Why are there so many bad leaders

One very common trait about people who lack skills and are generally shortcoming in information is that they believe that luck can make things work. For me to refute that will require a good understanding about how luck works, which isn’t the case. Skilled and informed persons generally tend to rely on those to make things work.

I think as a specie we’ve come to understand the importance of probabilities, rules, standards, methods, strategies and an overall understanding of our environment.

All these components which ensure that we are able to replicate outcomes, reproduce results, guarantee success. When we come to the understanding of a particular event, we are much more likely to find a way to control it and optimize it to best suit our desires. The fact that you are here reading this article isn’t a product of “luck” (at least not entirely), it might seem like the product of luck but it isn’t. From all the methods and strategies used to create this computer, to the algorithms and searches which led you to this article, all of that was pre-planned and can be replicated identically.

This leads me to the topic of leadership, its not a product of luck like some will like to believe. We already have a clear understanding about what leadership is, who a good leader is and how to replicate the same results. This was made possible because we have a good understanding about human nature and society in general. So we know precisely what to do to obtain specific results and all of this information has been penned down into countless books, videos, and articles. Despite all this information being available pretty much freely, people still choose to count on luck rather than thought out strategies which have been tested for decades.

So yes, that’s why we have bad leaders, because they don’t go through the stress of learning and adopting proven strategies which have shown their efficiency. What ends up happening is that these people prefer to learn on the job and develop experience while doing some average work. In the end they make a lot of mistakes, take a lot of time to get up to speed and if they are “lucky”, don’t end up breaking everything.

To be a good leader isn’t a mystery anymore, as opposed to the previous decades where information was very scarce, where you had to go to a professional school or pay for an expensive personal teacher to get the information you needed, this time around you are always just one google search away from finding the right information.

Being a bad leader, I’ll say is much more about not having the right information than it is about making the wrong decisions.

I’ll add a disclaimer here that I am not speaking to every leader across the board, but much more about leaders who have to manage people. I would like to believe that when you have the right information and apply these full proof strategies when it comes to managing people, your chances of failure are very slim, mainly because humans are very predictable.

Its no surprise that people end up being bad leaders, they ended up in that position for the wrong reasons, either due to greed for authority, wealth and power or because there was no other option, yet again it might have been involuntary. For whatsoever reason, it seems leadership skills are some of the most underrated qualification skills required for positions of leadership. Most people just assume it's something which can be learned on the fly or which doesn’t really matter that much, yet again can be delegated to others. Since it doesn’t necessarily impact a well organized system on the short run, people tend to not care about it either ways, it's a good thing to have, but we can do without.

Conclusion

The reason we have so many bad leaders is that we assume that charisma is leadership, and we tend to underestimate those skills when electing leaders. We also assume that being competent and affluent in a specific field automatically makes us a good leader. We see leadership skills as something we can make abstraction of as long as those persons excel in their domain of competence. That’s how you end up with specialist in managerial roles, meanwhile there are schools which specifically train persons to occupy managerial positions. A simple question you can ask yourself is whether the leader you are supposed to follow has been trained for that role or they just got there because of some other skills.