The Reason Most Leaders Fail Has Nothing to Do With Skill
When leaders treat their position as a reward they've earned rather than a responsibility they've accepted, their teams end up carrying the work those leaders quietly stopped doing.
Book Review: The Motive by Patrick Lencioni
OVERVIEW
Most CEOs at growing companies are competent. They know their industry, they can close deals, they understand the product. But somewhere along the way, they start avoiding the parts of leadership that feel tedious or uncomfortable. They skip the hard conversation with an underperforming exec. They let misalignment fester because addressing it directly feels like babysitting. The company starts to plateau, and they can't figure out why.
Patrick Lencioni has spent decades studying leadership teams. He's the author of The Five Dysfunctions of a Team and several other business fables that have become staples in leadership development. The Motive, published in 2020, is a short book, closer to a manifesto than a research study. But it makes a sharp, uncomfortable argument that most leadership books avoid.
Lencioni's core claim is that the reason most leaders fail isn't lack of skill or knowledge. It's the wrong motive. Leaders who treat their position as a reward end up avoiding the hard, unglamorous work that leadership actually requires. That avoidance, not incompetence, is what breaks teams and stalls companies.
CONCEPTS
Reward-centered vs. responsibility-centered leadership. - Lencioni divides leaders into two types. Reward-centered leaders see leadership as something they've earned, a payoff for years of hard work and strong performance. Responsibility-centered leaders see it as a burden they've accepted in service of the people around them. The distinction sounds simple, but it determines everything about how a leader shows up. Reward-centered leaders unconsciously filter every responsibility through the question, "Do I have to do this?" Responsibility-centered leaders ask, "What does my team need from me?"
The five responsibilities leaders consistently avoid. - Lencioni identifies five specific areas where reward-centered leaders fall short: developing the leadership team, managing and coaching direct reports, having difficult conversations, running effective meetings, and cascading communication throughout the organization. None of these are glamorous. They're repetitive, emotionally taxing, and easy to rationalize away. But they are, according to Lencioni, the actual job of a leader. Avoiding them means handing the responsibility off to no one.
The disguise of good intentions. - One of the sharper observations in the book is that reward-centered leaders often sound like responsible ones. They say things like, "I don't want to micromanage," or "I trust my team to figure it out." Those phrases can reflect genuine leadership philosophy. But they can also be a cover for avoiding the discomfort of working through a difficult stretch with someone. Lencioni is pointing out that the language of empowerment is sometimes the language of avoidance.
Leadership as a burden, not a privilege. - This is the reframe at the center of the book. Lencioni isn't arguing that leadership is miserable. He's arguing that treating it as a privilege, something you've earned and get to enjoy, sets up a leader to pick and choose the parts they like. The moment leadership becomes about what you get to do, a leader will naturally drift toward the interesting, strategic, visible work and away from the developmental, relational, and repetitive work that keeps a team functional.
APPLICATION
Audit what you're actually avoiding. - Start by going through the five responsibilities Lencioni names: developing your leadership team, coaching direct reports, having hard conversations, running meetings, and cascading communication. For each one, ask how much time you spent on it in the last 90 days and whether that amount was enough. Not whether you technically did it, but whether you did it well enough and often enough to make a real difference. Most growth-stage CEOs will find two or three areas where they've been rationalizing their way out. That's where the real work is.
Look at how you talk about the hard parts. - The language you use around your leadership duties is a diagnostic. If you describe team meetings as something to get through, or if your default framing around managing people is that it pulls you away from real work, you're operating from a reward-centered mindset. That framing doesn't just affect your behavior. It signals to your leadership team what the culture values and what's acceptable to avoid. Cleaning up the language is step one. Changing the behavior follows.
Build hard conversations into your calendar. - Most CEOs who avoid difficult feedback don't think of themselves as conflict-averse. They just never get around to it. The fix is mechanical. Schedule a recurring block each week, even 30 minutes, specifically for the conversation you've been putting off. Treat it the same way you treat a board meeting. When the block shows up, use it. Lencioni's point is that this work doesn't happen naturally for reward-centered leaders. It has to be deliberately structured into the week.
Treat leadership team development as a deliverable. - If your direct reports aren't measurably better leaders than they were a year ago, that's substantially on you. Growth-stage companies in the $10M to $30M range often plateau because the CEO built a strong early team and then stopped investing in them. Create a simple development plan for each direct report and track it the same way you track revenue or product milestones. This isn't an HR activity. It's a core strategic responsibility.
TAKEAWAY
The Motive is a short book, but it's one of the more uncomfortable things a CEO can sit with. Lencioni isn't talking about leaders who are failing at strategy or execution. He's talking about leaders who are genuinely capable, and who are still quietly stepping back from the parts of the job that don't feel rewarding. The standard fix for team underperformance, better frameworks, smarter hiring, more coaching, doesn't work if the underlying motive is wrong. The real lever is an honest look at why you took the leadership role in the first place and whether you're willing to do the parts of it that aren't interesting or fun. If your leadership team is underperforming and you can't figure out why, start by looking at what you've been avoiding.
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