On Leadership: 13 Traps Strategic Leadership Must Avoid

The post-COVID business world has brought forth an unprecedented level of corporate consolidation, M&A, and transformation across industries. The unintended consequence of this rush of hyper-consolidation and transformation has been the formation of disconnected corporate ecosystems and business units. Near-continuous change has forced strategic leaders to spend time and energy developing and working through detailed internal systems, processes, organizational structure, and operating rhythms.  

This deep internal focus has created silos and come at the cost of horizontal alignment and a strategic leadership focus. Leaders are overly focused on the team they lead versus the team they are on. This trap keeps strategic leaders from focusing on and treating the enterprise team as team #1. The irony is that the success or failure of the team they lead is dependent on the success of the enterprise team, yet the enterprise team is most neglected.  

During my 38 years as a senior leader in the Army, business, and other organizations, I learned several lessons about strategic leadership traps that leaders today need to avoid to be successful in a continuous change and hyper-consolidation and transformation era. These traps prevent leaders from focusing on organizational outcomes and acting in the best interest of the whole rather than one’s individual part of the organization. 

1. Making everything a priority means you have no priorities. Doing so relinquishes responsibility for prioritization to subordinates and allows them to determine what is important. You unwittingly allow them to make priority decisions once the organization is overburdened.
2. Having a vision not grounded in resource realities is illusion. Be realistic and develop a vision that is in the art of the possible. Define temporal end states, focus areas, milestones, objectives, and resources required along the way.
3. Fomenting a culture of friction avoidance. Ensure forums, events, and meetings do not mute public discourse, stymie candor, or incentivize consensus agreement. Leaders must listen, avoid showing pre-decision bias, and fight the pitfall of allowing past experiences to close off new ideas and differing opinions.
4. Taking an anecdotal “survey of one” and believing it is representative of the entire organization. Use as a tip, run it down, take a survey, and ask subordinate leaders to confirm or deny. Leaping on the first report risks undermining subordinate trust, overempowers misinformed individuals, confuses priorities, and drains resources.
5. Allowing proximity to develop into a culture of micromanagement. Proximity can be viewed through the lens of geography and technology. Leaders who interact often with their workforce must resist the impulse to be overly directive and take over. This impulse can be exacerbated in areas where the leader has expertise, in the division or department the leader rose from, and where technology gives the leader detailed insight and access. Comfort and reliance on proximity lead to leader overconfidence, neglect of the bigger picture and other priorities, and a breakdown in subordinate trust.
6. Failing to nurture an environment that tolerates mistakes. This causes hesitation during crises, decision paralysis, and inaction. A zero-defect culture can be toxic.
7. Publishing policy or directives without an understanding of competing priorities, resources and coordination required, and time necessary to accomplish the task. How are you managing all of the tasks and resources that must be applied to follow the policy or directive, and how does it add to what is already required? Have you shifted the burden downward in your organization and not properly empowered and resourced it for success throughout your organization?
8. Overreliance on metrics, staff analysis, and objective measures. The art of listening to subordinate leaders and relying on their expertise and experience can transcend metrics and almost always puts them into proper perspective. Waiting on the perfect objective solution often means missing opportunity. Nothing is ever risk-free. 70% early, combined with gut instinct and experience, is far better than 100% too late. 
9. Overreliance on, and overconfidence in, directives from the top that apply to an entire organization. Doing so risks overloading lower-level organizations and disempowering their leaders. Demonstrate confidence in subordinate leaders by directing your intent and guidance one to two levels down. Allow subordinate leaders to meet your intent and translate it further down in the manner that suits their leadership style. Trust them. 
10. Allowing your enabling organization to become a bureaucratic headquarters. Large organizations can become overly bureaucratic and tend to allow all their weight to fall onto the shoulders of subordinate organizations. They often forget that they bear responsibility for their share of the work. Task responsibility must be shared at the strategic/enterprise, operational, and tactical levels of an organization.
11. Failing to direct task responsibility by level (division or department) of an organization. You must specifically “pin the rose”, hold to account, and develop systems and forums to enforce. Rigid identification and enforcement of responsibility “lanes”, collaboration vehicles, and supporting cast is essential for task success.
12. Failing to identify complex tasks. Organizations often fail to properly analyze all aspects of a task and their impact throughout the breadth and depth of their organization. Personnel effort, time, and resources required are nearly always underestimated. Develop a process that fully assesses the task and routinely updates estimates of the situation.
13. Allowing outdated “cottage industry” programs to survive. All organizations have processes to gather ideas, brainstorm, and implement new initiatives. Very few organizations have an equally powerful process to review and kill outdated and defunct programs that have developed into stagnate “cottage industry” programs.