Let’s imagine that you are a very successful business owner or executive. You have achieved amazing results in your company. You are making a great deal of money and enjoying the fruits of your labor. You have earned the respect of your subordinates as well as your peers. You deservedly get the credit for how well things are going. When you talk, people listen. You have the authority to hire people, take them to task when things go wrong or fire them at will. You are now supremely confident in your ability to leap over any obstacle you encounter on the road to success and land on your feet. You feel good about your company’s future. You feel even better about yours. But, maybe you shouldn’t.
After working with many highly successful executives who experienced career failure, Dr.Tim Irwin, an organizational psychologist, noticed a pattern of mistakes which inspired him to write Derailed: Five Lessons Learned from Catastrophic Leadership Failure (available for theKindle).
Irwin was intrigued by the fact that the fatal flaws of leaders who failed had nothing to do with a deficiency in IQ or even competence. These people were smart, tough-minded, willful, skilled at political maneuvering and strategy; all necessary for success in the business world. What Irwin discovered after studying the derailment of six high profile CEOs will surprise you. In this short video, Gretchen Carlson of FOX News interviews Dr. Irwin who shares some common mistakes executives make that can lead to their demise.
In Derailed, Irwin paints a compelling portrait of how highly successful leaders fall victim to an insidious hubris which eventually leads to their downfall. He opens the book by pointing out our fascination with the misfortunes of others. We get a perverse pleasure from watching the mighty fall; relishing it when they get their recompense as we did when Bernie Madoff, the infamous operator of the largest Ponzi scheme in history was caught, convicted and punished.
“It’s like watching a train wreck. We should look away, but we just can’t”…George Will said “few things are as stimulating as other people’s calamities observed from a distance”. Perhaps this explains why we seem to have such an appetite for bad news, celebrity gossip and highway accidents. Irwin hopes that by reading the book, we can learn from other people’s experiences (OPE).
For this reason, the book has significant value for anyone who aspires to greatness; especially small business owners. There are several lessons in the tragic story of the California train engineer who ignored a red warning light and a dispatcher’s verbal warning before crashing into a freight train at 40 miles per hour, killing 25 and injuring another 135 people. The investigation revealed that the engineer had been texting just moments before the crash.
In a way, all of us are engineers, directing the path of our lives, our families, our companies, our teams and departments. And we are all vulnerable to derailment. In the book, Irwin points out that derailment is a process and shares 5 separate stages:
- Failure of self/other awareness
- Pride before the fall
- Missed early warning signs
- Rationalizing
- Derailment
According to Dr. Irwin, if there is one factor more than any other that can get you off track it is arrogance. I am completely honest with myself, I can recall several times when my life and/or career ran off the rails. And, although there were extenuating circumstances in every case, and there was plenty of blame to share with others, arrogance played a role.
What I loved best about Derailment was Irwin’s conclusion that when it comes to leadership, character trumps competence! In my career as a management consultant I have observed countless numbers of leaders who have demonstrated that this is true. Irwin’s definition of character has 4 components:
- Authenticity
- Self-management
- Humility
- Courage
As important as character is in business, however, it is critical that you define it in behavioral terms. For example, what kinds of actions and decisions demonstrate that a person has or does not have good character? What does it look like when someone has authenticity, self-management, humility and courage? All of these nouns can be extremely difficult to define, assess and measure in people. Different people will define them differently.
Many a company has tried to build competency models for jobs that include character. However, unless a company can define character in behavioral terms, it can increase their legal exposure if they try to use it to make decisions about an individual’s career. In my opinion, character or the lack thereof is not a competency. It is an individual’s operating system-what drives them to make certain decisions and take specific actions.
If you would like to know if you are at risk of derailment, take Dr. Irwin’s FREE Derailed Personal Risk Assessment.
I don’t know about you, but, in my case, I tend to learn more from my failures than my successes. Do you have story to share about learning from failure or derailment? I would love to know your thoughts on this very important topic!
Feel free to contact me by visiting my LinkedIn page or emailing me at susan.fronk@bestbizpractices.org.
Posted by: Susan Fronk
