Don’t let your organization leaderless unless you want to be jobless

For whatever reason you are distracted from your day to day duties (a merger, an acquisition, a family emergency) and you haven’t been in a position to attend to those duties. This is fine if it is a short hiatus (less than 3 weeks), but anything longer than that you need to make sure that somebody is tending shop. You have to groom your team to work without you for a while or designate one or more people to fill in your role. If you provide no leadership you are creating a vacuum where people are making decisions and launching projects because they sound good.


Let’s be clear, your team has to be able to function without you for short periods – and they should be able to provide their own direction (after all, their resumes do state that they are entrepreneurial, self-starters and self motivated). But the longer your absence, the more decisions start to pile up and change the direction; suddenly you have a new and emerging strategy that you are still accountable for.

Thinking about strategy: too many leaders

If you find that for your company, thinking about strategy requires a monumental effort it may be because you are including every possible variable in your analysis. Sometimes this approach to strategy comes about because there isn't a dominant leader in the company but several strong-willed executives. Without a charismatic leader - a company may flounder without direction. Just like two people can't drive a car, too many executives can't drive a company.

Instead of really working cooperatively, the dominant executives will try to control the situation by introducing variables in the analysis that will lead to their desired outcomes. The result will be an ineffective strategy:

• Too broad: being the no 1 position in the whole wide world (what does this mean?)
• Conflicting objectives: being the premium brand using the cheapest components.
• Unattainable: going from pure software development to software integration without making real changes to the way things are done.

If you are not one of the strong-willed executives, there isn't an easy solution to your problem (but that is why you are reading this post). What you need is a third party that breaks the stalemate and takes over - sometimes it can be you! Sometimes you need to use somebody on the board or the CEO. You need somebody with enough authority/clout to break the stalemate and take over completely. If there isn't any single person who can do this, then you will have to play Big Brother or Survival and make alliances with enough power to take over. Make sure you control the alliance or you will have the same situation but with even more people involved.

If you are one of the strong-willed executives (BTW, thanks for reading the post) the solution is even more simple: get another job (find your own company to play with without sharing) or get the the other person another job. If you are evenly matched (the unmovable object meeting the unstoppable force kind of situation) why are you complicating your life? find another company and take over. Do avoid anything with the N1H1 virus or Facebook photos in the mix.