A leader makes a convenient explanation for success or failure. Changing the main character won’t necessarily change the story.
I recently spoke with a client whose team was missing its targets. The verdict came quickly: it must be the manager. Not inspiring enough. No vision. Not leading enough, or not leading properly. Not Simon Sinek. Not even Steve Jobs. What are we paying them for?
Could the problem lie in processes, habits, planning or decision-making? Apparently not. So a new manager arrived. Six months later? The numbers looked the same. Price approvals still took three weeks. People still lacked the right tools. And the sales leads were as cold as ever.
The belief that an organisation’s success or failure comes down primarily to its leaders has a name: the romance of leadership. James Meindl and his colleagues described it in 1985. They observed a pattern in business reporting: the more striking a company’s results, the more attention its leadership receives. Doing brilliantly? A visionary chief executive. Falling apart? A failure of leadership. Average results? Hardly a word about the leader.
A leader is a convenient explanation. One hero, one villain and an easy-to-follow plot. But that attribution can be biased. Leadership matters. It just isn’t a cure for everything.
In decentralised organisations especially, results also depend on the people closest to the work and the conditions around them: culture, processes, tools and room to make decisions. A new manager doesn’t rewrite those conditions simply by taking the job.
Before replacing someone, try a different question: what would have to change for the person in that chair to have a fair chance of succeeding? Answer it and you have a brief for change. Avoid it and you may simply be recasting the lead, not changing the story.
P.S. Sometimes I leave the house without consulting the girls, and it shows. On my last trip back from Plzeň, people apparently mistook me for a mime. Any further resemblance is, I hope, purely coincidental.
