How to deal with leadership failures

Regardless of how hard we try, failure is inevitable in the running of a business. Whether it is an unsuccessful execution of a new product or a personnel issue, things are bound to go wrong at some point. Leadership failures, however, can be avoided for the most part.

Provided you have set your leadership teams up properly, failures should not happen. But what if they do? How can you deal with leadership failures in a way that minimises their impact on your organisation?

In short, the main causes of leadership failure are boredom, micromanagement, an inability to adapt to change, ineffective communication and individualism. Leaders deal with it by taking ownership, reflecting, putting contingency plans in place, processing the failure and investing in leadership training. We will look at each of these in more detail below.

What are leadership failures?

Before we jump into why they happen, we should first define what we mean by leadership failure. In short, it can refer to the unsuccessful execution of anything deemed the responsibility of leadership. This might include:

• Poor project execution
• A decline in employee or workplace morale
• A lack of accountability or responsibility within leadership teams
• Miscommunication and lack of coordination
• Inconsistent work quality

As you might expect, these issues can have far-reaching consequences on a business. Whether it is increased employee turnover, a decline in profits or negative client assessments, leadership failures can have a noticeable trickle-down effect. It would be wrong to assume you can avoid leadership failures completely, but it is possible to minimise their chances by being proactive.

What causes leadership failures?

The causes of leadership failures are as varied as the consequences. You will find that your business type, workplace culture and employee expectations can all contribute to them happening. However, the following are the main causes of failures within leadership teams across pretty much all organisations.

1. Boredom

A bored leader is an ineffective leader. Those who are truly able to inspire their teams do so because they are passionate about their roles and the work they do. This passion is essential for properly motivating people and getting them to achieve great things.

Of course, if leaders do not feel stimulated, whether through stagnation or a lack of responsibility, they will not be able to properly motivate their teams. After all, who wants to follow someone who seems to lack any interest in what they are doing?

Leadership is largely a person-focused role and typically means behaving in an exemplary fashion. If someone is not able to do this because they feel bored, then you can hardly blame employees for feeling the same way.

2. Micromanagement

Micromanagement is one of the worst things a leader can do. Most importantly, their role is not to manage people, let alone micromanage tasks. A successful leader will understand their position and will hopefully have enough trust in their teams that they can be left alone to do their work.

Micromanaging is time-consuming for everyone and detracts from a team’s goals. Similarly, from a leader’s perspective, spending a lot of time micromanaging can lead to feeling overwhelmed and a lack of productivity.

3. Inability to adapt to change

Adaptability is not unique to leaders, but it is an essential aspect of their roles. Work processes change, as do goals, and being responsive to business needs as they arise is necessary for successful leaders. Similarly, showing openness to change leads to opportunities for growth.

If a leader is not willing to be flexible or open to new techniques, they are bound to fail at some point. It could be that they miss a project deadline because their methods are outdated, or they fall behind on industry developments. Whatever the outcome, refusing to embrace change is always a bad thing.

4. Ineffective communication

Being able to communicate effectively is a core part of leadership. Whether it is taking in ideas from senior management or passing updates to teams, a good leader must be able to listen, empathise and translate ideas into concepts that everyone can understand.

Sure, communication techniques can be learned, but they require a solid foundation of people skills to work properly. If a leader does not have the skillset for consistent and effective communication, cracks will quickly develop within their teams. Problems with communication can have a big knock-on effect, too, on goal-setting, expectations and more.

5. Individualism

Ideally, leaders in your organisation should not have problems with individualism because it is pretty much the opposite of what makes someone a good leader. Focusing on an individual could mean themselves or a single person within the leader’s team. Whoever the person is, being the sole focus of a leader’s feedback, motivation and attention is not great.

The most obvious effect is on team morale, but it will have an impact on productivity, too. An effective leader knows the value of teamwork, which includes equally motivating and working with everyone. Showing favouritism can be damaging to a team and is arguably one of the biggest signs of leadership failure.

How to deal with and learn from leadership failure

Whether you are a leader who feels they have failed, or a senior executive who has encountered failure in their leaders, it is possible to deal with and overcome issues related to failure. Below are some of the best strategies for dealing with leadership failures.

1. Take ownership

The first step to dealing with failure is to take ownership of mistakes and use them as the starting point for a learning opportunity. Accepting that a failure has been made does require courage, and it is wrong to ignore your, or your leader’s, role in a failure.

Taking ownership pretty much goes hand in hand with reflection, as the two combined can help you to understand what went wrong and what to do differently next time. If a leader working under you has made a mistake, it is also worth you assuming a level of responsibility, assuming you perform some kind of leadership role over them.

2. Reflection

Similarly, it is necessary to reflect on what went wrong. This requires a certain level of self-awareness, but it is fair to assume that a good leader will have this skill. It can help to get feedback from others to understand why the failure happened.

If you are a leader, this could mean speaking to a mentor or colleagues. If a leader in your company has failed at something, consider speaking to their team members or people on their level to get opinions from those on the ground.

Either way, honest and open feedback is essential for growth and forms a good foundation for self-reflection.

3. Ensure you have contingency plans

Much like adaptability, having contingency plans is essential for effective leadership. It is always best to have backups in place to account for things going wrong, but if you do not, use failure as motivation to set some up.

The basis for contingency plans includes risk assessments and previous mistakes. These provide data for understanding where things can go wrong or have in the past, which you can use in your future decision-making.

4. Process the failure

This step is much like taking ownership and reflecting on failure. It is important to spend some time processing what happened and the role you, or your leader, played in this failure. However, it differs from the points mentioned above in a few key ways.

First, processing the failure forms the basis for your ability to reflect, because you need to understand what happened to figure out how to do better next time. Not processing something is the same as ignoring it: it prevents you from being aware of what happened.

Second, processing a failure helps you to separate emotions from the practical elements. It is reasonable to feel disappointed if you played a role in something not working properly, but these emotions can get in the way of your plans to fix it or prevent it from happening next time. Contingency plans should be practical and pragmatic, which means not letting emotions get involved.

5. Invest in leadership training

Finally, leadership failures typically signal a bigger issue within an organisation, such as gaps in knowledge or management-specific processes. While it is possible to solve these internally with feedback and mentorship, investing in leadership training is often the most successful way of preventing them from happening again.

Effective leadership training will focus on both the person-related and work-related aspects of being a leader, such as communication, strategic thinking, problem-solving and more. While you, or your leader, might have immediately identified the issue, going through all aspects of training is often a good idea.

More than anything, it creates a level playing field and ensures consistency across all leaders within an organisation. Again, it might only be one leader who failed at something, but sending all of them on the same training course can put everyone on the same page.

Learning from leadership failures

Experiencing setbacks is inevitable, and the way you deal with leadership failures is more important than what happened. They provide learning opportunities for leaders and companies on a larger scale and can highlight gaps in knowledge.

So, if you experience a leadership failure, either as an individual or an organisation, embrace it and learn from it. Use failures as a way to set realistic goals and manage expectations rather than punishment, and you will end up with a far more successful team structure.