right from the start. The first vendor he chose wasn't really up to the task. They gave him bad advice, and by the time he realized it, months had gone by and the project's costs had escalated. Now he was under pressure to get the system out, so he skimped on internal education. When the CRM hit the sales force, he got a lot of complaints.

Vic thought he had given the project everything he could. It had been a hard year. He had put in countless hours. He was often on call 24/7. And he felt like hiccups were common enough when implementing a new system.

His manager saw things differently. She knew how many hours Vic had put in, but in the end, he just didn't deliver. So although Vic rated himself as “meeting expectations” for the year, his manager gave him that dreaded rating of “unsatisfactory.”

During the meeting, the CIO explained that, as a leader, Vic shouldn't confuse effort with results. “It's one of the first ground rules of leadership,” she said. She also reminded him that as a leader, he needed to be able to take an objective view of his own performance, even when it fell short.

I've run into leaders like Vic many times. They're so focused on how hard they're working that they can't see the actual results they've accomplished—or failed to accomplish. This keeps them from seeing their own performance objectively and ultimately makes things more difficult. Many leaders think working hard is the same thing as doing the hard work of leadership. It isn't. Keeping yourself busy by toiling away at drudgery is hard and wears on you over time. But that's very different from tackling the real hard work of leadership.

Do you have a tendency to mistake effort for results?

4. Feeling Like the Victim. I once had a phone call that really bothered me with a leader I was working with. This woman spent 30 minutes complaining about her company and her role. The more she went on, the more frustrated I became.

It's never fun to get an earful of someone else's negativity, but this call really stuck with me. I was still thinking about it later that afternoon. Eventually I realized why: This woman was a senior leader in her company, but she didn't show up as a leader. Her complaining made her sound like an employee.

Everybody gets frustrated at work. That's normal. But leaders need to be able to move through the frustration. I'll cut an employee who's complaining some slack because he or she probably can't change his or her day-to-day circumstances that much. But a leader can.

I called this leader back and had a frank talk with her. I told her that although I understood the reasons for her frustration, she needed to step up and move forward. She needed to stop believing she was the victim and get busy tackling the hard things in her leadership role. If there's a problem, don't whine about it—fix it!

Do you show up as a victim at times? How does this set you back?

5. Being Insecure. When you are insecure as a leader, you come across as wishy-washy, unwilling to take a stand on any issue. Maybe you don't have the courage or stomach to be a leader, and you take the easy way out on important decisions. If you're really insecure, you don't trust others and you end up micromanaging. You never let go of anything. You keep doing work you shouldn't be doing, and others around you don't grow. You may also hire weak talent for fear that stronger people will surpass you.

Other insecure leaders need to be liked by everyone. So they are agreeable—too agreeable. They never tackle the hard stuff for fear that they won't be liked. Being a leader isn't about winning a popularity contest. In fact, being liked as a leader is often overrated. You are going to be obligated to do some things that won't make everyone happy. You can't let insecurity stop you from doing what needs to be done.

It's important to acknowledge that most of us as leaders have moments when we feel insecure. Maybe you're facing a big challenge that has you questioning your ability to succeed. Maybe intense scrutiny is making you second-guess yourself. Whatever the reason, most leaders get that sense of insecurity from time to time. When it's momentary or fleeting, it's usually not a big deal. But when it lingers and starts getting the best of you, it can undermine your success.

Traditionally, we have demanded that our leaders act and appear at all times like invulnerable, infallible superheroes. That discourages many leaders from confronting their insecurities. Unfortunately, when we duck and run from our insecurities, we rarely master and overcome them. When insecurity is not addressed, drama usually ensues. Many leaders build up their egos to compensate for a low sense of self-worth.

The key to overcoming insecurities begins by admitting that you have them. It's not a sign of weakness—it's a sign of strength as a leader.

Do you let your insecurity get the best of you?

6. Needing Good News. Many leaders want to hear only good news. They make their own lives harder because everyone who works with them spins information, and they never hear the real truth. If you avoid bad news, you keep yourself in a state of delusion, never confronting what's really going on. It's like being at a carnival and going to the House of Mirrors. Everything you look at is distorted. This distorted view keeps you disconnected from what's going on. You run the risk of missing things. Problems get worse, and your work gets more difficult.

Remember, your job as a leader is not to avoid, ignore, or deny bad news; it's to find out the bad news as early as you can so you can act before the problem becomes more complicated.

Do you want to hear only good news as a leader?

7. Winning at All Costs. Competition is a great motivator, but some leaders take it to an absurd extreme. They see everyone as an adversary or an enemy—even within their own organizations. Everything is a win-lose proposition. That extends to relationships, too; they eliminate anyone who doesn't support what they're trying to accomplish. If you're overly competitive, you won't tolerate dissenters or differing points of view. You'll most likely come across as pompous, conceited, and totally absorbed in your own personal agenda.

Excessive competition creates poor working relationships with team members and keeps you from engaging stakeholders genuinely. If you can't bring people along with you, you'll make your life much harder. In today's world, you need to be a savvy influencer and collaborator. You can't just intimidate people into going along with you. You need to be able to create win-win outcomes, instead of trying to win at all costs for selfish reasons.

As a leader, are you always driven to win at all costs? Do you appreciate how this strategy may be making things harder for you as a leader?

8. Waiting for Permission. I've seen many leaders who always seem apprehensive because they are waiting for permission to lead. This is a huge source of frustration for senior-level leaders. I've often heard CEOs exclaim, “What are they waiting for?” Many leaders mistakenly assume they can't act without approval from senior leaders. You need to understand that you have been put in a leadership role to act and tackle the hard work of leading. You haven't been given a leadership role to be a bystander.

Social psychologists have discovered a behavioral pattern called the bystander effect. People don't offer to help a victim in an emergency situation if other people are present. In fact, the more people present, the less likely it is that someone in need will get help. The mere presence of other bystanders diffuses the responsibility to act.

Is this happening to you? Are you waiting around for permission or acting like a bystander?

9. Being Driven to Distraction. I once worked for a manager who was a train wreck. She was a nice enough person, but she was completely disorganized. You could never count on her for anything. Meetings would be canceled at the last minute. Priorities were always shifting. We'd commit to a plan of action on a project, only to have the timelines change or have everything pushed to the back burner because we just couldn't get our ducks in a row. Her poor executive assistant spent all her time booking and rebooking meetings. As a result, this manager would go through a new assistant every six months.

It was clear she lacked discipline, and it was completely undermining her ability to lead us. A lack of discipline creates tremendous uncertainty for the people you lead. Your lack of preparation creates an environment in which crisis reigns supreme. A colleague of mine who suffered under a disorganized manager once said: “I simply show up every day waiting for the next urgent matter to tackle. Whatever!”

In what ways might you be undisciplined and driven to distraction as a leader?

10. Losing Perspective. During a recent leadership development program, I watched three senior public-sector leaders have a heated discussion. I could tell they were talking about a pretty serious issue, so I let them get into it.

But after a while, something started to bug me about the conversation. I called a time-out and said, “I've been following along pretty well, but now I'm getting confused. When did this issue happen?” In unison, they said, “Ten years ago!” And here I thought they were talking about a current issue that they needed to work out. “We've spent 25 minutes talking about this. Can anyone tell me how this is relevant to your leadership roles today?” I asked. Silence. I continued, “I don't understand how you can still be this emotionally invested in something that happened so long ago. It's clear you have all lost perspective as leaders.”

Unfortunately, I've been delivering that speech a lot recently. It's all too easy for people in an organization to get into the habit of rehashing old issues. But holding on to the past doesn't help. It acts as an anchor holding you back. You have to let it go.

Sure, leaders need to learn from the past, but if you're repeatedly discussing the same old events, you have lost perspective.

Do you find yourself getting stuck because you often lose perspective?

Tackle the Hard Work of Leadership and You Become Strong

The hard rule of leadership also says that if you tackle the hard work of leadership, you become strong. Moreover, it's not just you who becomes strong; it's also your team, your division, and your entire organization. Why? Because you don't get stuck. You keep things moving forward, progressing all the time, instead of letting the same issues and problems continue to dominate your life.

There are three things (see Figure 7.3) you need to understand to make this rule truly work in your role as a leader:

1. You need to shift how you view the hard work of leadership.
2. You need to develop a mindset of resilience.
3. You need to build a strong sense of personal resolve.

Final Thoughts—Leadership Is Hard Work

The CEO of a large financial institution recently convened a meeting to review the results of a major strategic initiative. As the executive team presented on their work, the CEO noticed a major gap in their plan—a gap significant enough that it would have easily scuttled the entire initiative.

The CEO was noticeably frustrated when he called out the entire team for this misstep. “We have had dozens of our leaders working on this plan over the past few months,” the CEO said, “and I can't understand how no one caught this problem. That is hard to believe, given the fact that we have some pretty smart leaders here. Why was it left to me to call this out?”

Maybe the team members all thought it was someone else's job to speak up about the gap. Maybe everyone felt they would do more damage to their personal brands by pointing out the gap, and it was safer and easier to stay quiet. We've all seen people get punished for speaking out about something controversial.

But no matter what their excuses were, this team knew all along about the gap but decided to “let it slide” in the hope that someone else would address it at a later date. To me, this represents one of the most powerful examples of unaccountable leadership that I've seen or heard about.

I've certainly experienced the “let-it-slide” phenomenon over my own career. You see a lot of people working hard on a priority project. Some may see problems and gaps, but do nothing about it. They know things are off track or have a sense that the quality of work is poor. Yet, they just let it go, let things get worse, and hope that someone else fixes it.

This is a perfect example of what it means to avoid the hard work of leadership—and what the consequences are. When you put off those tough conversations, when you let things slide, you put your organization, and your own career, at risk.

Baseball player Sam Ewing once said, “Hard work spotlights the character of people: Some turn up their sleeves, some turn up their noses, and some don't turn up at all.”

I began this chapter by saying that leadership involves hard work and, based on my discussions with leaders, it seems that things are going to get even harder. By now it should be clear to you that if you wimp out and avoid the hard work of leadership, you will weaken yourself and your organization. You will start a deadly spiral that will make you weaker and weaker. Instead, you need to build a sense of resilience and personal resolve that will help you do the hard work of leadership. Only then will you find that you are stronger and more able to tackle future challenges. It's time to get tough.