Seven reasons why nobody cares about your leadership anymore
One of the cardinal mistakes of leadership is to confuse having a title with being entitled. The status of leadership, which is an assignment of responsibility, is not the same as the relevance of leadership, which is a measure of its quality.
The point is that leadership effectiveness relies on the careful nurturing and cultivation of interactions with others. Therefore, to remain relevant, leaders must be able to reinvigorate and refresh their approaches. Ultimately, effective leadership is a delicate balance between reinvention and repetition. Without the capacity for reinvention, leadership risks becoming overly predictable, dull and uninspiring. When leaders are no longer able to inspire those around them, they quickly become redundant.
Friends, if you think that you have hit the proverbial ‘wall’, here are seven reasons why nobody seems to care about your leadership anymore.
1. Mutual disconnection
The most likely reason that those you lead no longer care about your leadership is because, at a fundamental level, you do not really care about them. When the simple things that matter become too much like hard work, you will begin to lose touch with others, and they will slowly move away from you. Mutual disconnection is the most common killer of leadership relationships, primarily because it happens slowly, not suddenly. To that extent, its affects are barely detectable until they become terminal. By the time that most leaders become aware of the damage being done, it is already too late.
2. Constant recitation of the ‘greatest hits’ compilation
It is profoundly troubling when leaders spend more time focusing on previous achievements than future ambitions. At best, it suggests that they are struggling to energise and stimulate those they lead or doubt their own capacity to exceed their best successes. At worst, it reveals that leadership may be consumed by its own vanity. In the right measure, celebration of success can have high motivational value. However, when it becomes indulgent or self-serving, it is more likely to produce eye-rolling indifference.
3. Situational predictability
To ensure relevance in the face of current and emerging challenges, leadership approaches must be dynamic. However, when leadership becomes needlessly predictable and formulaic, it can lead to stagnation. This in turn can starve the ambitious of development opportunities, because their impulse for creativity, innovation and learning is blunted. Without learning, there is no growth and in a competitive environment, where those around you are growing, stagnation equates to regression.
4. Personality principle
It is easy to forget how a leader’s personality can attract some, just as easily as it repels others. This attraction and repulsion dynamic presents hazards at both ends of the spectrum. For those attracted to a leader, the risk is that over-familiarity, breeds contempt and results in casual, careless and even negligent conduct. Meanwhile, for those already repelled by a leader, the danger is that they eventually become repulsed by them. When either of these thresholds are crossed, the leader ceases to be a motivating presence and instead becomes a demotivating one.
5. Preference for licking boots than washing feet
There are those in leadership who believe that their career prospects are best served when they find boots to lick, instead of feet to wash. For ‘bootlickers’, leadership is about identifying the proverbial audience of one. Even if this means insulating themselves from the wise counsel of the greater majority. For these individuals, subordinates exist purely to nourish the vanity of their superiors. However, those who ‘wash feet’ lead to serve and take their duty of care responsibility seriously. They don’t just serve amongst others; they serve for them.
6. Writing cheques that you can’t cash
It is not often appreciated that there is a transactional dimension to the function of leadership, where people want to see what you have achieved before trust is extended. Therefore, when leaders posture and preen, especially, without anything to show for it, they attract derision and invite opprobrium. Neither boastfulness, nor vacuity are endearing qualities for those looking to inspire others. There is a specific lesson here for those new to leadership roles, who sometimes overcompensate to prove they are worthy of the positions to which they have been appointed.
7. Saturation threshold has been reached
As painful as it may sound, even leadership has a saturation point. This is the moment when the baton should be handed over to successors with new ideas, different life experience and fresh faces. In leadership, the ‘changing of the guard’ can help to refocus effort, build momentum and accelerate progress, in way that a more familiar voice and face would not be able. For leaders, it is important to know when it is time to leave the stage. You should not wait to be asked and should not need to be told.
Unsurprisingly, when the moment of disconnection occurs between a leader and their followers, the last to realise are the leaders themselves. As this blog explains, this is because separation often occurs slowly not suddenly. It tends to be a cumulative effect of the attitudes, habits and practices that work their way into the fabric of leadership behaviour over time. Perhaps the most important lesson of this blog is that leadership relevance is not determined by leaders, it is determined by others.
