Ever been fired by your employees? No one wants to earn the title “poor leader, ineffective manager or bad supervisor”. Sadly however, many unhappy employees leave their positions because they do not feel cared for, supported, understood or treated fairly by their superiors.
Your leadership strategies have an effect on your overall organisation. How employees work, how they feel, what they do, how they relate to clients and everything else affects your organisation, and putting best leadership strategies in place would create a team that always has the thought of their organisation at heart, at all times.
Here’s a list of 5 leadership strategies you should do away with if you find yourself practicing them:
1. Not delegating
Some managers don’t delegate, because they feel that no one, apart from them can do the key jobs properly. This can cause huge problems as work bottlenecks around them, and as they become stressed and burned out.
Delegation does take a lot of effort up-front, and it can be hard to trust your team to do the work correctly. But unless you delegate tasks, you’re never going to have time to focus on the broader-view that most leaders and managers are responsible for. What’s more, you’ll fail to develop your people so that they can take the pressure off you.
2. Failing to make your expectation clear
A number of leaders are in the habit of assuming that their employees can read their minds. They’ll ask for some deliverable, like research for a prospective client, but when the employee gets it done it doesn’t look like they imagined it in their heads. Much of the blame in these scenarios can be directed toward a manager who didn’t make his/her expectations clear from the start.
If you have expectations, or a clear idea in your head, you need to make that clear, otherwise, don’t be surprised when your employee submits something different and needs to start the whole project over again.
3. Failing to give feedback
Yes, you have projects that you need to deliver. But communicating with your team is key. When you focus on your own activities without being available when your team needs you, they wouldn’t know what to do, and they won’t have the support and guidance that they need to meet their objectives.
Avoid this mistake by blocking out time in your schedule, specifically for your communication and feedback purpose. Develop your emotional intelligence so you can be more aware of your team and their needs, and have a regular time when “your door is always open”, so they can walk right in know when they need your help.
4. Being too friendly
Most of us want to be seen as friendly and approachable to people in our team. After all, people are happier working for a manager that they get on with. However, you’ll sometimes have to make tough decisions regarding people in your team, and some people will be tempted to take advantage of your relationship if you’re too friendly with them.
This doesn’t mean that you can’t socialize with your people. but, you do need to get the balance right between being a good friend and being the boss.
5. Ignoring individual differences
While it’s a good idea to establish a general work culture that appeals to the type of people you want to work with, not everybody works the same way.
Your account manager might benefit from multiple team meetings to exchange information and build camaraderie, but your web developer might see that as an aggravating waste of time. Your CFO might be a morning person while your designer works better in the afternoons. It’s your responsibility to know each person’s strengths and weaknesses, and cater to those as much as you can.
Have you been leading wrongly? Which of these leadership strategies have been using? Share with us in the comments!
