The Factors that Lead to Leadership Failure

Both HR professionals and CEOs agree that Failing to Build Relationships and a Team Environment and A Mismatch with Corporate Culture are the factors most likely to lead to a leader’s derailment.

Understanding the factors that most commonly influence leadership failure will inform your talent strategy and ensure leadership development is on target to deliver needed results. Business growth potential depends on the quality of talent, as does competitive differentiation.
Leadership turnover for non-performance or other leadership dissatisfaction issues continues to be higher than planned, especially since choices regarding senior leadership could be considered some of the most important corporate decisions a company can make.

To gain some insight as to possible sources of succession risk factors, we conducted research in partnership with Chally Group to identify the factors believed to contribute most to the failure of senior leaders in their organizations. The top 10 were as follows:

1. Fails to Build Relationships and a Team Environment
2. A Mismatch for the Corporate Culture
3. Failure to Deliver Acceptable Results
4. Unable to Win Company Support
5. Lack of Appropriate Training
6. Egotistical
7. Lack of Vision
8. Not Flexible
9. Poor Management Skills
10. Poor Communication

The costs associated with failure (at worst) or ineffective executive transitions are high, and lack of adequate support for talent during crucial periods can have long-term negative impacts for both leaders and the organization. This data only hints of what is to come. When considering the evolving workforce and the increasing importance of engagement on organizational transformation, high performance and productivity, the leader’s role becomes the organization’s greatest catalyst for success. Leaders need to be supported to fully understand the impact of their efforts and, in some cases, lack thereof. Leadership behaviors directly influence employee engagement levels.

Hiring Managers Say LinkedIn Delivers Candidates

LinkedIn is the top networking site used by North American companies to find job candidates, according to a global survey by Right Management. More than 2,000 internal and external recruiters, human resource executives and hiring managers from 17 countries representing more than 20 industry sectors participated in the Right Management survey.

LinkedIn was reported as useful for sourcing candidates by 93% of the respondents in the U.S. and Canada. Although it trails LinkedIn in North America, Facebook is dominant among European and Asian employers.

Networking Sites as Source of Job Candidates
(Percentage that said site was “useful”)

	North America	Europe	Asia Pacific	Global
LinkedIn	93%	42%	32%	52%
Facebook	34%	62%	75%	58%
Twitter	18%	35%	48%	34%

Most people tend to think of social or professional networking sites just as job hunting tools. But career transition professionals are well aware that nearly all employers search these sites for possible job candidates. Our survey, in fact, says that nine out of ten large organizations in North America find at least one of these sites useful. It’s also evident companies consult more than one site when seeking suitable people for openings.

In addition to the top three networking sites, several were also found useful by respondents, including Peoplenjobs, Plaxo, Scout, Viadeo and Xing.

Although nearly all employers today use networking sites as a sourcing method, it is only one among several. Number-one is job postings on the company website followed closely by referrals from company employees. Third are ads in printed media and on job boards followed by informational interviews and staffing agencies.

Are you active on LinkedIn?