Those who run for political office rarely understand what it takes to transform a country. Transformational leaders are marked by a willingness to take risks that would have gains, a higher level of thinking and great emotions. All these attributes are bound to have a gradual but prominent effect on the organization, country or community that they lead. Most parents seek to lead their children in the right way with their eye on the future. So should bosses in any form of establishment, knowing that the company or organization depends on their leadership capabilities.
If the dignity in labour is lost in the principles of any organization or country there are bound to be consequences
Bad Leadership can do the following evils to a family, religious organization, community, country or even company: Bad leadership will:
- Costs you time: A bad leader would waste time at unprofitable ventures ignoring those things that need to be done. And all the people they lead would suffer for it; so will the organization. Nigerians who are in their 40s and 50s will realize that very little has been achieved in our democracy in over two decades. The feeling is if some people in the private sector organizations and non-governmental organizations have been able to make progress by enlarging their businesses, expanding their scopes of operations and training their employees for greater capability and responsibility while ensuring that their organizations are prosperous, how come in the same environment there are organizations that are floundering countries that are being led astray and consequences that appear outside the control of those at the helm of affairs. Those who lead are unable to proffer solutions to the problems of growth, stability, security and progress. They seem to be headed nowhere fast and the clock is ticking.
- Lost opportunities: Definitely opportunities are lost when the leader lacks the skills and vision to lead the entity through a crisis situation or to make the people achieve a commonly desired state of being. One English dictum states that opportunity knocks but once. This is not entirely true! Those at the helm of any entity have thousands of opportunities to make headway through proper planning and implementation of plans, being able to make the right decisions during crises and ensuring that they evaluate as they proceed so that proper adjustments can be made along the way. Every crisis should be recast as an opportunity to assess situations and ensure we proffer proper processes to attain a solution, therefore ensuring that the entity is better for the majority of people involved.
- Lost momentum: Some African countries got independence around the same time that the so called Asian Tigers got theirs. Today there is a world of difference between those in Africa and Asia. At some point in time many of the African nations derailed. Resources that are supposed to help improve the wellbeing of a majority of the populace are stolen, squandered or simply neglected. When comparisons are made with nations that appear to have natural resources in abundance and those who do not any resources but are able to thrive on honesty and diligence, questions are often raised: How can such countries, communities or companies be so blessed but so poor at the same time?
4.Lost money: It’s amazing how bad leadership will cause business people, givers in a religious organization, customers to a company or even opportunities to a family to disappear. It is just difficult to imagine how much money is lost or wasted in the hands of bad leaders. For instance many leaders have become thieves who take the money their countries or companies have generated to Switzerland, UK and US and when they return to the entity or country that they have impoverished, they are given the recognition and celebration of heroes. A serious part of the problem is with those who follow such disenchanting leaders. Followers and supporters seem numb to the true situations of things. The strategy of these destroying leaders has been to empower a few influential people in the entity and make them advocates for cause of their leadership even when the results and outcomes are not really desirable.
- Damaging peoples’ values. A whole generation can be in chaos if their value system is skewed over what is wrong and what is right. If the thinking and activity in any entity is not guided by a proper value system then the wrong behaviour will be celebrated and people will consistently get away with breaking the rules, taking illegal short cuts and allowing that majority to suffer loss just for their personal gain. If the dignity in labour is lost in the principles of any organization or country there are bound to be consequences: People will desire to make profit without working; they just want to eat. Gambling, gangsterism and cultism will set in as a way of life and systems will be set up where resources and money will be extorted from those who seek to engage in honest processes to make head way. A compromised value system is one of the most dangerous draw backs of any entity that seeks to make progress.
- Damages generational wealth: Bad leadership damages generational wealth. Resources that are supposed to pass from one generations to another would be wasted. The wars that took place in Syria and lately Ukraine are a bad testimony to what can happen when leaders are so twisted in their thinking that they believe their own will is superior to that of the majority of those that they lead. In such situations of major crisis, a lot of the houses, artifacts and investments are destroyed and can never be recovered again. In recent times terrorism and insurgency has ravaged major countries in the developing world. One of the root causes of these misdemeanours is poverty and lack of proper education and enlightenment for the people in those areas.
- Damages high standards: These days, people are willing to take short cuts in services, industry, governance and even parenting and the results are obvious. Standards fall and the outcomes are horrible. A leader of any process should ensure that a high standard of quality is maintained so that should there be a crisis it would not be able to affect the processes and procedures that have been put in place for sustenance and continuity.
- Destroys accountability: Bad leaders feel that they are not accountable to anyone. They do whatever they like and tend to get away with it. But it bounces back on their followers. Parents who are bad leaders will raise children without values or a sense of purpose. Bad leaders of a country will waste the resources and not care about it. Bad leaders defy accountability and don’t care about the people who follow or look up to them. This is a dangerous trend since such bad leadership will replicate itself within the establishment and continue a cycle of damage and destruction which might take a lot of time and effort to abort.
Bad leadership is the curse of a group that seeks to make progress and as we see from this brief analysis, the consequences are dire.
*Ogundadegbe is a renowned management consultant. He trains managers and executives in the arts of Customer Service, Human Resources Management and Management strategy ([email protected]).
