I’ve yet to see a company that, having sound leadership, failed. I’ve also never seen one to succeed with bad leaders. And the surprise is that being a “good” or “bad” leader has nothing to do with how you treat people around you. You can be a tyrant (Steve Jobs), a bully (Bill Gates), a corsair (Larry Ellisson) or a friendly, passionate geek (Larry Page, Sergey Brin) and succeed nonetheless. But if you lead in the wrong direction, then boy, you’ll hit an iceberg sooner than you can spell “Titanic”.
This isn’t to say that you should immediately burn your copy of How to Win Friends and Influence People and start screaming around at your team like a drill instructor. But it does mean that if you’re not naturally a social, likeable person, trying to change yourself is probably a misallocated effort. You may rather want to spend time getting to know your market and learning as much as you can about your domain. Put a lot of work into becoming the best expert in your field.
Being a great leader may motivate people to row faster, but it won’t help anyone if you’re all heading for a cliff.