Your comment reminds me of one of my favorite quotes: “Leaders who fail to realize the importance of personal accountability will ultimately face the imposed accountability of others.” Thanks for the insights Jim…

Definitely agree with your perspective…I think your comparison to professional sports is a good one as well. Thanks for stopping by Dan.

I’m a little late to this party. However, I’ll jump in since the water looks fine.

It seems to me that one motivator for term limits is to protect organizations from abusive leaders. The answer isn’t term limits, the answer is character.

We wouldn’t have this conversation if it wasn’t for unethical, manipulative, deceptive, self-centered, egotistical, know-it-all leaders … hmmm, that felt good.

As you indicate, performance is a context sensitive thing. It depends on economic, regulatory, social, and other factors. Through it all, we need persons of character at the wheel.

It’s true that competence is key to performance. But character and competence make for long-term success. (I use success in the broadest of terms)

Well, I’m climbing out of this pool. That felt good!

As always you have my best regards,

Dan

Term limits are a lazy leadership concept in my opinion based on the thinking that new will translate immediately into growth or improved performance. There are countless studies, particularly in the area of professional sports team management, that refute this notion and in fact lead one to believe that the reverse is true. Often performance expectations and time lines to achieve those metrics once communicated to,and accepted by the CEO, negate any necessity for term limits. We either achieve or we don’t and we either surpass expectations or don’t. Seems to this simple guy that our term or shelf life, outside of moral and ethical turpitude, should primarily depend on that.

Thanks for your astute insights. You are spot-on as usual in pointing out that segregation of duties, responsibilities and authority and prohibit many things problematic with ailing corporations. Thanks for sharing William.

I really liked how you stripped away the confusion that often surrounds the concepts of time and accountability. Well done Sir. Thanks for stopping by Tanveer.

A recent study has shown that CEOs who have won industry awards average a 20% drop in performance over the subsequent 3-5 years compared to other eligible CEOs for the same award.

The CEOs who won awards and still had consistent high performance were supported by a diverse authority structure. THAT is infinitely more valuable and effective than a token gesture like term limits.

From my vantage point, I see this being an issue of confusing time with accountability, that by restricting the duration a person can serve as the CEO of an organization we’re enforcing a greater degree of corporate/social responsibility. Ironically, I think what we’d be accomplishing is the opposite, as the response to poor performance would most likely be ‘well, they’ll only be in charge for another 1-2 years so let’s just wait this out’.

When we consider that the role of a leader is to create a vision of what they’d like their organization to accomplish, it does become rather counter-productive to put any time restriction on people serving in these roles. After all, how could we expect employees to support and develop a leader’s vision if its understood that this role is ultimately not regulated by performance, but by a clock hanging on the wall.