Over the course of my career, both as a consultant and as an executive, I have worked with dozens of smart leaders who failed.

Some of these executives drove their organizations into the ground, some created massive morale problems, others simply failed to face reality. Most simply refused to listen.

A great book, Why Smart Executives Fail, by Sydney Finkelstein, is a fantastic, fact-based look at this problem. I highly recommend it for the rare leader who is serious about building a high-performance organization. (In my experience, most executives simply don’t care about their organizations, they only care about themselves.)

Here is a great quote that nets it out:

“We discovered that precipitous business failures are caused by four destructive patterns of behavior that set in, without anyone noticing them, well before a business goes under. These four syndromes involve (1) flawed executive mind-sets that throw off a company’s perception of reality, (2) delusional attitudes that keep this attitude in place, (3) breakdowns in communications systems developed to handle potentially urgent information, and (4) leadership qualities that keep a company’s executives from correcting their course.

In Good to Great, Jim Collins speaks of the “mirror and the window” when describing the behavior of Level 4 leaders.

Maybe it is time for all of you to take a long, hard, and brutally honest look in the mirror.