It can be hard to face the fact that many organizations fail due to ineffective leadership. However, there is also huge opportunity in that fact, because ineffective leadership can be remedied.

The first step to improving leadership is clarifying exactly what effective leadership means to your organization:

How is the current leadership performing? What does the situation look like when it’s better? How do you measure progress?

Second, you must determine, what constitutes an effective leader.

A leader gets results. If he or she doesn’t, they may be popular, but they won’t be a long-term leader. The difference between a leader and an effective leader is results and how they are attained.

In today’s complex, technical and global environment, effective leaders must learn to leverage all resources around them. This is a change from the days when the top person was expected to know everything and touch everything.

Therefore, an effective leader needs to attract and retain excellent people, and to create an environment that is open to communication and innovation.

So, an effective leader gets results; develops people; and creates a culture of open communication, learning and productivity.

After you’ve clarified what effective leadership means to your organization and what constitutes an effective leader, the next step is evaluating the current status of your organization’s leadership. One way to evaluate this, aside from simply looking at results, is to look for warning signs:

Take an honest look inside your organization. How many of these issues are present? Excessive meetings with no agenda and no results; consensus-driven decision-making; lack of personal accountability; poor communication between parties; reluctance to terminate poor performers; misaligned and uncoordinated efforts (silo effect); personality conflicts and power struggles; apathetic and unmotivated employees; inconsistent results; poor time management; reactive rather than proactive efforts; micro-management; declining sales and/or market share; lack of teamwork; duplication of efforts; high employee turnover; substandard quality of work; or numerous unresolved issues/postponed decisions.

While these issues touch many team members, they are all the result of poor leadership. Effective leadership creates an environment where things get accomplished, employees feel valued and their work is directed in a way that it results in achieving the organization’s goals.

If you want your organization to be successful, it must be supported by an energized, competent management team. If it’s not, the flow of communications is hindered in two directions. Your instructions don’t go down the chain of command the way they should, so things aren’t done the way you want. And communications from below don’t come up to you in an accurate and timely manner, so you find out about important matters too late or not at all.

To be an effective leader, you must first learn to lead. Often the first step is finding the right people to head up your organization to lead it into success.

Martin Harshberger is the founder and president of Measurable Results LLC, as well as the author of “Bottom Line Focus.” He can be reached at martin@bottomlinecoach.com or visit www.bottomlinecoach.com.