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Library of Congress Catalog Card No.: 99-64598ISBN: 0-7645-5176-0
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No ...For Dummies book is complete without " The Part of Tens." This part enhances the essence of the book with short chapters that offer a medley of timely tips. "The Part of Tens" is an ideal place for authors to express humor, opinions, and creativity. Check out "Ten Mistakes That Every Leader Makes" from Leadership For Dummies.

Ten Mistakes That Every Leader Makes
In This Chapter

Repeating the same mistakes
Being inflexible
Trying to be what you're not
Being a commander rather than a leader
Failing to listen
Getting caught up in your own glory
Expecting it to last forever
Hoarding skills or information
Taking yourself too seriously
Missing the gray areas

There's no such person as a perfect or ideal leader. If there were, situational leaders would remain leaders for life. Even Moses, considered to be one of the best leaders who ever lived, made enough mistakes over the course of his life that he was ultimately denied entrance to his homeland and died with the object of his wanderings within sight. Every leader makes mistakes; the challenge is to know what the most common ones are, so you can be alert to them and try to avoid them before they do you in.
There's no worse failing in a leader than refusing to acknowledge mistakes. Religious leaders may declare their infallibility, but that doesn't mean that they're right all the time. Dictators may create cults of personality that trumpet their perfection, but that only makes their downfall all the more sudden when it inevitably comes. But you don't have to be either a dictator or the head of a major religion to be guilty of the flaw of failing to learn from your own mistakes.
Most leaders like to believe that they got to the top by being smarter than the people around them and by being right more often. A wise leader recognizes that more than climbing to the top, he or she has survived to the top by overcoming hardship, missed opportunities, blown judgment calls, and poor human relations. But the leader who won't learn feels that none of that matters -- after all, they reason, everyone makes mistakes on the way up, and the fact that they made it to the top means that they've achieved a leadership Nirvana, a perfection that makes them infallible. We've known leaders who talk about being "inside the bubble," protected from the realities of the world by the trappings and power that come with leadership. Guess what? The bubble can burst.
Another instance of this problem occurs to people who are new to leadership, who feel that they have only one shot and so aren't allowed to fail, lest it reflect poorly on the people who chose them as leaders in the first place. This I-can't-disappoint-the-people-who-trusted-me syndrome puts almost unbearable pressure on leaders and blinds them to the possibility that things may go wrong on their watch. It causes them to retreat inward when things do go wrong, cutting them off from the people they are leading and creating a self-fulfilling prophesy.
Along with being willing to learn from your mistakes, a good leader has to be flexible. Situations change; the members of your team change; competitive pressures change; the marketplace changes; everything changes. If you can't accept change and the fact that much of your leadership energy will be devoted to helping your team adjust to those changes, you can never become an effective leader.
Indeed, your very position as a leader is based upon the fact that the people who have chosen you know that change is taking place, and they need someone to guide them safely through the uncertainties that come with change. A vision gains its basis and authority from how accurately you foresee the outcome of the changes taking place around you. For example, you could be working in retailing when you draw up a plan for the company to expand into electronic commerce, which you then get to take the lead in implementing. Your selection as leader derives precisely from your vision of how computers, telecommunications, and the Internet are going to create major shifts in the retail landscape. You are being asked to provide guidance and control the pace of change so that when your vision becomes reality, your firm will be in the vanguard.
But if you understand that change is normal, then you also have to learn to understand that the pace of change varies sharply. You may be able to predict the flow of events, but your timing may be off, unforeseen events may complicate or radically change the picture, a new paradigm may emerge, or the people you were counting on to help you may have moved on to other places. If you aren't flexible, then you will be left scrambling and playing catch-up. And that's when you make mistakes.
We've said it before and we'll say it again: There is no such thing as a natural leader. Leaders are made through training, mentoring, guidance, and circumstance, with the best leaders accumulating experience over the course of many assignments and jobs. Nobody wakes up under a cabbage leaf one day and appears at Camelot as the "perfect knight," prepared to lead troops into battle. And when people do come along seemingly from nowhere, their failures as leaders are out in the open and spectacular, such as Joan of Arc, a teenage girl who led an army that swept across France to put a young boy on the French throne. At the height of her success, seemingly invincible, she was captured and put to death, with none of her followers prepared to raise a hand in her defense.
Great leaders, like great rock 'n' rollers, return to their roots repeatedly in order to replenish themselves. They go back to the people from whom they've learned, and they learn some more. They allow for the fact that they don't know everything, and they get help from the people who have helped them in the past. Vain leaders and poor leaders make the assumption that appearing to lean on others is a sign of weakness, and so they refuse to acknowledge their past or even cover it up. Although you don't have to memorialize your past or to glorify it, you also don't have to eradicate it, because the past does point the way to the future.
In the military and in certain other situations, a leader needs unquestioned authority and instant obedience. But command is almost never an effective substitute for leading, and dictating behavior is never an acceptable substitute for eliciting the cooperation of your group. People are counting on you not only for guidance, but for motivation as well. They want you to articulate the reasons that they should make the sacrifices they know they should make, but need a reason or context for. If your answer is always, "Because I say so," or "Because that's what I'm telling you to do," or "Because I'm in charge," then you're leading the wrong way and breeding insubordination and anger in the ranks. You may enjoy watching a television series such as Horatio Hornblower, but the reality is that you cannot go around flogging people for their mistakes anymore, even in Her Majesty's Navy.
The idea that commanding is leading is an archaic idea, one not suited to a democratic society where government is by the consent of the governed. Instead of working on your commanding voice and presence, you should be working on your cooperation skills, perfecting your ability to get people to say yes to what you want them to do, learning how to explain things in a persuasive, clear, simple way that always shows people what cooperation offers them in benefits.
A leader has to listen to many voices: the voices of the group, outside voices clamoring for a solution to a problem, the voices of the higher-ups in an organization who are judging your performance, the voice of the marketplace, and your own inner voice, which may be screaming out in panic and fear. All these voices not only have to be heard, but they also have to be listened to. You need to learn how to pay attention to the voices you hear and how to interpret properly what they are telling you.
Listening and interpreting effectively can be accomplished with reporting systems. The more confirmable information you can take in, the more reliable the voices are likely to be. It is a lack of knowledge that gets the voices clamoring for attention, so keep yourself well informed about every aspect of your leadership role.
Don't underestimate the importance of listening to your followers. Political pundits make unmerciful fun of presidential administrations that adhere to public opinion polls, but the writers are wrong. Although leadership is supposed to supply vision, it should also supply comfort and continuity, and one of the surest ways of doing that is to be constantly aware of the voices that keep your followers awake at night. If they're hearing different voices than you're hearing, you have to make it your business to listen to the voices that make your followers nervous. Those are the voices that represent the greatest challenges to your leadership. The most common complaint against leaders of all kinds who are turfed out is, "He or she wasn't listening to me."
We see leadership as a set of responsibilities, but many leaders see it as a mantle of privilege -- an entitlement to the perks that go along with being the top dog. The first thing you have to learn when you're a new leader is modesty. If you've been given a large office, turn it into a reception area and use another room as your office.
Senator Inouye, one of the most powerful leaders of the United States Senate, turned a large closet into his office, leaving the formal office as a kind of museum for his constituents visiting from Hawaii. By making the hometown voters feel comfortable when they came to visit him, Inouye ensured that they left with the feeling of being well taken care of. When his constituents saw the Senator's modest working quarters, they were convinced that he wasn't abusing his office, his power, or their trust. It's a lesson every leader should learn.
Unfortunately, leaders all too often make a fetish of the perks that come with power and look for new trappings to confirm their authority, from the ridiculous uniforms that Nixon outfitted the White House guards in, to the stripes that the Chief Justice put on his robe during the Clinton impeachment trial. All these trappings are for show, and all that show does is make people cynical about their leaders. Cultivate modesty whenever possible. It doesn't mean that you have to live like a monk, but it does mean that you should not glory in your office, lest you forget why you're actually there.
A good leader should take every opportunity to find ways of putting the needs of other people into the forefront. It is not enough to patronize a cause; as a leader, you should find ways to participate and promote those things in which you believe.
An instructive TV commercial takes place inside a factory, where the workers are chanting, "We're Number 1. We're Number 1." Outside, as the camera pulls away, a sign on the factory which says, "We're Number 1" begins to vibrate, until finally, the letters e and r and the number 1 fall off, so the sign reads, "We're Numb." More good leaders have messed up their place in the history books by going from number 1 to numb than we care to recall. There seems to be an unshakable tendency among human beings not to know when to call it quits.
Good leaders know that times and circumstances change and that they have a limited window of opportunity in which to be effective. When the window is open, they have to do everything in their power to achieve their visions. But when the window starts to close, they also have to know how to plan for a graceful exit. Ordinarily, leaders tend to retire when they're older, so their influence fades from the scene as they do. But increasingly, our leaders are rising faster and leaving at younger ages, with lots of energy and time left to them.
The greatest leadership crisis of the twenty-first century is not going to be the shortage of leaders, but how to recycle effectively those young leaders who have completed their assigned task but still have a lot to offer. People like General Colin Powell, President Clinton, and a host of forty-ish CEOs are going to have to find effective ways to spend several decades in roles that go beyond occupying an honorary title on meaningless committees.
Just as a leader needs constantly to learn, to upgrade skills, and to add to his or her knowledge base, a leader also has to be a constant teacher. Too many leaders make the assumption that there is an unbridgeable gulf between themselves and their followers, so they fail to impart what they've learned, allowing their followers to remain in the dark.
In a democratic society served by a competitive press, it's getting ever more difficult for political leaders to keep their followers in the dark. Outside the political realm, however, leaders all too often leave their followers in the lurch until trouble rears its head. The best course of action for a leader is to make every effort to keep followers informed and then to teach them new skills whenever possible so that the group can benefit as a whole. A good leader should also make it his or her business to have every member of the group be a teacher so that skills do not flow in one direction only. "Each one teach one" should be your guiding motto on the subject of learning. Your obligation is to teach someone, who can teach someone else, and so on.
Groups succeed because their knowledge and skill bases rise faster than those of competing groups, so it seems obvious that learning and teaching are integral to the success of leaders. Leaders who think that teaching is beneath them are leaders destined to fail.
John F. Kennedy was probably the first modern leader, someone who led by example rather than by command -- a leader who made every effort to be inclusive. Whatever Kennedy's faults as a man, or even as a leader, the one thing that no one can assail was Kennedy's remarkable and often self-deprecating sense of humor. Kennedy's press conferences, where he actively jousted with the White House press corps, make memorable viewing to this day, and have set a standard for leaders that has yet to be matched.
Reuben Mark, the CEO of Colgate, is another leader who brings a refreshing sense of humor to his position. Colgate's annual meetings are akin to tent revival meetings, as endless numbers of small shareholders parade up to the stage to talk about their experiences as lifelong Colgate stockholders, all the while being subjected to Mark's good-natured jibes. Herb Kelleher, who runs Southwest Airlines, is another CEO who believes in a heavy dose of levity amidst the seriousness of business.
Unfortunately, too many leaders become pompous the minute they assume the mantle of leadership. The four words that annoy us most are "pillar of the community." Leadership is stewardship, which means that you are assuming a set of responsibilities, not getting your title carved in stone. The wise leader understands that being in the right place at the right time is every bit as important as anything that he or she brings to the job. If you can't laugh over the irony of your position and how you have become a target for every crackpot who thinks he or she can do your job better than you can, you don't deserve to be a leader.
One of the fallacies of having a lot of information at your disposal is that you come to believe that decisions are either yes or no, up or down. You become guided by the data and the concrete "facts on the ground," as the military planners like to say, instead of recognizing that there are subtleties to every situation that often cannot be quantified.
One of the problems that comes with seeing things in black and white is seeing things in terms of moral absolutes. In your mistaken view, things are either right or wrong, good or evil. But life doesn't work that way. We suspect that one of the reasons that violence in schools has increased among teenagers is that they spend too much time in church hearing that their behavior is considered evil and aberrant. If you receive that message constantly, you come to believe that you are already damned, so what's the difference whether you live or die, whether you kill or allow yourself to be killed?
The world exists in myriad colors and subtle shades, and the leader who can learn to see the world in all its polychrome wonder and to make the fine distinctions in shadings that are required to solve problems without causing confrontations, is the leader who will ultimately succeed.

