Habits Of Really Ineffective Managers:They Stay In Their Comfort Zone

Life is a series of challenges and responses. Learning to crawl, learning to walk, starting school, graduating…on and on it goes. But Really Ineffective Managers see it differently. At some point they want the challenges to stop. They've reached a certain level, and that’s where they are going to stop. Life, and work, have other ideas, of course, but that’s beside the point. They've reached their comfort zone, and that’s where they are going to stay.

Examples are all around us. Consider the CFO who spends half a day on the intricacies of the annual accounts. Nobody is going to pay much attention to them, and in any case the financial accountant is perfectly capable of getting them done on his own. Meanwhile, two things are being ignored. The first is a cash flow crisis. There is a huge, acknowledged, problem collecting money from customers. He needs to fix this, but doesn't know how. The second problem is just as bad, but as yet invisible. A cost reduction exercise agreed three months previously has not been implemented. Costs are too high, and if this isn’t dealt with immediately the company will be in breach of its banking agreements. But he hasn't even noticed this one yet. Managing costs and cashflow come pretty high up the hierarchy of CFO responsibilities, but they are nasty tasks with no clear solution. Technical accounting is what he’s used to, but he needs to learn more about how to deal with human and commercial issues. But these are new, so uncomfortable, so he doesn’t change.

Or consider the CEO who came from an operations background. He was a problem-solver. Things went wrong and he fixed them, immediately. His main management technique was taking personal charge and jumping up and down shouting. This worked fine when the problems were short-term and operational. It doesn't work so well when he needs to develop other people or get the organisation thinking strategically to chart a course through a complex and rapidly changing environment. That would need different skills, But they are new, so uncomfortable, so he doesn't change.

Getting stuck in your comfort zone is probably the biggest source of failure for individuals in organizations. The good news is that there is a very simple diagnosis for it. Simply look back over your last three months and ask yourself, what did I do that made me feel uncomfortable? What did I do clumsily, because I hadn't done it before? If you can’t come up with anything, life probably feels good. But you’re in a fool’s paradise.

Learnt from Forbes.com