7 Habit of Unsuccesful Executives

1. 7 Habit of Unsuccesful Executives from Eric Jackson and Forbes.com www.forbes.com/sites/ericjackson/2012/01/02/the-seven-habits-of-spectacularly-unsuccessful-executives/

2. They see themselves and their companies as dominating their environment • Why Problem: Unlike successful leaders, failed leaders who never question their dominance fail torealize they are at the mercy of changing circumstances.They vastly overestimate the extent to which they actually control events and vastly underestimate the role of chance and circumstance in their success. Habit #1

3. They identify so completely with the company that there is no clear boundary between their personal interests and their corporation’s interests • Why Problem: Instead of treating companies as enterprises that they needed to nurture, failed leaders treated them as extensions of themselves.  And with that, a “private empire” mentality took hold. Habit #2

4. They think they have all the answers • Why Problem: Leaders who are invariably crisp and decisive tend to settle issues so quickly they have no opportunity to grasp the ramifications. Worse, because these leaders need to feel they have all the answers, they aren’t open to learning new ones. Habit #3

5. They ruthlessly eliminate anyone who isn’t completely behind them • Why Problem: The problem with this approach is that it’s both unnecessary and destructive. CEOs don’t need to have everyone unanimously endorse their vision to have it carried out successfully.  In fact, by eliminating all dissenting and contrasting viewpoints, destructive CEOs cut themselves off from their best chance of seeing and correcting problems as they arise.   Habit #4

6. They are consummate spokespersons, obsessed with the company image • Why Problem:  The problem is that amid all the media frenzy and accolades, these leaders’ management efforts become shallow and ineffective. Instead of actually accomplishing things, they often settle for the appearance of accomplishing things. Habit #5

7. They underestimate obstacles • Why Problem: Part of the allure of being a CEO is the opportunity to espouse a vision. Yet, when CEOs become so enamored of their vision, they often overlook or underestimate the difficulty of actually getting there.  And when it turns out that the obstacles they casually waved aside are more troublesome than they anticipated, these CEO have a habit of plunging full-steam into the abyss. Habit #6

8. They stubbornly rely on what worked for them in the past • Why Problem: Frequently, CEOs who fall prey to this habit owe their careers to some “defining moment,” a critical decision or policy choice that resulted in their most notable success.  It’s usually the one thing that they’re most known for and the thing that gets them all of their subsequent jobs.  The problem is that after people have had the experience of that defining moment, if theybecome the CEO of a large company, they allow their defining moment to define the company as well – no matter how unrealistic it has become. Habit #7

9. Unsuccessful executives do not seek out new information and are not open to this information when it arrives. Consequently, their competitors find success to be much easier! Summarizing the 7 Habits

10. Competence: Is Your Boss Faking It? from Jeffrey Kluger of Time Magazine http://www.time.com/time/health/article/0,8599,1878358,00.html?cnn=yes from a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (by Cameron Anderson and Gavin Kilduff)

11. How to be a Leader? • Social psychologists know that one way to be viewed as a leader in any group is simply to act like one. Speak up, speak well and offer lots of ideas, and before long, people will begin doing what you say.

12. Experiment • Four teams (either all-male or all-female) are given the task of organizing a non-profit. Whoever does best gets $400. • After the teams performed their work for a fixed amount of time, the members of each group rated one another on both their level of influence on the group and, more important, their level of competence. The work sessions were videotaped, and a group of independent observers performed the same evaluations, as did Anderson and Kilduff. All three sets of judges reached the same conclusions. • Consistently, the group members who spoke up the most were rated the highest for such qualities as "general intelligence" and "dependable and self-disciplined." The ones who didn't speak as much tended to score higher for less desirable traits, including "conventional and uncreative."

13. Second Test • "More-dominant individuals achieved influence in their groups in part because they were seen as more competent by fellow group members," Anderson and Kilduff write. • But so what? Maybe they were more competent. Isn't it possible that people who talk more do so because they simply have more to contribute? • To test that, Anderson and Kilduff ran a second study with a new team of volunteers in which the skill being tested was a lot more quantifiable than forming a nonprofit green group. This time it was math.

14. Second Results • Once again, the volunteers were divided into fours in competition for a $400 prize, but now their assigned task was to work as teams to solve computational problems from previous versions of the Graduate Management Aptitude Test (GMAT). • Before the work began, the participants informed the researchers — but not their team members — of their real-world scores on the math portion of the SAT. • When the work was finished, the people who spoke up more were again likelier to be described by peers as leaders and likelier to be rated as math whizzes.

15. Finding Pretenders • …any speaking up at all seemed to do. Participants earned recognition for being the first to call out an answer, but also for being the second or third — even if all they did was agree with what someone else had said. Merely providing some scrap of information relevant to solving the problem counted too, as long as they did so often enough and confidently enough. • When Anderson and Kilduff checked the participants' work, however, a lot of pretenders were exposed. Repeatedly, the ones who emerged as leaders and were rated the highest in competence were not the ones who offered the greatest number of correct answers. Nor were they the ones whose SAT scores suggested they'd even be able to. What they did do was offer the most answers — period. • "Dominant individuals behaved in ways that made them appear competent," the researchers write, "above and beyond their actual competence." Troublingly, group members seemed only too willing to follow these underqualified bosses. An overwhelming 94% of the time, the teams used the first answer anyone shouted out — often giving only perfunctory consideration to others that were offered.

16. Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's OwnIncompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments from Justin Kruger and David Dunning Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (1999)

17. Abstract Says It All • People tend to hold overly favorable views of their abilities in many social and intellectual domains. • The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled in these domains suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it. • Across 4 studies, the authors found that participants scoring in the bottom quartile on tests of humor, grammar, and logic grossly overestimated their test performance and ability. Although their test scores put them in the 12th percentile, they estimated themselves to be in the 62nd. Several analyses linked this miscalibration to deficits in metacognitive skill, or the capacity to distinguish accuracy from error. • Paradoxically, improving the skills of participants, and thus increasing their metacognitive competence, helped them recognize the limitations of their abilities.

18. The Kruger-Dunning Effect • There is an inverse relationship between a person’s assessment of their own competence and their actual competence level.

19. What Can We Do? • Behavioral Economics teaches that if we understand how our mind works and the pitfalls we face, we can work to overcome these. • In other words, knowledge is power!!