There’s a lot of great posts on leadership, so we’re not going to discuss what a leader is. (And if you don’t know, go find them and come back.)

But leadership is more than just what you think about. It’s not just the attributes you associate with command, authority, and communication … and the greatness you expect from people that attain the position. It’s also the attributes you associate with submission, anarchy, and concealment … which you might associate with followers, lack of leadership, or walled organizations. (But that’s another post.)

But the most overlooked skill for Procurement, as Garry point out in a LinkedIn post on the leadership skill no one talks about, is the ability to end things. In fact, a CPO’s ability to end things is more important than a CEO’s ability to end things. (But that’s likely another post as well.)

In Procurement, especially a poorly functioning Procurement organization, a lot of things will need to be ended:

• the people who were placed in, but don’t belong in, Procurement will need to be removed — if the organization won’t transfer them, they’ll need to be let go
• the supplier relationships that aren’t working will need to be ended as soon as possible
• the consulting relationships offering no value (and just billing hours for nothing) need to be axed
• the processes that aren’t working need to stop (and they will need to be replaced with modern processes that do)
• the data silos that aren’t connected, aren’t up to date, and aren’t usable need to be connected and updated or deleted
• the systems and software not meeting Procurement needs must be disposed of

That’s a lot of endings that need to occur before new beginnings can take place.

And if these endings don’t happen, Procurement will collapse and maybe even take the organization with it. As Garry notes, organizations don’t collapse from lack of beginnings, they collapse from an inability to stop!