The Bible of Leadership

Othmane KABBAJ
INTRODUCTION

It is an unassailable fact that any society or organization needs a leader in order to go forward and to grow.
Therefore, leadership must be seriously taken into consideration in the strategy of the corporations. Leadership is the capacity
of an individual to influence and guide the members of an organization, it involves making important decisions, establishing
achievable goals and helping the members of the organization by giving them knowledge and tools that allow them to achieve
their goals. Unfortunately, leadership is a very difficult skill to acquire and a lack of effective leadership can be detrimental
for your company. As you requested, we may rightfully wonder to what extent can a leader have a positive impact on your
corporation. To outline the main points, we will first shed light on the causes of the bad leadership in your company and then
analyze different measures to put in place in order to bounce back.

FINDINGS & DISCUSSION

To begin, bad leadership is the cause of a lack of motivation and a lack of soft skills. It appears that bad leadership
takes roots from a variety of factors and seems to be quite identifiable but bad leadership cannot be spotted in good times.
Indeed, if a bad leader is the leader during a good phase of an organization, he will never be challenged. Consequently, a bad
leader is a leader who cannot positively change things during hard times. In fact, “poor leadership in good times can be
hidden, but poor leadership in bad times is a recipe for disaster” (Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman, June 2009, Ten Fatal
Flaws That Derail Leaders, The Magazine). As said before, we can tease out a link between bad leadership and lack of skills.
More concretely, a bad leader usually has poor communication skills, an egocentric behavior, inadequate decision making
and problem-solving skills and eventually a lack of vision and failure to set clear and achievable goals.

Furthermore, we could also change perspective by thinking why is it possible for an incompetent person to become a leader.
Indeed, a cause of bad leadership is a lack of selectivity in hiring procedures. In Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become
Leaders (2019), Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic argues that some people find it easy to fool the others into thinking you are
better than you actually are. It works because we have an inability to distinguish between confidence and competence (we
tend to assume that confident people are more likely to be good leaders) and because of our inability to resist the allure
narcissistic individuals (we have always admired people with grandiose visions).

Then, it is also true that leadership is a subjective notion, it means that a leader can be bad for some people but good
for other people. This leads us to qualify the incapacity of those who are called bad leaders and allows us to delve into the
behavior of those who follow the leaders: the followers. In fact, according to Barbara Kellerman, bad leadership is still
leadership and bad leaders are still leaders. She also argues that “we must resolve ourselves to this expanded definition of
leaders and leadership and come to grips with the fact that leadership can be good and bad” (Kellerman Barbara, 2004, Bad
Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, Boston, Harvard Business Publishing). Consequently, one of the
measures that can be taken in a situation of bad leadership is to see if there are not bad followers also because they can
influence the work of the leader by judging him. To say nothing about the fact that bad followers can also be detrimental to
the corporation because they are the ones who are supposed to listen to the leader, if they listen wrong or does not want to, it
is the leader who will be falsely accused of bad leadership.

Moreover, it is an unassailable fact that the skills of the leaders must change according to the period. Indeed, a good leader
has the ability to adapt to the times and “effective leadership is largely context-specific: The same person who succeeds in one
era might fail miserably in another (Nitin Nohria, 2022, As the World Shifts, So Should Leaders, The Magazine). Therefore,
one of the measures that can be taken is to remind the leader that he must keep up with the shift in order to have a positive
impact on the corporation.
RECOMMENDATION

All things considered; we have taken into consideration potential reasons why there might be a lack of effective
leadership in your company by highlighting many personality flaws that can affect quality of leadership and the issue of
selectivity. In order to fix it, we can increase your selectivity process, train your leaders and remind them of what they have to
do in order to succeed and eventually go further by analyzing the behavior of the followers, the workers in your company and
its impact on the behavior of the leaders.
Reference List:

 Jack Zenger & Joseph Folkman, June 2009, Ten Fatal Flaws That Derail Leaders, The Magazine)
 Kellerman Barbara, 2004, Bad Leadership: What It Is, How It Happens, Why It Matters, Boston, Harvard Business
Publishing
 Nitin Nohria, 2022, As the World Shifts, So Should Leaders, The Magazine
 Tomas Chamorro-Premuzic, 2019, Why Do So Many Incompetent Men Become Leaders