On Death and Dying

Previous posts dealing with the relationship between the public and private sectors have focused more on what government leaders can learn from successful private industry strategies than on learning from private sector failures.  Leaders in each sector face unique challenges, but there are a few fundamental pitfalls that can hinder a leader in any arena.

In their study, “On Death and Dying: The Corporate Leadership Capacity of CEOs,” John Slocum, Cass Ragan, and Albert Casey explore character traits and factors that can lead to the “corporate executive ‘death’”.   .  These are leaders of some of the world’s most recognizeable companies; whose careers were previously marked only by success.  “On Death and Dying” identifies self-sabotaging habits common to leaders who either leave or are prematurely forced out of their organizations.  They pinpoint following three critical failures, leading to untimely CEO departure, and ultimately damage to the entire organization:

• [failing leaders] often have been members of their organizations for a long period of time and…cannot dismiss or reassign poorly performing managers
• [failing leaders make] strategic decisions that cost their company its competitive advantage in the industry. They either failed to execute a strategic decision or solved the wrong problem well
• [failing leaders avoid] the financial realities facing their firm

The first two failures are clearly apparent in the government sector, and although government leaders rarely interact directly with financial results, any refusal to aknowledge the truth can afflict any leader.

 As it turns out, Slocum argues, the last, self-sabotaging, habit is key to understanding the behavior of those facing career-threatening crises.  In order to understand this behavior, Slocum, Ragan, and Casey applied to each case the model of the 5 emotional stages of a terminally ill patient: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, and acceptance. Failing leaders, they discovered, go through the same progression of stages, and whether or not the leader and the organization recover depends largely on the ability of the leader to reach the stage of acceptance.   Those who were caused serious organizational disruption and unable bounce back from their failures were those who got stuck in the denial stage.

By attributing their failures to everything from internal conspiracies to uncontrollable external forces, these “unproductively narcissistic” leaders left their organization having never accepted the true cause of their problems, and therefore never taking corrective actions.   This type of leader often creates an environment in which subordinates feel unable to deliver bad news for fear of becoming the scapegoat.  In the precarious world of government leadership, where a highly-publicized failure might mark the end of a career, it is all too easy to create an atmosphere of willful ignorance.

This paper was originally published in Organizational Dynamics and is available online (unfortunately access requires a paid subscription). More information is available on John Slocum at his website.