3 Reasons Why Management Fails

Post date: Oct 20, 2013 9:45:41 AM

Simon Sinek describes the Golden Circle as a guiding principle for communicating, establishing and propagating a vision across a whole company, at all its levels.

Despite its clarity and simplicity the model is not consistently applied on a wide scale and this leads most of the time to poor decisions, failures and to inconsistency of business results.

From here several reasons for management failure can be derived.

1. Unclarity of Vision

A vision clearly states the reason a company, an endeavor, a project or a product exists and why it might be representative for peole comprising that company and for its clients. It defines a higher level purpose to which people commit, facts that people believe in. It answers the "Why" question, stating the motivation behind the whole company, its actions and its artifacts. It provides an explanation of why certain types of people are employed there and it clarifies also why the clients of a company buy its products. A clear "Why" defines the vision of a company, providing inspiration. This is clearly different from the mission of a company which does not have the ability to inspire.

2. Failure to Communicate the Vision

According to the Law of Diffusion of Innovation, the market is divided in several important groups, which have to be approached in the right order and with the right strategy in order to ensure effective communication and reachability. Otherwise spreading an idea and achieving a source of consistent inspiration is not possible. Instead of spending time and energy to focus on the why, most management focuses on a more pragmatic means of how, putting inspiration on hold.

3. Failure to Propagate the Vision

According to Golden Circle, people might be divided in groups such as "why", "how" and "what" types. Without inspiring the "how" types a vision cannot be propagated correctly. But in order to communicate a vision to the "how" types, this group has to be clearly identified which is not always the case.

A clear vision stays at the core of providing the essence of a solid, successful company culture that inspire its employees and clients. Investing an effort in creating it would pay itself on long term, instilling loyalty and motivation.