Krishnan had read this article last year and saved it so we could share it more widely. Leadership is a topic close to our hearts and good leaders are hard to come by !!
Good Leaders Vs Bad Leaders
On the second day of the PGPMax Leadership Summit 2021, I had the pleasure of moderating a session of Shiv Shivakumar, President, Aditya Birla Group. He has written a very interesting book “The Right Choice” which is about ten career dilemmas that an executive faces in the corporate world.
Do see Shiv’s presentation here – Career Transformation – The Right Choice.
There is a slide on his presentation which talks about Career Health Check and the very first point speaks of self awareness. Shiv made an important point, saying, “often we have a very high opinion of ourselves which is far from reality” 😁. He said become more self aware and ask around for feedback before assuming that you are a great leader.
This Business Insider article looks at bad leaders who think they are good leaders …. obviously, no marks for self awareness !!
Here is the link to this article – Why bad leaders think they are good leaders.
Some highlights from the article
“…In fact, it has been so well demonstrated in studies that it is now known as the Dunning-Kruger effect. This is a cognitive bias where people of low ability assess their ability as greater than it is, because of their meta-cognitive inability to recognise their own ineptitude.“
“…One of the difficult implications of fuzzy causality is that good leadership behaviours may go hand-in-hand with bad outcomes and bad leadership behaviours may go hand-in-hand with good outcomes (or no evidence of the bad impact for a very long time).”
Basically what the author means is a bad leader may end up getting great outcomes despite his bad leadership and a good leader might end up with bad outcomes and evidence of either behaviours comes to light much later.
“…Combine results from all stages: behaviour, employee, customer, financial. If all are positive, the person has almost certainly led well. If the first three are positive but not financial, perhaps there are other factors or simply a little more time is needed. If only financial is positive, ask yourself if this might be a misleading result.”
Do read the article and look around your organization to identify bad leaders that have “good leader” tags and vice versa.
