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Strategies in Failure Management pp 79–94Cite as

Failure of Leadership

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Part of the book series: Management for Professionals ((MANAGPROF))

Abstract

The mystery of what leaders can and ought to do in order to spark the best performance from their people is age-old. In recent years, that mystery has spawned an entire cottage industry: literally thousands of “leadership experts” have made careers of testing and coaching, all in pursuit of creating businesspeople who can turn bold objectives into reality. Still, effective leadership eludes many people and organizations. Strong leaders and strong leadership teams are essential to sustaining today’s high complex and globalized business. On the other side, ineffective leaders represent the way to organizational disasters. What are the elements that could help us to recognise the incipient of a leadership failure? Let’s discover it together.

Leadership is a whole combination of different ingredients—but by far, by far, the single most important ingredient of leadership is your character…99 percent of all the leadership failures in this country (USA) in the last 100 years were not failures in competence; they were failures in character. Greed, lying, prejudice, racism, intolerance, sexism, hate, immorality, amorality—none of these things are competence failures. They are all character failures

Norman Schwarzkopf (1999)

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Notes

  1. 1.

    See also Badke-Schaub and Hofinger (2018).

  2. 2.

    See also Kauffeld and Massenberg (2018).

  3. 3.

    Taken from MacDonald (2015).

  4. 4.

    As an example see Coleman-Lochner (2016).

  5. 5.

    See also Bedenk and Mieg (2018).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. University UNIR, La Rioja, Logroño, Spain

    Salvatore Moccia

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  1. Salvatore Moccia
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Editors and Affiliations

  1. artop–Institute, Humboldt-University Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Sebastian Kunert

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Moccia, S. (2018). Failure of Leadership. In: Kunert, S. (eds) Strategies in Failure Management. Management for Professionals. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-72757-8_6

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