Why Do Businesses and Leaders Fail?

I hate the term “soft skills”. To me, it’s a weak and misleading label that attempts to categorize everything that really matters about leadership and business success into a bucket of fluff. Any leadership development professional should know better.

Given that, I know it’s a common term used by every day people. It’s because they don’t know what else to call “it” or how to define that stuff that seems to separate the haves and have nots.

When I was first learning about competency modeling, I’ll never forget what a consultant said to me that underscored the importance of the “soft stuff”.

We were in the process of building a leadership competency model and curriculum for a former company. At the time, we were having a debate about having a balance between the “hard” stuff – things like marketing, finance, operations, sales, industry experience, etc… and the “soft” stuff (listening, peer relationships, composure, vision, etc…). Our executives were leaning towards the second – the traditional MBA topic list of functional management skills.

The consultant asked our executive team: “Name one business that ever failed because of a lack of functional or technical expertise”.

You could hear crickets chirping for a few minutes – we couldn’t. That was almost 20 years ago, so that consultant was way ahead of the conventional wisdom at that time. Think about the recent challenges of some of our great car companies and banks. It sure wasn’t due to a lack of engineering or financial expertise.

Fast forward to today: Jim Collins, in his book “How the Mighty Fall” spent four years researching how once great companies failed. He developed a five-stage model that describes the stages that each of these companies went though. They are:

Dan McCarthy

Full Story: http://www.greatleadershipbydan.com/2010/08/why-do-businesses-and-leaders-fail.html