The Top 10 Reasons Managers Fail

Almost everyone has served time under a nightmare manager. Perhaps she was an incurable gossip or couldn't delegate. Whatever her most glaring fault, chances are it's one of the flaws identified by Morgan W. McCall, Jr., Ph.D., professor of management and organization at the University of Southern California's Marshall School of Business, as being the most likely to bring a manager's career to a screeching halt.

The 10 Killer Flaws:

1. Insensitivity
2. Acting aloof
3. Betraying trusts
4. Over managing
5. Being overly ambitious
6. Inability to think long term
7. Inability to adapt to a new manager
8. Over dependency on a mentor
9. Making poor staffing decisions
10. Inability to deal with the department's performance problems

How do you know if you possess one of these fatal flaws? "There are clues all around us," says McCall, "and everyone else usually sees it. The question is, do we have the courage to ask them? And if we do, do we have the kinds of relationships where people will answer honestly?"

Even better than asking others is to pick up on the subtle clues yourself. The clues will vary depending on the flaw:

If you suspect yourself of over managing, step back and ask yourself if people are taking your mandates enthusiastically or if they seem to be merely complying. If you step in on a project you assigned to others, do they seem resentful?

Poor staffing decisions are evident if you habitually form teams of people within your organization that prove ineffective, or if you tend to recruit people in your own image, or hire only experts. "The higher you go, the more you need people with broader skills and abilities underneath you to help lead," notes McCall.

Signs that you're overly ambitious include being too solicitous to upper management or finding yourself doing things at other people's expense. "It's when some of your sacred moral values are turning into shades of gray," says McCall. "The root of effective leadership is having an understanding of one's own values."

According to McCall, it's a mistake to rely too heavily on performance surveys. "Some surveys are better than others. But often the people who need the feedback the most have created an environment where coworkers are afraid to tell the truth," he says.

McCall does advise using the reviews as a springboard for soul-searching. "If you see disparities among different rater groups, for instance your boss thinks you're great at something but your employees think you're terrible at it, or if you get low ratings on a homogenous set of items, then at least you know what questions to ask yourself and others," he explains.

Perhaps the most challenging step in overcoming a fatal managerial flaw is learning to take responsibility for the flaw in the first place. "When I interviewed executives whose careers were derailed, I saw the tendency to attribute things that happened to them to external sources," McCall says. "They didn't recognize that a piece of it was theirs. Even if it's just 10 percent or 20 percent, that's the part that you have to work with