10 big mistakes successful leaders make

Here is an article written by Steve Tobak for CBS MoneyWatch, the CBS Interactive Business Network. To check out an abundance of valuable resources and obtain a free subscription to one or more of the website’s newsletters, please click here.

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(MoneyWatch) COMMENTARY Executives and business leaders don’t just peak and lose their potency over time, like wine. They change. Oftentimes, success is the culprit. Success affects everyone differently and not necessarily in a good way.

I’ve seen it happen to loads of successful CEOs, entrepreneurs and business owners I’ve worked with over the years. It’s not a result of the Peter Principle, since their responsibilities didn’t change. It’s not necessarily a question of the business outgrowing their capabilities, either.

And they don’t just ”lose it.” Rather, they change. Success changes them.

If you know a little about human psychology, that shouldn’t surprise you. You’ve got to really know yourself, possess unusual self-confidence, and be pretty well grounded in reality to withstand the ego-inflating onslaught of winning big in business.

Since we’re all human, we’re all susceptible to the unusual pressures and pitfalls that come from achieving what we’ve always dreamed of. In my experience, these are the ten most common traps successful leaders fall into.

[Here are two of the ten mistakes that Tobak discusses with his usual precision and eloquence.]

Becoming the status quo. Startups often break into the market by challenging the status quo. The problem is when success makes them the status quo, yet they don’t realize it. That was evident when Apple and Google challenged the BlackBerry with the iPhone and Android platform. It’s ironic that RIM’s co-founders forgot that they were once the challengers. Their failure to be proactive or even to react in time was RIM’s downfall.

Tunnel vision. They lose perspective and become rigid, sticking to their myopic vision like glue. Since competitors are unpredictable and markets are always evolving, it can be deadly to a business. If their vision fails to gain traction, they often double down and become even more grandiose. We saw that with former Sony CEO Howard Stringer‘s concept of product synergy. The only problem is it didn’t exist.

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Steve Tobak is a consultant and former high-tech senior executive. He’s managing partner of Invisor Consulting, a management consulting and business strategy firm. Contact Steve, follow him on Facebook, or connect on LinkedIn.

The Thought Leader Interview: Dov Seidman

Photograph by Matthew Septimus

Here is the introduction to an interview of Dov Seidman, conducted by Art Kleiner and featured in strategy+business magazine published by Booz & Company, during which the influential business author and CEO explains why the practice of enlightened self-governance gives companies an edge. To read the complete interview, watch a video of it, check out other free resources , and obtain subscription information, please click here.

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This interview, formally conducted in January 2012, started as an argument two and a half years earlier, when the economic crisis was at its peak. Dov Seidman — the founder and CEO of LRN, a global firm that helps companies with such matters as legal and regulatory compliance, reputation and principled performance, environmental sustainability, business ethics, governance, leadership, and culture change — had published a book, How: Why HOW We Do Anything Means Everything…in Business (and in Life) (Wiley, 2007). In August 2009 he visited the strategy+business offices to propose an article about the link between enlightened corporate behavior and performance. The most sustainably successful businesses, he argued, were also the most moral — not through formal programs like corporate social responsibility (CSR), but through what he called “sustainable values” (as opposed to “situational values”). They had an orientation toward sustaining human relationships built into their day-to-day practices and behaviors. Hence his book title:How a business is operated, led, and governed is just as important as what that business chooses to produce.

I was skeptical. Sure, many companies promoted themselves as ethical and responsible, but was there really a clear cause-and-effect relationship between values and performance? Among the most successful companies were quite a few that were known for visibly amoral — or, in some cases, exploitative — values and practices. Seidman persisted, arguing that the world’s growing transparency and interconnectedness were changing the culture of business: making it harder for large companies to operate purely on the basis of expediency and short-term returns. Consumers and employees were shifting their loyalty to companies they perceived as more principled. He added that in part because of the general criticism of corporations that had followed the economic crisis, there was a groundswell of enlightenment among the CEOs he knew. “We’re in a world,” he said, “in which you have to live and earn your reputation; you can’t just assert and manage it.”

We found one intriguing point of common ground when we talked about the government bailouts of General Motors, AIG, Bear Stearns, and Fannie Mae — companies that had all been dubbed “too big to fail.” Their size wasn’t the reason they had been saved, we agreed. They were really “too connected to fail”: too enmeshed in a chain of suppliers, financiers, customers, and community members. If they went down, too many others would go down with them, so they had to be kept alive. In that light, maybe Seidman’s argument made more sense; maybe companies would increasingly have to justify their existence on the basis of the ways in which their presence benefited an interwoven web of other companies and people.

Since then, the business world has seen two almost contradictory trends involving corporate values. As organizational learning expert Meg Wheatley recently noted in an interview in this magazine (Winter 2011), many companies seem to be moving away from enlightened management and retreating to command-and-control authoritarianism, often in the name of cutting costs. At the same time, there is indeed a visible wave of interest in the kinds of values that Dov Seidman champions. Banks and health insurance companies are becoming more consumer-centric; food companies are developing healthier packaged goods; automakers are putting less-polluting vehicles on the roads; and some company leaders are talking about authenticity, integrity, and participative management.

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Art Kleiner is the editor-in-chief of strategy+business and the author of The Age of Heretics: A History of the Radical Thinkers Who Reinvented Corporate Management (2nd ed., Jossey-Bass, 2008).

How to Get Into the Zone

Here is another valuable Management Tip of the Day from Harvard Business Review. To sign up for a free subscription to any/all HBR newsletters, please click here.

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Everyone aspires to get into “the zone,” or the mental state where you do your best work. Next time you’re trying to achieve peak performance, remember these three things:

• There is no zone for new activities. When you start a new task, you’re not going to find flow. Getting in the zone requires activating the subconscious part of the brain, which is simply inaccessible when you are trying something for the first time.

• You need the right environment. Figure out the settings that facilitate your flow — be it a crowded coffee shop or a quiet library — and work in them whenever possible.

• Emotions are key. Being in the zone requires finding the feelings that allow your subconscious to take over. Music can help activate these emotions. Find songs, albums, or artists that put you in the right mood and block out distractions.

Today’s Management Tip was adapted from “How to Get into Your Zone” by James Allworth.

To read that article and join the discussion, please click here.

Also, you may wish to check out Management Tips from Harvard Business Review by clicking here.

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To read his other articles, please click here.

James Allworth is the co-author of How Will You Measure Your Life?. He has worked as a Fellow at the Forum for Growth and Innovation (FGI) at Harvard Business School, at Apple, and Booz & Company. Connect with him on Twitter at @jamesallworth.

You may also wish to check out Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, written by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (mee-hy cheek-sent-mah-hy-ee),  a Hungarian psychology professor, who emigrated to the United States at the age of 22. Now at Claremont Graduate University, he is the former head of the department of psychology at the University of Chicago and of the department of sociology and anthropology at Lake Forest College.