For any presidential campaign, there usually is an ad about which candidate would you trust to handle the phone call in the wee hours of the morning. You want someone to answer the call instead of it just going to voice mail.

When dealing with an organization, one of the problems I’ve seen is a leadership vacuum where there might not be a decisive decision maker at the top or the top person maybe out for extended periods of time and there is no one to pick up the slack. Armies need generals and any organization needs leadership that they can answer to and will be responsible if something does go wrong. Any organization that I ever was involved with that wasn’t efficient in its work was because there was a lack of leadership either at the top or in the middle. Employees and workers need direction and when there is a lack of leadership, they are not going to get it.

A leadership vacuum means that work isn’t going to be efficiently done, mistakes are going to be made, and clients are going to be lost. Worst of all, the inmates are going to run the asylum and that always reminds me of the first place I ever worked at full time: it was four years of summer camp and that place has been out of business for 14 years.