Common mistakes in leadership

Whether you think of leaders or managers, you can avoid some of the common mistakes more easily that fixing them afterwards.

1. Build the organization to reflect your personal strengths and weaknesses. If you are erratic and disorganized, your organization can easily become erratic and disorganized, and attract only people who are similarly erratic and disorganized. You can't see it, and you like the fit with how you think. The way to avoid it is to listen to constructive criticism so you can think more widely, and deliberately recruit people who think differently from you.
2. Queen Bee syndrome. The Queen Bee holds absolute power because she believes that all goodness and light flows from her.
3. Distance. The more physical distance you have from people, the more difficult it is to communicate well and to have effective managerial controls. It is easier to have misunderstandings and to misinterpret motives.
4. Working hard? Most people feel they are working harder than they are. When people feel the load of responsibility, they feel they are working very hard even if they have nothing to actually do.
5. Terminations. Terminations are difficult and messy, no matter how necessary they are.
6. Talented people. Some managers present the image that they want to recruit and promote talented, creative people with leadership potential. In reality, however, they feel threatened by talented, upcoming leaders, and hold them back. Many upcoming leaders either give up and become quiet, frustrated, compliant and uncreative. Others leave the organization and rise through the ranks of another organization.

Volunteers. Charities often use volunteer labour inefficiently. Workflows would change radically if they had to pay full wages.

Too much change. Even when changes are improvements, changes can destabilize the organization if there are too many of them, too frequent, or too erratic. "Too" implies a tipping point; it occurs when the work involved in implementing the changes outweighs the benefits of the changes.

Poor delegation. The reason for poor delegation, other than deliberately holding people back, is that supervisors don't ease people into new tasks through ordered stages.

Poor delegation takes two quite different forms. In one form, managers under-supervise. Subordinates don't learn their job properly, and perform poorly with a higher risk of serious errors. If these subordinates do a bad job, nobody knows until it's too late. In another form, micromanagers control every aspect of what a subordinate does. In the worst cases, subordinates can't do their jobs at all. In other cases, they don't develop a personal style, don't learn much, and don't exercise abilities where they could do a better job than the supervisor. They don't feel free to take initiative, even if the consequences of non-initiative are disastrous. A few people accept their role and lose any creativity and initiative. Good people tend to move on as soon as they get an opportunity.

Forcing square pegs into round holes. If a manager has one peg and one hole, it's convenient to ignore the fact that the peg is square and the hole is round. It's then easy to force the square peg into the round hole. Pushing people into roles for which they are clearly unsuited, however, ruins them both; the person is frustrated and the job is done poorly.

In the worst cases, the person gets so frustrated at being sacrificed that they develop a bad attitude and the supervisor forces them out of the organization. The supervisor then justifies him/herself by saying: "Lousy attitude; they had to go." but doesn't realize that he/she caused the problem.

Whip a willing horse. The worker is willing to take on a load that is more than their fair share, and carry it for a long time.

It can result in the worker eventually burning out and needing to leave. In the worst cases, the person realizes that they are being exploited and becomes bitter. The supervisor forces them out of the organization, with the justification: "Lousy attitude; they had to go." but, again, doesn't realize that he/she caused the problem.

Contributing weaknesses rather than strengths. In this kind of sick team, everybody contributes their weaknesses rather than their strengths. This has two variations, and your nightmare is to have both occuring together. In the first, everybody in the team is assigned jobs to which they are poorly suited, so they contribute mistakes rather than good performance. In the second, the oppressive atmosphere makes people want to complain, so each person contributes negative attitudes.

In too deep in a mistake. You realize that you have made a mistake in a decision and are now committed to a course of action, but you are now too far down the path to call a halt. How do you get out or change direction without losing face? You might fear that a backdown would tarnish your reputation, or that the change process would be too difficult to reverse.

 

Task

Express each of these common mistakes in leadership in a positive form that would be good advice to people learning leadership.