The Roots of Real Leadership Series: Are You Managing by "Luck" or "Cause and Effect"?

In our research for Take Your Lead, we lean heavily on the work of Dr. J. Clayton Lafferty from Human Synergistics, specifically his seminal presentation, The Roots of Excellence.

One of the primary "Roots" Lafferty identified in high-performing leaders is a deep Belief in Cause and Effect.

The Antithesis: Management by Magic

Too many leaders operate under the belief system of the ancient Greeks: Luck, Fate, Chance, and Magic.

• If the quarter goes well? "We’re geniuses." (Misattribution of Success)

• If the quarter goes poorly? Either "The market is tough." (Fate) or "It's someone else's fault." (Missattribution of Failure)

The reality is, you really don't know until you understand cause and effect thinking. Lafferty argued that Excellence is the result of rejecting "Luck" and accepting that things are caused. If performance is down, there is a cause. If performance is up, there is a cause.

Most memorable for me was something my long-time mentor, Thomas A. Smith (Smitty), would always say:

"Today, we depend on the heroic efforts of a few outstanding individuals for our work. They get all the credit when things go right and all the blame when things go wrong. Instead, we should create systems that routinely produce excellence through the ordinary efforts of our extraordinary people."

In our next installment on the Roots of Real Leadership, Blog Post #3, we're going to start unpacking this statement, beginning with Drive Out Fear (Why "Boss Watching" Kills Quality)

We'll then explore the idea of "excellence" in Blog Post #4 in this mini-series: Passion for Excellence vs. The Trap of Perfection

For now, I'll close this post by introducing something that W. Edwards Deming argued convincingly—he brought the receipts in the form of data: most common causes are "built into the system," they are not local faults (whether good or bad, effective or ineffective). This is why he created something we'll explore in Blog Post #5: The System of Profound Knowledge.

Taking Your Lead

Real Leaders do not hope for results; they engineer the causes that produce them. They move from "hoping" to "knowing." As we state in the book: “Things are caused. If you want to figure out what took place at point Y, you have to find out something about what preceded it.”

Stop waiting for your lucky break. Start building the causes for your own leadership effect. In other words, eliminate the words luck, fate, chance, hope, and magic from your vocabulary and Take Your Lead.