Learning from ineffective leaders: Three things I learned about leadership by watching people who didn’t lead well
Learning to lead is a journey, with all kinds of potential role models
Doing the same thing over and over again does not lead to better results the next time. Doing things the way they have always been done does not allow for innovation and progress. Your leadership journey should include new paths that haven’t been tried before as well as new directions that are the result of learning from what you’ve done or seen others do before. So where do we most often look for those leadership lessons?
The reality is that we learn from all kinds of people in our lives - family members, teachers, mentors, colleagues, bosses, public figures, maybe even fictional characters. I am not ashamed to admit that there was a time in my early adulthood when I would occasionally ask myself, “What would Scully do?” Often, we look for leadership role models who exemplify who we want to be as a leader and how we want to lead. I would argue that we can learn just as much from ineffective leaders.
Learning to lead isn’t just about following someone else’s path because it looks like the right one to you. It’s also about looking down the paths of those that look less well-maintained, messy, maybe even problematic. It is down these ineffective paths that I found some of my most valuable lessons.
Ineffective leaders aren’t necessarily unethical or bad. The unfortunate reality is that some very effective leaders are both of those things and people follow them anyway. Ineffective leaders are those that no one follows, those who cannot effectively influence people to work toward a common purpose.
Three things I’ve learned from ineffective leaders
When I think of a leader as ineffective, it is distinctly different from a leader who makes mistakes. All of us make mistakes. Ineffective leaders, however, make the same mistakes over and over and over again, or they make progressively more damaging mistakes over time. Which brings me to the first thing I have learned from ineffective leaders.
Learn from your mistakes
If you try something and it doesn’t have the result you were hoping for, it might be because you made a mistake. Ineffective leaders either don’t believe that a mistake is possible (the “I’m always right” crowd), they don’t care that a mistake has occurred (the “not my problem” crowd), or they insist the mistake belongs to someone else (the “not my fault” crowd). Effective leaders don’t blame others for mistakes. They care about the end result and know that a mistake is something that needs to be addressed, not ignored. And they have sufficient self-awareness to know that no one is always right.
I once worked for a boss who believed that the most important perspective on any issue was her own. She believed she had sufficient experience to make every decision and enough knowledge about every topic to make that decision alone. She also believed the only mistakes being made involved people choosing not to listen to her advice or follow her approach. Disagreeing with her, as I once did about a case I was investigating, inherently meant that you were wrong because she simply didn’t make mistakes.
I tried that approach once myself as a brand new manager. I decided based on a chapter I had read in a book for a college course on effective leadership that I knew the perfect way to more effectively assign people to work schedules to meet the needs of those we were tasked with serving. Without talking to my staff or other leaders, I simply made the change. It didn’t go well. Sick calls increased. Work slowed. I explained my reasoning and that didn’t help. That’s when I realized I had made a mistake.
A couple of years later, in a new leadership role in the same department, I remembered that lesson. Schedules needed shifting and the people in those roles were waiting for me to do what I had done before and just make a change to something I thought would work better. This time, I didn’t. I talked with my staff and other leaders, and I used their input to come to an effective compromise. Sick calls didn’t increase. Work didn’t slow down.
That boss I mentioned? She almost always struggled to get people to follow her lead and work toward a common purpose. People didn’t follow her. They simply did what they were told - most of the time. They also looked for ways to work around her rather than following the path she was trying to lay out. In large part, it was because she refused to admit her mistakes. And they actively worked to get out of her orbit as quickly as possible.
To be an effective leader, you need to be willing and able to admit mistakes, assess what happened, and determine why it didn’t work out. Ask for feedback. Learn from that feedback and use it to handle similar situations differently in the future. None of us has all the answers. This takes me to the second thing I have learned from ineffective leaders.
Admit it when you don’t know the answer
The easiest way to lose the respect and trust of those you are trying to lead is to make up the answer to a question they ask you. Don’t guess. Actually acknowledging that you don’t know the answer however is a very effective way to earn their trust and respect.
As a relatively new street cop 30 years ago, I learned this lesson first hand from one of my sergeants. I watched as more experienced officers avoided asking that particular sergeant for advice on calls, approval for arrests, or information that could help them come to decisions about specific charges. When I asked why, they were very clear about their reasons. The sergeant would make up the answer if he didn’t know it. The officers had no respect for him and I watched as they frequently operated against his directives as a result.
I learned from that experience and did the opposite when I became a sergeant myself. The results of that choice became clear to me one night when I learned of a conversation that had been overheard by a colleague. One of my officers had come to my defense with a group of his peers who were deriding the three sergeants on duty that night, including me. This officer interjected and came to my defense because I had admitted earlier in the shift that I didn’t know the answer to a question he had. In his mind, and ultimately in the mind of his peers, my ability to admit when I didn’t know something not only made me different from the other sergeants they were dismissing, it also made me more reliable, trustworthy, and worthy of their respect. They knew that I would tell them the truth.
As a high-level leader in both city and county government spaces, I often had to present information to elected officials in public settings. I would occasionally answer one of their questions by saying, “I don’t have that information in front of me right now, but I will get you that answer.” I had many staff who wondered how I could be comfortable admitting that I didn't immediately have the answers they were looking for. My comments to those staff members were consistent with what I had learned 30 years earlier as a street cop and had reinforced as a new sergeant several years later. I never wanted to be the reason someone acted on erroneous information simply because I was unwilling to admit that I didn’t have all the answers.
The leaders I most admire and seek to emulate don’t just admit when they don’t know the answer, they also admit when they are wrong. Ineffective leaders don’t. That’s the third thing I have learned from ineffective leaders:
Own your decisions and hold yourself accountable when you get it wrong
It’s hard for most people to own unpopular decisions and to admit their mistakes. It’s even harder to hold yourself accountable for those decisions. When decisions are unpopular or you get it wrong, you have an opportunity to really show your leadership chops. Think about it. What do we want from our employees, those we lead, when they are faced with difficult decisions or get something wrong? We want them to make and own those decisions, acknowledge mistakes, and develop a plan to address them. Why wouldn’t they want the same from their leaders?
About mid-way through my law enforcement career, I made a few decisions that were pretty unpopular with many of the officers who worked for me. I didn’t make those decisions in a vacuum, though. I had sought both advice and approval from my boss, who told me she agreed with me and that I was making the right call. While I was on vacation after making one of those decisions, she told the officers who were displeased with my decision that I had done the wrong thing, despite what she had told me before I made the decision. It undermined my authority as a leader and shattered the trust I had in her.
It wasn’t the fact that she had presumably changed her mind about her advice and guidance to me that was the real issue. It was the fact that I heard about it second hand. She never spoke with me about what had occurred. She never owned that change of heart, which led me to believe it was less about changing her mind and more about her inability to own her own role in those decisions in the face of opposition. And it helped me realize I never wanted to put someone I was leading in that position.
A little later on in my career, I made one of those unpopular decisions again. After making it, I had a colleague remind me of something I had told our officers several months earlier that was in direct contrast to the decision I had just made. In some ways it would have been easier to just shrug and keep moving forward, but that wouldn’t have been leading, and it would have been similar to what I had seen from that prior boss only a year or two earlier. I thanked the colleague, walked into the break room where the officer most directly impacted by the decision was eating dinner with several of his colleagues. In front of all of them, I apologized to that officer and changed course to reflect what they had all been told months earlier.
About 30 minutes later, that officer walked into my office, shook my hand, and told me that he had never before seen a leader apologize for a mistake like that, much less do so in public. He thanked me and told me in very clear terms that he and the officers in that room would follow me wherever I needed them to go. It was valuable feedback and reinforced my belief in the importance of owning decisions and addressing mistakes.
Learning to lead is a continuous process
Who you strive to be as a leader also has a lot to do with who you strive to be as a human. One of the things that has remained important to me over the course of my career is the belief that continuous learning is not only vital to career success, it is also essential to who I want to be as a person. That process of continuous learning means seeking new ideas and information from multiple places, consistently engaging in accurate self-reflection, and spending time observing others in both success and failure.
Take advantage of the opportunities to learn about what not to do by watching ineffective leaders and you can hopefully avoid making some of the same mistakes yourself. You can also learn a lot about how decisions land for the people who report to you by reflecting on why you view someone as an ineffective leader. Often, that view is heavily influenced by the way a leader’s approach or decisions impact you and those around you. Leading is a human endeavor and thus involves emotion, even when we attempt to leave our emotions at the door. Learning to address and anticipate emotional responses - both yours and others - can be a key part of learning and one that is perhaps more easily accessible when watching and learning from those leaders who are not as effective as others.
