What’s Holding You Back?

What’s holding you back? Ten bold steps that define gutsy leaders.

By Robert J. Herbold
Managing Director, Herbold Group LLC

Why do managers at all levels shy away from the tough decisions that lead to success rather than mediocrity?  What’s holding them back?

My book What’s Holding You Back? is about why managers often have so much trouble making tough decisions.  It pinpoints the types of problems and failures that result from a lack of courage.  The heart of the book is ten principles — comprising a roadmap for managers so they will be able to confront their inner wimp and find their inner courage to become strong leaders.

Operational and innovative excellence can only come with gutsy, determined leadership.  This book will tell managers how to become such a leader.

The Issue: A Lack of Courage To Make the Tough Decisions

The more responsibility a manager gets, the more likely he or she will face tough decisions. Tough decisions typically have one or more of the following characteristics:

1. No Ideal Option – For many tough problems, there is no perfect path to improvement/solution/innovation. This means the decision maker must make trade-offs and choices.
2. Lack of Data – For some decisions, there are issues for which no valid data exists, or can be generated, that can help significantly reduce risk. You are going to have to use some judgments based on experience, input from others, and your intuition.
3. Guaranteed Disappointment – With many decisions, there is no one solution will please everyone.
4. Long Term Perspective Needed – While a short-term, temporary solution may exist, the courageous leader demands that a longer tem perspective be taken.  Many managers give in to an expeditious, short-term fix.

All of us, as leaders of a group (or a department, or a division, or the whole company) have experienced the situation where you know what you need to do, but you also know these steps will be unpopular. The change may be so major many will think you are doing the wrong thing. And you worry that it might in fact be dead wrong.  There may be people who will lose their job or need to be transferred elsewhere.  Your boss may not be happy.  Et cetera.  A whole lot of managers, when faced with tough decisions, will crumble.  They will decide to delay, further analyze, massively compromise, ignore the whole thing, or employ any other tactic to avoid dealing with the situation.

Why Do They Act That Way?

Often, managers fail to provide courageous leadership on the tough issues because they fall victim to one or more of the following types of human behaviors:

1. Avoiding Conflict –  Knowing that not everyone will agree, they would rather compromise or do nothing than argue their case or exercise their authority on a contentious issue.
2. Striving for Certainty – They don’t want to take any chance of being wrong, so they assume there is always more data to be found, or theory to be tested, rather than getting on with things.
3. Avoiding a Career Risk – If they make the decision and things go badly, they fear that their boss will view it negatively and their career will be jeopardized.  Also, the people who don’t like the decision may end up holding a grudge and that may eventually be career damaging.
4. Lack of Self-Confidence – They are simply too timid to take the lead and make the decision, since they are very uncomfortable in trusting their views.  They often prefer making no decision, indicating that there isn’t universal concurrence, so the issue will be studied further.
5. Lack of Sense of Urgency – Their attitude is: what’s the hurry?  Things are going along just fine.  We have our challenges but let’s not rush into things.
6. Protecting Their Turf – The individual has gotten very comfortable in their current job and fears that any change will likely result in a situation where he or she is vulnerable.   They could lose status, or be put out of a job, or their lack of varied experiences would be revealed, or it could become clear just how out-of-date they are regarding technology.

The Implications

There are huge implications for this lack of courage to confront the critical decisions.  The serious problems such behavior often leads to usually fall into one of the following two categories:

1. Operational Complexity: Weak leadership often generates excess personnel, organizational fragmentation (various groups going off in separate directions), non-standardized processes, and ever-increasing bureaucracy and complexity.
2. Lack of Innovation:  In dealing with new ideas and change, managers often seek the safety of consensus-oriented decision making, thus suffocating innovation.  Often there are no clear goals regarding innovation and the new-idea qualification process is random.  Also, weak leadership often causes there to be a lack of clarity regarding who is responsible for spotting key trends and innovating accordingly.

Virtually every day you pick up the newspaper and see where some major, well-respected company is having serious business problems, usually caused by just this kind of operational complexity and lack of innovation.  The result takes the form of: 1) excessive costs and slow response times; and/or 2) stale and mediocre products/services.  These kinds of problems are due to the lack of courageous leadership; the tough decisions are simply not being made.

What to Do About It:

How can a manager avoid such problems and improve his or her ability to be a courageous, determined leader?  You will probably never turn the inherently timid or technically-trained manager (often leading to perfectionist tendencies) into a natural, charismatic, hard-charging leader.  Still, all managers can make good use of this book’s ten fundamental principles that will enable them to spot what needs to be done, and provide the gutsy leadership to get it done.  For each principle, I give detailed case studies of actual companies (the companies are listed here) to demonstrate the power of these actions, and the implications of not doing them.  By following these principles, a manager can provide the kind of courageous leadership that yields significant results.

Robert J. (Bob) Herbold, retired executive vice president and chief operating officer of Microsoft Corporation, is the Managing Director of The Herbold Group, LLC, a consulting business focused on profitability.  He serves on the Board of Directors of Agilent Technologies and of Neptune Orient Shipping Lines. For information on his latest book, What’s Holding You Back, as well as his leadership blog, go to www.bobherbold.com .  Bob can be reached at bherbold@herboldgroup.com