When you study failed and troubled projects it doesn’t take long to realize that the leaders initiating, overseeing, managing or providing technical guidance to projects are a common soft spot. Leaders make key strategic decisions, leaders provide the resources a project needs, leaders set the tone and leaders bare ultimate responsibility for the outcomes achieved. Effective leadership can set the stage for success. Poor leadership sows the seeds of disaster.

Discussions with working professionals readily illustrate those impacts and help identify some of the underlying root causes. The University of British Columbia’s Leading from the Middle class provides a forum in which annually hundreds of working professionals across Canada (and the world) share their workplace experiences. In class discussions and surveys collected over the years suggest that among the root causes of ineffectual leadership are the following factors.

• Candidate selection – Weak selection processes that allow those without the necessary skills or aptitude to be promoted into important leadership roles
• Training and development – Failure to provide those entering into leadership roles with appropriate training, support or mentorship as they make the transition from individual contributor to leader of ‘contributors’.
• Defining the role – The failure of the organization to have a clear definition of what leadership is (and hence the failure of the organization to set expectations for how those in leadership roles will ‘add value’).

All of those issues are solvable, but not surprisingly those problems take ‘leadership’ to overcome. As a seed from which that leadership can spring the following white paper takes us back to the most basic of basics: What is leadership?

Career white paper – What is leadership?

There is of course much more that needs to be said about leadership and in the coming months I’ll share more thoughts on what it takes to be a leader into today’s business context. But in the mean time feel free to review the Catalogue of Catastrophe. It provides cautionary tales for those organizations or individuals who haven’t developed their leadership capabilities to the level today’s workplace demands.