Destructive Leadership The base rate of managerial incompetence is estimated to

Question

Destructive Leadership

The base rate of managerial incompetence is estimated to be 50 to 75 percent. This means that a majority of people in positions of authority has difficulties getting a group of people to work effectively together or get results.

1. What do you think about this percentage estimate of incompetent managers? For example, is it too high or low, and why?

2. Think about one particular ineffective leader you have worked or played for. What dark-side traits (as described in the text) did this leader possess that caused him or her to be ineffective?

3. Surely you have no dark-side traits (or perhaps you do). Nonetheless, managerial and leadership incompetence is not solely due to dark-side traits. How would you as a leader get feedback on your own performance and traits to help you become a more effective leader?

Explanation / Answer

1. The base rate of managerial incompetence is very high because it represents that approximately half of three quarter of people in an organization are facing difficulties in terms of understanding and cooperation. This is a big fault by management because this indicates that leaders are unable to maintain integrity, social friendship and synergies between their team mates.

The organization is composed of individualistic culture where people prefer to perform tasks individually through their own ways and principles. Such organizations are unable to produce a synergy effect because synergies are combined efforts that result due to coordination between two or more people (Hill, 2012).

This organization should improve its leadership competencies; it should provide team projects to its people so that they may know how to deal with group and teams. In this way they can enhance their managerial competencies.

2. There are several leaders with whom I have spent in many phases of my life. Out of all those leaders, the two that I will never forgot are my manager in the bank where I had worked and my sports team leader.

Both of them were two different ends of the spectrum because my manager at the bank was an experienced man who kept an eye on the progress of his workers; he was calm, quiet, patient and relaxed. When I committed a mistake in the accounting statement of entries than instead of getting aggressive and harsh, he recommended to me how to correct the mistake (Milburn, 2014). He was assertive, focused, humble, polite and detailed. Later, I assisted him in settling the mistake and we finally concluded with fruitful results. His behavior motivated me to work with him in the future. These are the qualities and behaviors of an effective leader.

3. On the other hand, my sports team leader was an ineffective leader because he just knows how to shout; he did not tell us the correct way to throw a ball, but he wants us to be perfect all the time. Besides that, sometimes he fought with students and he literally coerced children to either win the game or die.Such type of behavior is unacceptable as a leader; he was not a leader, he was a terror and a nightmare. He did not know how to manage problems; he misbehaved a lot and he was unable to deliver the appropriate message.

References:

•                  Hill, Catey. (2012). ‘What makes an effective leader?’ Retrieved on 2014 from, http://www.nydailynews.com/news/money/effective-leader-article-1.372028

•                  Milburn, Tim. (2014). ‘8 Ways To Measure Your Leadership Effectiveness’. Retrieved on 2014 from, http://timmilburn.com/8-ways-to-measure-your-leadership-effectiveness

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