Introduction
“Most often what gets organizations into trouble,” writes Richard Farson in his book Management of the Absurd: Paradoxes In Leadership (Simon & Schuster, 1996), “are faulty leadership styles, poor internal relationships, and managerial blind spots. The delusional hope of a troubled organization is that it will be saved without having to make changes in these highly personal areas.”
Time and time again, I have seen troubled organizations fail to address issues related to faulty leadership styles, poor internal relationships, and managerial blind spots. Instead, they focus on creating new strategic plans, rolling out a major reorganization, and then doing in-depth system redesign work. However, like a house of cards, it all falls apart, and generates minimal, if any, difference in moving the organization out of it’s troubled pattern of execution.
I think this happens, because troubled organizations don’t know actually how to deal with these highly personal areas. Instead, they default to past choices, thinking they will generate different outcomes. And yet, truth be told, this is rarely ever the case. Still, all is not lost, if a troubled organization chooses to deal with the three, aforementioned problems.
Dealing With Faulty Leadership Styles
First, from my perspective, faulty leadership styles reflects a faulty understanding of leadership. For many troubled organizations, leadership is defined by being competent in three basic areas: character competency, technical or functional competency related to the job, and positional competency, i.e. the number of years of experience in that position or line of work. Positional competency can also include some level of team competency, i.e. number of years and experience of building and maintaining teams, and customer competency, i.e. knowing how to work with internal partners and external customers. And, for the most part, all of these are critical skills to have when it comes to being a leader.
However, faulty leadership styles rarely reflect problems in these three areas. Instead, they reflect problems in other areas that are especially important and significant over time. When I have been called in to coach a positional leader who is struggling, I often discover two overlapping problems. The first problem relates to communication, and the second problem relates to building and maintaining relationships, not just teams.
In the area of communication, the problem is bigger than issues related to speaking and writing. What I have observed is a problem that revolves around poor listening skills in combination with a leader feeling like they always need to add their two cents to every conversation. The result is a form of communication that ends up being nothing more than two intersecting monologues with little, if any level of shared clarity, understanding and perspective.
In the area of building and maintaining relationships, many leaders think leadership is a call to action. In reality, it is a call to enter into relationships that generate action. Furthermore, the best leaders grasp that it also is more than just an individual relationship. In essence, faulty leadership styles reflects a complete lack of understanding of the social networks within the organization. It also reflects a total lack of clarity that successful execution related to major change efforts requires an individual to grasp that a company is the sum of it’s relationships. And if the relationships are unhealthy, then execution is unhealthy.
Improving Poor Internal Relationships
Second, poor internal relationships contribute to this problem. When coaching people who struggle in this area, I often discover leaders who know very few people within the organization, and even fewer people who know them. As William Oncken III wrote, “What you know will not get off the ground without active support of who you know.” And the interesting thing is that very few leaders actually engage in an on-going relationship building strategy. Instead, they focus on getting things done, and do not build and/or expand their own network of relationships.
Herminia Ibarra in her book, Act Like A Leader, Think Like A Leader, (Harvard Business Review Press, 2015), explains that leaders use networks as an essential leadership tool. They help them with “sensing trends and seeing opportunities, building ties to opinion leaders and talent in diverse areas, working collaboratively across boundaries to create more value, avoiding groupthink, generating breakthrough ideas, [and] obtaining career opportunities.”
Given the importance of networks, Ibarra recommends leaders build and maintain three different kinds of networks, namely operational, personal, and strategic . As she writes, “the first [operational] helps you manage current internal responsibilities, the second [personal] boosts personal development, and the third [strategic] focuses on new business directions and the stakeholders you must get on board to pursue these directions.” She also notes that “your strategic network is made up of relationships that help you to envision the future, sell your ideas, and get the information and resources you need to exploit these ideas….A good strategic network gives you connective advantage: the ability to marshal information, support, or other resources from one of your networks to obtain results in another.” From my perspective, the root cause of poor internal relationships reflects poor network management.
There is one other factor in poor internal relationships, namely accountability. In the workplace, accountability is about taking ownership of your actions, responsibilities, and results without blaming others. Therefore, many leaders will hold their direct reports accountable for their actions, responsibilities and results. The interesting thing for me is that very few leaders will hold themselves accountable for their own actions, responsibilities, or results. Typically, the ones who are struggling will blame others rather than acknowledge their own role, and even fewer will admit their own mistakes.
On a parallel track, the best leaders not only hold themselves accountable for their words and our actions, but they also engage in lateral accountability, namely holding their peers accountable for their actions, responsibilities, and results. And as Patrick Lencioni notes in his book, The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (Jossey-Bass, 2002), holding one another accountable for delivering against the decisions and plans that the team agreed to is one of the defining characteristics of a team that moves from being a dysfunctional team to a healthy and functional team. In short, it is the combination of personal accountability, vertical accountability, and lateral accountability that makes a major difference when moving from being a troubled organization to a resilient and healthy organization.
Correcting Managerial Blind Spots
Third, from my perspective, managerial blind spots are common, but can be corrected with timely and on-going coaching. In the beginning, we need to determine what blind spot or spots are taking place. Then, we can come up with a coaching plan.
There are four common, managerial blind spots. The first is temporal blindness, where an individual sees what is happening today, but does not understand how the past is influencing current choices. The second is relationship blindness, where an individual does not see themselves as being in relationship with others, or understanding the social networks within the company. The third is spatial blindness, where an individual may see parts of a system, but not understand the whole system. The fourth is strategic blindness, where an individual sees part of the company’s strategy, but does not comprehend the whole strategy for the entire company. Connected to this last form of blindness is when an individual does not understand that having a strategy and executing a strategic plan are not the same thing.
Once a form of blindness have been identified, an experienced coach can help an individual change their perspective over time. Still, as the coach does this work, I am reminded of the wise counsel of Margaret Wheatley who wrote: “People don’t support things that are forced on them. We don’t act responsibly on behalf of plans and programs created without us. We resist being changed, not change itself.” Helping people with managerial blind spots is a co-creative process where an individual moves from being unaware to aware, and ultimately to understanding. This depth of personal change does take time, patience, and support, because we are changing how people think and how they see the world around them.
Making Room Inside Your Head
“You cannot manage for the long term,” writes former editor of the Harvard Business Review, Thomas A. Stewart, “unless you can make room in your head, and your company's collective head, to think, plan, and execute over a multiyear time span, even while tending to inevitable (and important) distractions.” This is a key perspective when a troubled organizations wants to deal with faulty leadership styles, poor internal relationships, and managerial blind spots. The work to transform these three elements is a multiyear process, and will need to happen even in the midst of inevitable, and important distractions.
As Jim Collins in his book, How The Mighty Fall and Why Some Companies Never Give In (HarperCollins, 2009), points out: “The signature of the truly great versus the merely successful is not the absence of difficulty, but the ability to come back from setbacks, even cataclysmic catastrophes, stronger than before. Great companies can fall and recover. Great social institutions can fall and recover. And great individuals can fall and recover. As long as you never get entirely knocked out of the game, there remains always hope.” And the hope for troubled organizations is to commit the time and resources to make changes in the three aforementioned areas. Then, they can recover and, in due time, can come back stronger than they were before.
© Geery Howe 2026
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