Why Managers and Leaders Fail

"Failure is only feedback"

Very often the team and I are called to coach managers and leaders that are somehow missing the plot, making sad and obvious mistakes for a variety of reasons. Our role as coaches is to help support and come along-side these otherwise amazing people to help them re-discover and come up with winning strategies to become resilient once again. To be effective they need to bounce back and above all learn from their mistakes and the coaching experience which helped them how to learn from their mistakes. This adds value to the future.

Not everyone that is coached is failing. By the way, in coaching we never allow the person to click and drag a specific failure into their identity by saying “I am a failure.” We see this all too often when people turn an experience into an identity such as “I am a divorcee” or “I am an alcoholic”. The situation is not the person! The core of our being is far bigger than any mistake we could conjure up today or tomorrow so see yourself as a sojourner, having had an experience from which you are willing to learn and re-align yourself. Failure and success are both a result because someone has focused on certain issues and criteria and not on others. We fail and succeed by design, not by accident.

Armand Kruger, a master executive business coach and international master neurolinguistic practitioner says, “I am reluctant to offer the complete answer, but from my modelling and coaching experiences I am becoming more aware of the vital importance of two recurring themes.

• First, "contextual intelligence", i.e. the reading of the situation/circumstances and within the unique demands of the context to make decisions about achieving outcomes against designated standards, and then to role out the actions ensuring that the outcomes happen.
• Second, "balancing act", i.e. given the sensitivity to context, how to balance the priorities of the context and the longer term/bigger picture outcomes and standards, to deal successfully with an occurring event; dealing with the now to reap now and later. 

Our experience as coaches is that the labels 'success' and 'failure' can sometimes get in the way of useful understanding because they cause us to feel good and bad rather than curious. Even feeling good can, paradoxically, stop us investigating further what exactly has been contributing to our successes, so that we miss an opportunity of finding out more about how we achieved what we did. And as a result we're less able to repeat that success in the future.”

I say this often: people fail, not organisations and companies. Wrong decisions are made mostly because the brutality test is ignored when decisions are made. We tend to be too quick to agree on a decision trajectory and then go for it with all our might. Einstein said if he had an hour to solve a problem he would use 40 minutes to look at every possible angle and get perspective, then he would use 10 minutes to develop pros and cons, and then he would solve it in 10 minutes. Not every challenge affords us with so much time, but we do need to stop allowing the silent code of not objecting or not giving our point of view to the team, when we notice discrepancies in the outcome possibilities.

Roger, a middle manager responsible for administration logistics, had to pay attention to his limiting inner beliefs that were rampant and constantly hi-jacked his options for creative solutions on a daily basis. He had to be coached in listening to his inner sound tracks saying “I am not good enough in their eyes”, or “I don’t have sufficient resources to do the job”, or “I don’t have support from them all”, or “I am a failure”, all of which needed to be addressed and dealt with so that he could release himself to be the best version of self that he can be.

Marie, a sales consultant, needed coaching to address her thought viruses that were sabotaging her behaviour. In her case, she believed that she was indispensable and not replaceable – quite the opposite of Roger! It made her cocky and obnoxious in her behaviour within the team and did not win her the respect she needed in order to gain support and understanding from the team.

Theunis, an IT consultant, was blocked by an impossibility thought virus and every new opportunity would be met with a set of dark clouds, thunder storms and lightning that prevented him from even trying or daring to go and play in the rain!

Sophie was dis-empowered by believing the excuse and blame games she designed for herself. Even though she was an amazing personal assistant she believed she was making no difference at all and was therefore worthless and not deserving of compliments, no matter how often her manager paid them.

Inconsistent personal behaviour sends confusing messages to the team and this creates havoc in the way we deal with each other. Moreover, excuses have a life and power of their own.

Sophie was coached to see how her excuses and blame games were masterfully orchestrating her responses and influencing her decision-making. When she saw, really saw from her new perspective, she realised that the excuses were exactly that, and she could re-programme the way she thought and therefore how she behaved.

As a team leader, she learnt that she actually had to challenge the statements that her team would give her like, “trust me, I’ll do it, don’t worry, I’ve been around, I know!” She had to stop , check and pay attention to the outcomes desired and the path planned to give her confidence that the focus was correct and the outcomes clearly understood. “Taking things for granted cost us dearly," she said.

Active Inertia

Kruger also refers to “active inertia”, a term used by Donald N. Sull in his Harvard Business Review article “Why Good Companies Go Bad?” The point he makes is that leaders in the top of companies can “know” and yet not “do” what they have to do: either by not doing it at all, not doing it fast enough, or by not doing enough of what has to be done. CEOs fail not because they are not smart (they inevitably are!), they fail because they do not deal with their own thought-viruses. See Sull's book, Revival of the Fittest: Why Good Companies Go Bad and How Great Managers Remake Them, for a good exposure of some recurring thought-patterns which I would name thought-viruses. 

Skilled Incompetence

Active inertia is different from what Chris Argyris calls skilled incompetence, where he describes how people become skilled at avoiding testing information, exploring options, exposing artificial polarities, testing one's own negative attributions about other people (which prevents you from listening or using their inputs).

Skilled incompetence typically happens over a long period of time and can be compared to destructive games business people play, where one of the rules are that you are not allowed to question the rules or ask questions about how decisions are being made. Decisions are then seen as events, rather than a process that has an open-ended end (open-ended for review, re-adjustment and corrections). (see also Garvin and Roberto's HBR article What you don't know about decision-making, where they make the point that decisions inevitably have histories, and can be presented as arguments, or as directions/preferred priorities). 

Coaching folks out of failure is more than just coaching the direct opposite of what was focused on. It is about looking at how the mistake was not paid attention to in the first place. It is about looking at the inner convictions and convincing strategies that the managers and leaders use to create the mistake. Coaching adds huge value as it helps the individual concerned to stand in a second or third position to gain perspective and to learn new personal decision-making strategies to secure the next success in the journey ahead. It helps with the various levels of thinking such as fact finding, cause effect analysis, idea generation, idea screening, implementation stages, analytical thinking, systemic thinking, innovation thinking and integrative thinking. 

Many coaches use models to help jumpstart their coachees to move up a level in their thinking such as Bloom's Taxonomy of Thinking Levels, which includes the following criteria:

• Knowledge Recall: Observe, Repeat, Label/Name, Cluster, List, Record
• Comprehension Translate: Recognize, Locate, Identify, Restate, Paraphrase, Tell
• Application Generalize: Select, Use, Manipulate, Sequence, Organize, Imitate
• Analysis Break Down/Discover: Examine, Classify, Distinguish, Map
• Synthesis Compose: Propose, Plan, Compose, Formulate, Design, Construct
• Evaluation Judge: Compare, Prioritize/Rank, Judge, Decide, Rate, Evaluate 
• Integration Weaving not the personal experience as their own information into their identity levels and dimensions.

The power to enhance the way you lead and manage is directly proportionate to the coaching intervention. In a South African company where we coached 12 executives for 12 sessions each over a period of one year, their personal performance measurement system applied by their company measured their increased effectiveness, efficiency and performance at an average of 26% to the previous year when they were not coached.

Dr Bill Price - Helping high-performing, transformational and visionary C-Suite executives get their employees to buy into and execute on their mission.