You Are Not Doomed to Lead Alone

Posted on September 8, 2014

Finding great leaders to join your company is required. Keeping the dysfunctional ones will kill your growth.

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Many midsized company leaders feel doomed to leading and managing their business alone.  They’ve been burned so many times by dysfunctional leaders that they think they must “do it all” themselves.  They hired executives who ran amok, or who made one bad decision after another.  They give up on having a team of leaders, and end up burning themselves out trying to do more than is humanely possible.  The growth of their company stagnates.  Growth killer #7, Tolerating Dysfunctional Leaders (from my book, Mighty Midsized Companies; How Leaders Overcome 7 Silent Growth Killers, Bibliomotion, September 2014) has hammered their business.  But they actually did it to themselves.

Consider the case of a medical devices CEO who hired an engineer as the VP of Engineering to develop a next generation device. The plan was to be on the street selling in one year and they had just enough cash to do it. The first hint of problems arose nine months into the redesign, when the VP fired an outside engineering firm for non-performance. That blew the budget. A new firm was hired, came up to speed, and the CEO dove into another round of fundraising. However, this time, the CEO hired a project manager watchdog, and when the project again went off track, he fired the VP and had to slash features in an effort to save the company.  The new device took 50% longer than plan and caused a lot of heartburn.

There are plenty of people who are not competent to play leadership roles in a midsized firm.  They often interview well, seemingly have excellent references, and by all accounts they have delivered results in the past.  We bring them in, pay them at market or better (hopefully), onboard them (hopefully), explain their job to them, meet with them for our weekly 1:1s (hopefully) yet too often, come month six (often even later), we discover they are failing, have cost us big money, and we must replace them.

Rather than conclude that “getting burned” by bad leaders means we must do it all ourselves,  we must reduce the high cost of bad leadership by requiring new leaders to earn our trust. While we will anticipate trust, we will create boundaries and expectations, will oversee their progress and verify their results.  As they perform to expectations over and over again, trust will be earned, and their leader will shift the focus of their attention to other areas in the business.  As we collect excellent leaders in our firm, our faith in team leadership grows, along with our company.

Follow these steps when you bring in a new executive, or when you promote one to a new position.

1.    Create boundaries and expectations, often in the form of a business plan for their area of responsibility.  For any major initiatives, use the RACI model so everyone knows the limits of their authority.

2.    Start regular oversight from day one, with a reporting system that verifies progress or results.  KPIs or project management shouldn’t be an exception for this executive, it should be in place for everyone.  However, a little closer oversight is fair and appropriate.  Weekly 1:1’s, drop-level 1:1s and monthly deeper check ins and review of results are crucial.

3.    If possible, first priorities should be smaller and more manageable, so that the new executive can get their arms around them, get some wins, and you can observe how they lead and manage.

4.    Don’t tweak their work, trying to get their work to look exactly like yours.  That’s unproductive micro-management.  You’re looking for major gaps or dysfunctional behavior.

5.    As you see a pattern of good work and diligence, you’ll tell them to proceed on their own more and more often, until the oversight you give them is no greater than proven, veteran company leaders.  If you see a pattern of disappointments, you’ll call them out, will manage more closely (even micro-manage) in an effort to coach them, and the minute you lose hope that they’ll succeed, you’ll start preparing to replace them.  Never tolerate dysfunctional leaders!

The concept of earned trust is a crucial element in adding quality leaders to your team and stopping the cycle of mistrust in team leadership that occurs when new executives fail at their job.  My best and most current work on other aspects of team leadership in midsized companies is in chapter 7 of Mighty Midsized Companies.

 

You can also read “You Are Not Doomed to Lead Alone” and weigh in with your comments on Forbes.