The Number One Cause of Failed Leaders

What’s the greatest destroyer of leadership?

What can undermine your potential faster than anything else? What’s the number one cause of failed leaders—on personal, organizational, and even national scales? What’s the Achilles heel that disarms leaders, and makes them more vulnerable than anything else?

It’s not money. It’s not admiration. It’s not business. It’s not logistics. It’s not numbers.

The greatest destroyer of your leadership is arrogance. Pride.

Why? Because arrogance and pride say this: “I am better.” In order for you to hold this view of yourself, you have to put others down. You’ve got to demean them, disrespect them, and not honor them.

Proverbs 16:18 tells us that “Pride goes before a fall.” As leaders, we’ve got to be extra vigilant to ensure that our confidence and self-esteem doesn’t morph into arrogance. You likely have people around you that affirm, encourage, and build you up. Don’t ever allow their voices to make you think you’re better than others.

So how do we catch ourselves when we do begin to become arrogant? This is tricky. The challenge is that very few people—especially those employed by us—will have the courage to say, “You’re proud.” People will talk amongst themselves. They’ll say it to everybody else. But they will rarely come to you with it.

This means that, as leaders, we must be extremely self-aware. We’ve got to constantly remind ourselves that other people got us to where we are; and without others, we cannot go further. That humility, that dependence, is the antidote to the greatest destroyer of leadership: arrogance.