Leadership Perception and Self-Deception

Perception
Few people would argue that confidence is a necessary leadership competency. When does confidence go too far and start to limit, or even worse damage good leadership and decision making skills? Leaders are sometimes labeled as having narcissistic personality traits; traits that could be doing more damage to organization growth and stability than they realize. Most leaders believe that they are in their role to make good decisions and often make them quickly, seemingly knowing the precise next move to take the organization forward or to solve a critical workplace challenge. How much of this decision making ability is based on experience? How much of that experience is based on the perception of the situation?

Self-Deception
What about self-deception? Self-deception by definition would indicate that leaders sometimes deceive themselves as they face workplace challenges. Often in the workplace employees complain about the repetitive nature of problems. The same or similar problems continue to happen over and over again. While there may be many reasons that this occurs one sometimes unforeseen reason is that the leadership continues to implement changes that are not addressing the root cause. Instead they are addressing issues that the leadership views as problems, based on their perception. Convinced that they are implementing practical, intelligent, and appropriate resolutions the leaders are suffering from self-deception. Being so fixated on a problem they fail to see other problems that are happening right before their eyes. So confident of the answers to the problems they face, they fail to realize that it is their own solution to the problems that are causing them.

Training Solutions
A recently published training program will address leadership skills and competencies in the areas of perception and self-deception. Details of this program can be found in the book The 2010 Pfeiffer Annual: Training and is available at amazon.com or pfeiffer.com.




This program can also be delivered on site at your location with expert facilitation provided by the program author.

Contact: Dennis E. Gilbert – a human performance improvement consultant and President of Appreciative Strategies, LLC may be reached at (570) 433-8286 or by email: dennis@appreciativestrategies.com.

Effort or Results?

Leadership certainly has its challenges. How we lead and perhaps more importantly how we measure results is critically important to organizations that wish to stay competitive and be successful.

Often managers discuss with me the effort that they or their employee teams put in on a daily, weekly, or monthly basis. I listen with empathy as employees discuss long hours, missed family, and lack of work/life balance. While many of these stories are strikingly real, like any good story some begin to shift from fact to fantasy. Effort is very important but strong leaders should avoid comparing effort with results. Working long hours doesn’t necessarily indicate that you are getting the best results, and getting results doesn’t guarantee you have given your best effort.

Leadership Action: Create a culture that is stimulated by results, measuring effort alone will not necessarily generate success.