Strategy Insight

Here are two questions worth considering.

• Who is most responsible for the success of your leadership?

The success of each level of leadership is heavily influenced by the monitoring, measuring, and coaching of the leaders directly above it. If you want to increase the likelihood of success within your pipeline, it is incumbent on you to dedicate your leadership to this process.

• What influences the likelihood that your people will execute successfully?

It should be clear that one of the core success factors is to have a team of leaders with the proper skills, focus, and values.

Still, even by applying this process, you may never be completely successful. In some organizations, professionals will not readily accept people if they don’t have credentials in the field so your choices are limited. In these cases, we have no way of knowing how the person will respond to the tensions, frustrations, and relationships of staff work.

When an executive places a person in the wrong job, s/he must correct it. Not removing them is a false kindness because in the short and long term it is cruel to the individual, the direct reports, and the company to keep that person in that role. But there is also no reason to let that person go. The appropriate course of action, and with planning this is often accomplished, is to return that person to the old job or an equivalent position.

Sometimes, the position itself is the reason for the lack of success. When a ship would have several fatal accidents, it earned the moniker “widow-maker.” The owners would not keep sending out the ship – instead they would break it up. Whenever a job defeats two people in a row and these people in their earlier assignments had performed well, a company has a widow-maker on its hands. . The executive should consider abolishing the job because it may not be doable.

This entry was posted on December 12, 2008 at 3:19 pm and is filed under Strategy, Uncategorized. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments.

Tags: executives, influences, Leadership, responsibility, Success, widowmakers