Leaders Are Rarely the Best Performers

I’m re:visiting Tom Peters’ Re:imagine! and stumbled upon this chewy management ditty on leadership…

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Leaders Are Rarely the Best Performers

A symphony conductor is usually a good musician, but seldom a world-class performer. The most effective university deans are often not the best professors. The ability to lead … to Engage Others and to Turn Them On … rarely coincides with being at the tip-top of the … Individual Performance Heap.

Which is not to say that leaders shouldn’t have a fingertip familiarity with their particular line of business. But the factors that make you good at the “people stuff” and the “inspirational stuff” and the “profit-making stuff” are quite distinct from the factors that vault you to the Pinnacle of Individual Mastery.

In business, alas, it’s all too common to promote the “best” practitioner to the job of leading other practitioners. The best trainer becomes head of the training department. The best account manager becomes head of the sales department. And so on. Tellingly, that’s not how things work in … True Talent Enterprises.

So why do we go that route in business? Beats me. Gross stupidity? Maybe. But more likely: a refusal to see that leadership is … a discrete, limited, special quality.

SOURCE: Re-Imagine! (2003), pg. 321 | Tom Peters

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Comments

[Lewis Green]

John,

I agree completely with the premise. In business we reward practitioners by promoting them to positions of leadership (which in most businesses means management, another act of stupidity, but I'll save that for another day).

The system is a misconstruct. And it can't be fixed. As long as we create bureaucracies, we will continue to hurt productivity, creativity and innovation, and do great harm to operations (production, creativity and innovation) and to leadership.

As Peters would say: We need to blow the current corporate structure up.

[Matt Heinz]

Some of the best athletes in various sports - baseball, football, basketball - actually make terrible coaches. The best athletes, with the most natural talents, often haven't had to work as hard for their success, and therefore don't really know how to coach others on how to achieve their level of greatness. They also bring to their job as coach an expectation that all athletes should ultimately be able to achieve a performance level that they themselves enjoyed in their prime, which isn't usually possible.

Probably some good analogies in the business world here. Speaking of spectacularly-talented people, I love going back to the work of people like Peter Drucker and Tom Peters. Their advice is timeless and always relevant.

[johnmoore (from Brand Autopsy)]

So true Matt. Isaiah Thomas comes immediately to mind.

[Jay Ehret]

Unfortunately, there's no "leadership division" in companies. No one gets to prove their leadership prowess until they are put in a leadership role. It is easy to prove you are a leading salesperson, it is tougher to prove you a leading leader.

[Business Marketing]

What a good point, Matt. I never even thought about that before!

[Valeria Maltoni]

I also look at it this way: when a group wins, it's the team's merit, when it loses, it's the coach's fault.

[willie]

Great post. After owning and leading an ad agency for many years, I concur, AND I admit it is a bit counter-intuitive. As I think about it more I am also realizing I'm torn between my desire to lead and my desire to do (at least in some cases).

[Shama Hyder]

Leadership and Excelling at a given task are two different traits. They don't have to be found in the same person.

[Kevin D Goodman]

Nothing worse than losing your best salesman by making him/her a sales manager. But we look for promotion as a validation of our skills. How else do we reward our mavericks and even protect them from the new managers whose positions they were passed for.