BAD LEADERSHIP

Bad Leadership



Bad Leadership

Synopsis

The book by Barbara Keller man is about bad leadership. It is a departure of conventional thinking where the dark side of leadership is shown. Leadership is viewed as corrupted and cruel rather rigid and callousness. She has a view that bad leadership must be carefully examined and clearly understood. She takes examples from Mary Meeker, David Koresh, Bill Clinton and Radovan Karadzic. She explores seven basic types of bad leadership and provides reasoning as to why the leaders turn from good to bad (Kellerman 2004, 33).

The book put lights on the critical role of followers, telling how they collaborate and provides causes for bad leadership. The book by Kellerman is devoted to a comprehensive analysis of the influence of subordinates and followers of the activity leaders and development organizations and social processes. The author deliberately avoids an approach that places the leaders in the center of the debate about power, influence and authority. Particular attention is paid to the division of responsibility for development between leaders and their followers.

Introduction

Kellerman creates a typology consisting of seven kinds of bad leadership. Four of them consist of ineffective leadership whereas three are evil leadership styles. The most common traits of bad leadership are sociopath, borderline personality, psychopath and aggressive conduct disorder. Bad leaders are common in the world. Sometimes they sit in government. At other times, they sit in the Board Room. Bad leaders are almost always vilified by history. People hate them and, they leave behind a trail of destruction. The seven types of bad leadership discussed by Barbara Kellerman is incompetency, rigidness, intemperateness, evil, insular, corruptness and callousness. Kellerman points out that poor followership also affect leadership. Followers learn bad habits from their leaders (Kellerman 2004, 33).

Team lacks the motivation. Constant criticism and lack of praise de-motivates the employees. Harvard business Review study of 2000 indicates six factors which affects the organization's working environment. The indicators are sense of responsibility; clear understanding of mission and values, level of standards, commitment degree, flexibility and innovation freedom and sense of accuracy about feedbacks and rewards. This creates disharmony in the organization. It affects overall productivity and financial challenges of the organization. Bad leadership demolishes morale of the employee (Kellerman 2004, 33).

Employees feel less commitment to the organization and its mission and goals. Companies are still hiring and promoting people in leadership positions that need way too much grooming or promoting people way over their capabilities. Employees tend to leave leadership and management, not companies. Also companies seem to forget but need to remember this: A company will rise or fall based on the decision leaders make.

According to Dubrin (2009, 27), the leaders have been doing it over and over again to successfully brand themselves a bad leader within days of assuming a new position. After leaving a meeting with a bad leader, you feel exhausted and de-motivated. Bad leaders set appointments and are late for them or do not show up at ...