Leaders and their limitations

An organization leader has to accept that he or she will be honest with himself or herself about the challenges he or she faces in achieving performance standards, both within the organization and in the field. Without accepting his limitations, he cannot be a leader. Leaders may well discover their limitations early in their careers, in fact, but it is through recognizing and overcoming them that leaders are able to become leaders. Failure to recognize and overcome limitations can be directly proportional to the severity of those limitations. In other words, the more dangerous the limitations are, the more importance they will receive in leadership.

This is especially true of leaders of human resources, management, business, sports, educational, or legislative operations. An organization cannot function if it does not have a credible leadership succession plan in place. Most CEOs will admit that they don't have one. And, in fact, most organizations that have poor succession plans simply don't function. The current and historic losses to operational losses to staff attrition and employee departures are all too often attributed to the CEO's inability to balance business and personal commitments.

Many leaders react to their situation and lack of progress by feeling like they've hit a roadblock and hitting it harder and harder. That mindset is destructive to both the leaders and the organizations they lead. If a leader is slow to put things into perspective and understand his situation, but nonetheless has a productive work day, he may not put up his best performances when the pressure is on the field and pressures mount on teammates.

When it comes to dealing with and adapting to your own weaknesses and strengths, there is no substitute for a person who can consciously and openly know the exact limits of what he or she can achieve and how they will be approached when confronted with challenges. In our generational society, the value of this concept is not in general consensus or popular opinion, but in the thought of leaders.

leaders can't admit is that they, themselves, are limited and fall short of the lofty standards that we impose on others, simply because we like to be the best and most knowledgeable about things. However, we can be aware of how we truly are in order to more effectively utilize ourselves to achieve our goals. It helps to have a clear sense of who you are, what your abilities are, and the limits to how far they can be pushed.

These limitations must be overcome not just because their presence poses a particular risk to his life, but because they continue to cast him back into the self-destructive self-indulgence that has drained him so far. Many leaders of organizational groups have, for the last forty years or more, allowed the blind pursuit of self-interest to dictate their decisions. This has led them to make the worst mistakes in organizational life. They have managed organizations according to formulas and rigid rules that they devised on a far less stable foundation.