ABSTRACT

It has been said that 51% of employees believe that business initiatives succeed in spite of their leaders, not because of them [1]. Why? Because there are leaders who don’t clearly communicate what they are trying to accomplish, who establish useless policies, and who don’t consider the capacity of their organization to accomplish goals when initiating new programs. Therefore, it seems reasonable to assume that there are some pretty good self-motivated employees who work hard to make poorly planned new programs work, even if they don’t get any of the credit for their successes. But how can it be that some leaders don’t lead, yet they can claim success? It can happen, at least in part, when managers move up the ranks into more and more visible leadership positions, and eventually reach a position where they think that they don’t have to pay attention to the details because that’s somebody else’s job. Basically, these so-called leaders are taking credit for the work of other people. Unfortunately, there is a fairly obvious downside to this: eventually, these self-motivated employees leave and the leader is left with a weaker team, if there is any team left at all [1]. The take-home message is that leaders are expected to be positive role models and lead their organizations to new and important goals. They must solicit honest and critical feedback from others and must have a solid understanding of their organization’s day-to-day operations. Leadership, like management in general, is a daily job; it’s not an opportunity to relax and let others do the work while you take the credit for successes and shift the blame for your failures. In this chapter, we’ll look at what leaders do, how they do it, and some of the differences between managers and leaders.