Note: This superb article was written by my good friend Doug O’Bryon who writes under the moniker The Soundbite Laureate. I concur with the article 100% and thank him for allowing me to post it.

Do Companies Really Want Leaders?

The choir of dissonant voices from corporate America seems to increase each year, with scores of mournful HR departments lamenting their plight, as they recount their sincere, ongoing, yet unsuccessful attempts to recruit leaders, but ending up instead with managers.  With the cacophony growing louder and the angst reaching a crescendo, I can hold my tongue no longer.  Instead, I’ve decided to enter and exit the discussion with a simple answer:

“The reason you’re ending up with managers instead of leaders is because that’s what you’re recruiting for.”

Tell me – how many classified ads, Career Builder, The Ladders, or 6FigureJobs.com listings have you come across that read, “Wanted: Leader” in their headline?  I can answer that for you – ZERO!  Sure, you’ve got requests for college graduates, MBA’s, PMP certification, 15-years of experience, Microsoft Office Suite proficiency, or even familiarity with the alternative energy industry.  And you’ve got searches for titles like Vice President of Operations, Director of Marketing, Financial Analyst, and Project Manager – and guess what? That’s pretty much exactly what they end up with.

Is Leader Named in Your Organization Chart?

The fact is, there exists no box on the org chart for “Leader” because leaders are – by their very nature – outside the box.  And because they exist outside the box, leaders just don’t “fit” – literally and figuratively – into the hierarchy of most corporate structures.  And because “Leader” doesn’t exist in the org chart, companies don’t know how to staff for it.  So what do they do instead?  They simply replicate the structure they’ve always had, and continue to hire managers – who actually fit quite nicely into the boxes on the corporate org chart – and fail to recruit, hire, support, and embrace leaders.

The other thing that most companies don’t understand is that effective, genuine, natural leaders are A. Truly rare, and B. Dangerous.  True leaders rock the boat to get things done, which often upsets the status quo, and it is this status quo – sensing their livelihood is at stake – that usually gangs up to oust the leader, and thereby preserve the safety (and bland, incremental performance) of the status quo.

 What Exactly is the Difference Between Leader and Manager?

Perhaps the most elegant and insightful description of the demarcation between the leaders and managers that I’ve read was composed a few years ago by an obscure writer in a blog post entitled, “Leadership Unleashed.”  Towards the end of his passionate discourse, the author emphatically concludes:

“I believe the reason there are so few leaders is because few have a truly compelling vision, few have the fortitude to take the risk, and because organizations are designed to punish those who aspire to lead. Because leaders are focused on results, their mind is always on the future, predicting how evolving external trends will overlay with existing processes. This outward facing “visionary” posture leaves them little time to “watch their back” and hence extremely vulnerable to “managers” who see them as a threat to the status quo. All too often, organizations will “kill their own” as aspiring leaders are stymied by politically-minded managers, seizing the exposed vulnerability of the risk-takers to deal a death blow, thus ensuring the continued reign of mediocrity.”

America’s 26^th president Teddy Roosevelt also had some poignantly insightful things to say about this very matter.  His first quote seems to echo the prototypical managers profiled above by stating,

“The only man who makes no mistakes is the man who never does anything.”

His other, slightly longer and more famous diatribe amplifies this thought even further:

“It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly; who errs and comes short again and again; because there is not effort without error and shortcomings; but who does actually strive to do the deed; who knows the great enthusiasm, the great devotion, who spends himself in a worthy cause, who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement and who at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly. So that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who know neither victory nor defeat.”

No Room for Failure Today

In corporate hiring today, there is no accommodation for failure.  A gap in the resume, a risk taken on a startup that failed, or an ambitious venture that was unsuccessful is an automatic disqualification, and the candidate – often very capable and courageous – never makes it through the corporate “search sieve” which was purposefully designed to filter out those who don’t fit into a box.

The tragedy, and the cause of our leadership malaise, is our collective hypocrisy, whereby in one breath we encourage others to take risks and learn from their mistakes, and in the other we punish anyone who has risked enough to fail.

In summary, the reason that management mediocrity continues to reign while giant leaps of achievement gained through genuine leadership remain elusive is because companies reward mediocrity – the game of playing politics and playing it “safe” – and punishes those innovative, out-of-the-box leader personalities, either denying them access on the front end, or pushing them out the back end.  The established, entrenched notion that the best, most capable, and most creative leaders progress in an incremental, linear career path from college diploma to Board Director is patently false and painfully archaic, yet firms are too frightened or too lazy to change.

The Bottom Line

The bottom line is this.  If you want transformation, if you want true leadership, if you desire out-of-the-box talent, you need to know how to look for it, where to look for it, and most importantly – you must have the courage to know WHY you’re looking for it.  My favorite definition for insanity is doing the same thing, the same way, and expecting different results.

Corporate America – you’ve reaped what you’ve sown.  Great leaders are out there – because that’s where you’ve pushed them.  I don’t know about you, but if I’m going into battle, I’ll take the guy with deep cuts in his armor and some blood on his sword, over the guy with the spotless shield and the pristine sword EVERY TIME!

First off I am well over 30 but I and some older associates are cooking up new business ideas and we are drawn directly or through recommendation to consider using some of the new business incubators that exist in our home state.

However we are finding the structure of the incubators difficult to access for individuals our age with some pretty critical financial responsibilities, you know things like mortgages, car payments, health insurance, college expenses, food, heat, light, water, you get it.

While we think the incubator model is great, and the process is great, the financial funding provided by most entities while incubating does not support older entrepreneurs who have these types of financial responsibilities. It might be enough to support some core living expenses and work progress on your idea but the lack of enough funding to care for familial responsibilities serves as a barrier to older entrepreneurs.

Here are a couple of the descriptive lines of one of our states, taxpayer supported incubator entities:

“Accelerating Young Entrepreneur Start-Ups” or 

“10 Young Entrepreneurial teams will be selected from within”

That begs the question what does ‘Young’ mean? Maybe we should just start an incubator labeled, “Accelerating Mature, Seasoned Entrepreneurial Start-ups.” Not all great business ideas come from the young but it seems we think innovation can only happen at a certain age.I think innovation can happen at any age. Of course maybe I am a bit biased…

I took the accompanying photo (click photo to enlarge) in downtown Cleveland yesterday, I was walking up the street and from a block away all I could see was the street based cloud.

As I got closer and stopped to watch for a bit it dawned on me to think about:

Who are the guys working in the hole?

What are they doing?

What makes the steam happen?

How did they learn how to do this work?

How long have the pipes down in the hole been around?

Do all of us appreciate the workers and the ownership taken to solve these types of problems?

I for one am thankful for the millions of workers of all types who daily work on the invisible structures that we come to rely on in our world. From wireless carriers to ‘cloud’ data storage companies to understreet water departments. It is truly a miracle that it all seems to continuously work pretty well.

My Thanks…