Fort Langley, July 2026 – What is the basic requirement for a leader? It’s that someone follows. Obviously bad people can be good leaders, and can lead good people into bad situations. In an established organization, do you really need good, inspirational leaders? Subordinates will follow because, frankly, they don’t want to get fired for insubordination. That’s why they are subordinates. I think that rather than looking for good leaders, a company should look for good decision makers, as in people who make good decisions, rather than people who are good at making decisions whether the decisions themselves are wise or unsound. Semantics is important. As long as they aren’t so bad at leadership that they inspire active rebellion, they should be fine in authority. On the other hand, those that crave authority might make selfish decisions. All this musing on leadership stems from an article from the recent Bannerman Consultants newsletter.
The Vancouver Canucks just went through a very public process of setting new management leadership in place. Putting aside, for now, the fact that they are in the entertainment business, so notoriety and profitability are arguably more important than sporting prowess, how important is it that these new leaders can lead? Hockey legend Steve Yzerman just moved away from his general manager role with the Detroit Red Wings because even though he led the team to 3 championships as a player, he couldn’t even lead them into the playoffs as a general manager. So unless he somehow forgot how to lead once he retired as a player, it wasn’t leadership that he lacked. Of course Wayne Gretzky’s coaching record is a prime example of how being able to execute a skill doesn’t make you the best person to teach that skill. The Vancouver Canucks are talking a lot about team culture, but Steve Yzerman knows what culture is necessary to win, but either he couldn’t recreate that culture as a manager, or culture isn’t as important as a lot of other things, like filling your goals, both figuratively and literally.
Of course looking for someone to lead a team is probably barking up the wrong tree. That of course, brings up the question: do packs of dogs require leaders? For that matter, what about flocks of birds or armies of ants? Anyway, what a business team probably wants more than a leader is a team manager, or perhaps a coach. In that case, communication skills are probably more important than task execution skills, which is often what promotions are based on, at best. Maybe the solution is to leave good workers in the positions in which they work well, and promote mediocre workers who have superior communication or decision-making skills. You need workers competent enough to execute their jobs without been spoon-fed of course, but that’s why you shouldn’t promote those who do their existing jobs well. How do you find this capability? You promote incompetent leaders and then see who still thrives under them. Maybe poor promotion is all part of a grand plan to create a good working culture in the first place.
- Martin Fandrich, BASc, PhD, PEng, FIMechE, CEng, FEC
Leader on arrow image source: lumaxart, CC BY-SA 2.0 https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0, via Wikimedia Commons