9 Common Leadership Mistakes That Set Your Employees Up for Failure
Posted January 28th, 2016
As a leader, you can enable or obstruct your employees’ success. Unfortunately, recognizing whether you’re helping or hurting is a tricky process and hard to approach honestly. Be sure you are doing anything and everything possible to advance the goals of your team by avoiding these nine common leadership mistakes:
- Holding on to Power – Your job is not to maintain total control over a project, it’s to assign control/responsibility to the right people. If you’re not delegating responsibility effectively then the wrong people are doing the wrong jobs.
- Operating Without Goals – How can your team be successful if they don’t know what success looks like? In all things you need to clearly assign goals/targets and communicate how those goals relate to the success of the team specifically and the success of your organization generally.
- Relying on Easy Fixes – You can ignore a fire, but that doesn’t put the flames out. Looking for quick solutions can be tempting, but that only causes problems to reappear repeatedly and continually hold your team back.
- Stopping the Flow of Information – Effective leaders have to communicate clearly and constantly. If your team is operating without all the information it needs, it won’t ever be able to live up to your expectations.
- Failing to Learn From Failures – Failure is inevitable. Instead of using it as an opportunity to scold and punish, turn it into a learning/teaching opportunity. Leaders that operate in a punitive way discourage risk taking and rarely see surprising results.
- Creating Barriers to Change – Your team/organization/industry are in a constant state of evolution. Leaders who are resistant to change are forced to constantly play catch up which puts teams at a distinct disadvantage. Try, instead, to anticipate changes and stay ahead of the curve.
- Ignoring the Human Element – Your team is not a series of cogs in a machine, it’s a group of real people. If you don’t make a serious effort to manage the human side of your team and address the real concerns that arise in an office, you’re doing your staff a disservice.
- Focusing on Work Alone – Ultimately, it falls on you to ensure that things get done. But work shouldn’t be only about targets and deadlines. If you make no effort to create a fun workplace, you’re missing out on a big opportunity to engage your employees.
- Overlooking Great Work – Just because your expectations are high doesn’t mean you shouldn’t praise and reward good work. Employees who feel like their accomplishments are ignored and downplayed have little incentive to work harder.
Above all, leaders need to be conscientious. They should self-reflect, solicit lots of feedback, be open to trying new things, and be realistic. Leaders that do these things tend to be the ones that inspire and innovate. Learn more about leading in a positive way by connecting with Bayside Solutions.
