3 Indicators You Need to Rethink Your Leadership
We have priorities bombarding us all day long, and we want to hit our goals as quickly and efficiently as possible. Are we truly being effective in our leadership and bringing value to our team members? Every now and then, we need to pause and reflect. If you see these 3 trends in your leadership, you may need to rethink your approach.
Your own hands have to touch everything.
Leadership is about getting things done through people. It’s not about doing things for them. It’s also not about doing everything yourself. Unlike popular belief, it’s not about being able to roll up your sleeves and showing others that you can do the job. It’s also not about telling everyone what to do or writing processes for every step that needs to happen. Instead it’s about influence. If you have your hands in everything, then you’re influencing things, not people. At some point the number of “things” on your plate will grow much larger than what you can handle, and you’ll find yourself in the vicious cycle of chasing fires - no time to think, no time to respond, and only being able to see the symptoms at the surface of issues.
Pause for a moment to reflect on your involvement in how your team reaches its goals. How hands-on are you? Are you interacting more with things as opposed to adding value to the people on your team that can move the needle in the direction of your goal?
Your team members point fingers.
There are several scary outcomes of the blame game among teams - lost business due to the lack of ownership of actions toward your goals, internal conflict between team members, and a hostile work environment are just a few that come to mind. What’s humbling is that the root of the blame game starts with leaders’ interactions with their teams. Leaders foster accountability among the group. Some leaders give permission for the blame game by participating in it themselves. Others enable blaming through how they handle conflict and poor performance. When someone does not meet expectations, leaders must take action to re-align the person with the team before that person corrodes the team’s culture. If you turn a blind eye and allow for poor performance and behaviors to fester, whether it’s because you tend to avoid conflict or you make exceptions because of the person’s performance in other areas, you’re sacrificing accountability. You also lose respect and authority. Your team members lose respect for one another. It’s no longer a functional work environment, and you’re going to lose your people to other teams.
What recent examples of the blame game come to mind? How might your interactions with your team support the blame game? Are you modeling the blame game to your team unintentionally? How do you feel about conflict, and are you addressing it with your team members head-on? How will your interactions be different going forward?
You have to repeat yourself over and over again.
Tons of reasons exist for your message being missed, and most of them start with you as the leader. Here’s what I commonly see: being unclear, failing to take into consideration differences in how people receive messages, issuing too many priorities and directives, and thinking for your people by constantly telling them what to do. If you find you’re repeating yourself or a lack of follow through after you’ve delivered a message, it’s time to get curious and reflect.
How are you obtaining feedback from your team about what they heard you say and their takeaways? How many priorities are you giving (are there more than 3 main focuses at a time)? How can you ask questions that require your people to solve problems on their own as opposed to creating a dependency on you?
If any of these indicators are familiar to you, then you’re not alone. I’ve helped organizations and clients that have recognized these patterns among their teams to define their own strategies for improving leadership and ultimately achieving the desired performance of their teams. I offer a free first session to give you peace of mind about your first steps and how I can help you.
