The Mediocre (Incompetent) Leader! Part 3.

As a management consultant and mentor to executives, I don’t make up the rules. I just observe over time what tenets of management relate to certain situations in business and report what actions are normally taken by an executive or CEO in similar situations.

Such is the observation with leaders. The vast majority of them are mediocre, some even say incompetent, because they place all of their emphasis on learning how to use the soft skills instead of the blocking and tackling skills first. And they keep feeding themselves the koolaid from academia and HR, such that the leaders of a company all compete on being liked the best.

The best leaders know the process of managing with hard skills, using the soft skills for an interpersonal guidance to success.

I recall the time I was facilitating a program for potential department managers at Flakt, Inc., in Michigan. One of the 25 participants was a former Army Platoon Leader who had served in the Gulf war.

The major topic of discussion at this session was defining the most important attributes of a leader. The vast majority of the responses all hinged around the leader’s need to use soft skills like empathy, sympathy, integrity, etc. but about 30 minutes into the session, he had still not said a word.

Knowing that we were both veterans, but from different eras, I continued receiving comments from around the room until it became his turn to comment. It went something like this:

“I believe soft skills like empathy, sympathy are ?important to a leader but not as important as other hard skill attributes. Whenever my platoon would go out on night patrol, it was probably the most dangerous time in my duty. I never cared whether they instilled any of the soft skills mentioned into our objectives. No, the most important attributes were the decision making, metrics, problem solving, and action planning attributes we needed to stay alive. We only used those soft skills when someone didn’t make it back, or was injured on patrol.” The entire audience sat silent for several seconds.

Years later, my consulting firm began assignments at companies on optimizing the supply chain. A part of that assignment is to analyze the workloads of everyone in the supply chain so that we could shrink it and eliminate waste.?

After performing this assignment with over 30 companies, we analyzed the results over time, and realized that 90% of the workloads involved those same hard skills that the platoon leader professed: Decision making, problem solving, action planning, strategy, core process, continuous improvement. Only 10% involved soft skills like sympathy, empathy, integrity, diversity. We believe the soft skills are important, but not nearly as important for an executive as mastering the hard-skill competencies.

We firmly believe that today’s leaders do not have to be incompetent or mediocre, but they also have nowhere to turn to get the mentoring required to be a powerful executive. Nor do they have sound mentoring to get there. Not coaching.

Remember what Lou Holtz said about coaching someone and mentoring them: “A mentor gives advice but not opinion. A Coach gives opinion, not advice. A mentor develops an individual from his or her expertise; a coach trains an individual for technique. These are two different roles.”

So, think of what a CEO is looking for when he wants to promote a leader to an executive. ?If the CEO sees a leader who is skilled in empathy, diversity, equity, and inclusion, but has no skills in the blocking and tackling, hard skill competencies that make a business double in size. What good is that? You need both, but more of the latter.

Suivez-Moi!

GW