How you define success matters because, when you have a faulty definition, it makes you ineffective, and you may not even realize it.
How we define success determines our actions.
It tells you what to measure, what you measure tells you what to do, and when the definition is wrong, you get a lot of activity that may seem good but ends up being ineffective.
Success in leadership is defined in different ways, such as:
- Getting promotions
- Getting short-term results (such as a positive quarterly return)
- Making money
- Having good relationships with your team/helping people be their best
In the right perspective these things aren’t bad, but when they become the definition for success as a leader, it creates harmful behavior.
Getting promotions as a definition of success
When you define success for a leader as the ability to get promotions, you get people who are good at moving up, but not necessarily good at leading. That’s why we have a lot of incompetent leaders in top positions.
Why do narcissists get promoted more often?
When the definition of success is getting promotions, that’s how we get more narcissistic leaders: leaders who are just about themselves. Narcissistic people are often good at playing the game, politicking, and making themselves look good.
They are good at getting promoted. It doesn’t mean they are actually good at leading.
In fact, a meta-analysis by Grijalva and colleagues (2015) found that narcissism has a strong, positive relationship with who rises into leadership and no relationship with how well they actually lead once they’re there.
Reward-centered vs. responsibility-centered leadership
Patrick Lencioni talks about something similar in his book, The Motive. He says there are two main motives: the reward-centered and the responsibility-centered. Or, as I like to call them: the selfish and the service motive.
When your focus is on self, on the reward, you focus your activities on the promotion, the reward, what you get out of it, not on what is good for the team or the goal the team should be pursuing.
Reward/self-focused leaders are more likely to focus on what moves them up (such as politicking) or the things they enjoy instead of the needed work that leaders should do, such as having the hard conversations and developing their team.
Getting promoted doesn’t mean you are effective as a leader
Here’s a hard truth: just because someone gets promoted doesn’t mean they know how to lead well. What gets leaders moving up is often not what makes them effective. This is a concept studied in leadership research (See Kaiser, Hogan & Craig, 2008 and Luthans, 1988), and it is often called leadership emergence vs. leadership effectiveness.
The two often get treated as the same thing. They aren’t.
One is the ability to get hired and get promoted (emergence); the other is actually being effective in leading (effectiveness). One doesn’t mean the other.
When we define success as promotion, we get a lot of people who are good at “moving up” but not good at the actual work of leadership.
Short-term results as a definition for success
When the focus is on short-term results, then you get better short-term results. It doesn’t mean you get good leadership or that the company will keep running well in the long-run.
“Leaders” of organizations may be praised when they show profit by cutting costs or laying off people, regardless of the impact it will have on the future of the organization. Short term, they got the results.
Then when months or a few years down the road the bill comes due, that “leader” may be gone or the dots don’t get connected. And the business and employees suffer for it.
Graham, Harvey and Rajgopal (2005) surveyed 401 financial executives and interviewed 20 more. They found:
- 78% said they would sacrifice long-term value in order to smooth out reported earnings.
- 55% said they would pass on a project they knew was valuable if starting it meant missing the current quarter’s number.
- 80% admitted to cutting things like research and maintenance while understanding full well what it costs down the road.
This is executives describing their own decisions because of the short-term pressures they felt they must meet.
Making money as a definition for success
Making money looks similar to short-term results, and it does overlaps, but it reaches further. Defining success as making money can distort what you are willing to do and who you’re willing to affect to get it.
It shapes how you treat customers and employees. You may cut corners. You may push something out before it’s ready. It may lead to unethical behavior because success equals more money, however it’s made.
Good relationships as a definition for success
What about building relationships with your team? That’s a good thing to do, but by itself it’s not a good definition of success.
It doesn’t matter if you have great relationships and if they are “being their best” if your department or company shuts down because you aren’t also getting results.
People will follow a leader who genuinely cares about them. They won’t keep following one who can’t deliver anything.
It’s both. And they aren’t contradictory.
A meta-analysis by Judge, Piccolo and Ilies (2004) looked at two long-studied leadership behaviors: consideration, which is the people side, and initiating structure, which is the task and results side. Both showed relationships with leadership outcomes, but they didn’t predict the same things.
Consideration was tied more closely to follower satisfaction, motivation, and how effective the leader was judged to be. Initiating structure was tied more closely to actual job and group performance.
Both matter.
What is a good definition of leadership success?
So what would be a good criterion of success for leadership?
A good definition of success as a leader would be being someone people want to follow while getting the results.
In fact, this is actually Peter Northouse’s definition of leadership, paraphrased: the process of guiding people toward the accomplishment of a goal through influence.
You build influence, build relationships, and be someone that people want to follow, AND you guide, support, and do the hard work to get the results through your team.
Are you aiming for good or great?
In the process of defining success, it’s also good to look at the difference between good and great. As Jim Collins says in Good to Great, Good is the enemy of great.
When you have the wrong definition of leadership, it hides the ceiling you are hitting. You are settling for less and don’t realize it. You think you are doing well when you really aren’t.
If you think getting a promotion is the definition of success, and you get it, you’ve succeeded. You don’t see the ceiling you’ve stuck yourself on when there is so much higher you could (and should) go.
The wrong definitions can blind you and make you complacent with being “good” (or less), and you may not even realize it.
That’s one reason why the right definition is important. It lets you see the gap that you may not see otherwise.
But even then, we can still settle for “good”, and call that “success” when there is greatness to be had.
Sometimes people will say a leader is doing okay, or that what they’re doing is getting “good” results.
But it’s not great. It could be better. They’re settling for good and don’t realize what they’re leaving on the table.
So my question for you is: how are you defining success, and are you settling for “good” as a leader, or going for great?
Sources
Collins, J. (2001). Good to Great: Why Some Companies Make the Leap… and Others Don’t. HarperBusiness.
Graham, J. R., Harvey, C. R., & Rajgopal, S. (2005). The economic implications of corporate financial reporting. Journal of Accounting and Economics, 40(1–3), 3–73.
Grijalva, E., Harms, P. D., Newman, D. A., Gaddis, B. H., & Fraley, R. C. (2015). Narcissism and leadership: A meta-analytic review of linkages with leadership emergence and effectiveness. Personnel Psychology, 68(1), 1–47.
Judge, T. A., Piccolo, R. F., & Ilies, R. (2004). The forgotten ones? The validity of consideration and initiating structure in leadership research. Journal of Applied Psychology, 89(1), 36.
Kaiser, R. B., Hogan, R., & Craig, S. B. (2008). Leadership and the fate of organizations. American Psychologist, 63(2), 96.
Lencioni, P. (2020). The Motive: Why So Many Leaders Abdicate Their Most Important Responsibilities. Jossey-Bass.
Luthans, F. (1988). Successful vs. effective real managers. Academy of Management Perspectives, 2(2), 127-132.
Northouse, P. G. (2010). Leadership: Theory and Practice (5th ed.). SAGE Publications.
