Why Leaders Fail

John Maxwell famously said, “everything rises and falls on leadership.”
Although research offers a more nuanced picture.

For an organization to succeed, it takes a variety of contributions from talented individuals at all levels. But when leaders fail, the whole organization can indeed fall.

In this article, we’ll review several reasons why leaders fail. Failure is feedback. Failure is a great teacher. And for current and aspiring leaders, the failures of leaders past can be a great teacher at discounted tuition. It’s popular and easy to study successful leaders, but you learn a lot more a lot faster when you study why leaders fail.

Stop Learning

The first reason why leaders fail is that they stop learning. Many people front-load all of their learning into the first few decades of their life and years of their career. Once they reach a certain age, or in our case a certain level in the organizational chart, they stop learning. The excuse most leaders give is time, as in “I just don’t have enough time for continuous learning.” And as you rise in an organization, the demands of the position do seem to consume more and more of your time. But unless the demands of that position never change, the outdated learning from years past isn’t going to help much. As the scope of one’s leadership grows, the problems…