Bad Leadership Can Ruin Your Business

Are you a good leader? Are you leading in the right direction? Or are you doing some things that might be turning people off and inhibiting peak performance?

Most people are actually somewhere between being a good leader and a bad leader, with the majority uncertain of the connection between their leadership and performance. A deeper knowledge of what good (or great) leadership is will then enable you to break-through and affect change in the performance of your team, organization or company like never before.

Considering that break-through superstar performance is what most bosses hope for in their careers, let's review what represents good leadership and bad leadership in a concrete and actionable way — actions that drive positive sustainable results from an understanding of which managerial actions push negative results and which drive positive results.

Leadership denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to conduct their work.

Leadership in the workplace applies to managing people, not to managing things. And as I have previously defined leadership (watch and read here), in the workplace, leadership denotes the sending of value standard messages that most people then use to conduct their work. This means how industriously, cooperatively, openly, respectfully, caringly, honestly, neatly, cleanly, and the like to perform their work. Thus, we say that employees have been led in the direction of those standards.

How does an employee experience leadership? They experience it through the support provided by management and the quality of this support dictates the quality of their work. The support an employee uses comes in two forms: tangible and intangible.

Tangible support consists of training, tools, material, parts, discipline, direction, procedures, rules, technical advice, documentation, information, planning, etc.
Intangible support consists of feelings like confidence, morale, trust, respect, relatedness (or purpose), autonomy, ownership, engagement and empowerment.

Providing that support may or may not be clear to you, as the boss, but it is clear to whomever you manage, the majority of whom are followers. What this means to you, the boss, is that leadership happens inexorably every minute of every day because the vast majority of people are following the lead of the boss, some more, some less. Followers follow the leadership of the boss. This is a Natural Law. The only choice available to a boss is to set the standard employees will follow—be that good, bad, mediocre or somewhere on the spectrum. We want to be in the very good to great range!

Now we can get more specific in defining good leadership in the workplace and poor or bad leadership.

Good Leadership
In order to produce the absolute best products and services in the marketplace, all employees must treat their work and their customers with great respect and care. Everyone knows this. It follows then that good leadership requires treating employees with great respect and care — the better the respect and caring, the better the outcome.

Remember this is a Natural Law (inexorable, inescapable). Treat employees as if they are very important and valuable and you will cause them to feel and become this way. They will then treat their work, customers, peers and management this way. They will follow your lead.

What then characterizes good (or great!) leadership?

• Listening to your employees including subordinate managers/bosses — addressing their complaints, suggestions, concerns, and personal issues at work.
• Coaching people when necessary to raise them to a higher standard.
• Allowing everyone to put in their two cents.
• Trusting them to do the work.
• Not giving orders or setting visions, goals and objectives, but instead soliciting this from them so that everyone is fully involved in how the company will be successful.
• Providing direction when needed to ensure that everyone is on the same page (the one they devised). A good leader communicates the vision that was set by all. If it is a vision of little interest, then another one must be found.
• Every person wants to be heard and respected. Everyone has something to contribute. Listening and responding respectfully makes it worthwhile for employees to apply 100% of their brainpower on their work thus unleashing their full potential of creativity, innovation and productivity and making them highly motivated, committed and productive. All of this gives them very high morale, enables them to take great pride in their work and then they will literally love to come to work. Good leadership multiplies whatever creativity, innovation and productivity top management has by however many employees they have.

What does that mean for bad leadership?

Bad Leadership
Bad leadership is characterized by attempting to control employees through orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions, bureaucracy, and changes all designed to almost force employees to work and to create and deliver what management considers to be satisfactory products and services. In this mode, management on its own decides what to do, when to do it, and how to do it and listens only perfunctorily, if they listen at all, to what employees have to say.

What characterizes bad leadership?

• Dishing out orders, policies, rules, goals, targets, reports, visions and changes to force employees to work the way management believes it should be done.
• Failing to listen or only perfunctorily listening to complaints and suggestions.
• Trying to motivate employees.
• Exhibiting the “Do as I say, not as I do” mentality
• Providing inadequate support
• Withholding information
• Treating employees as if they don’t want to do a better job, don’t care about their work, don’t want to accept responsibility, or don’t really want to work.
• Treating them as if they are lucky to have a job
• Being afraid to discipline and never disciplining anyone
• Staying in your office or in meetings at your level or above
• Us versus them mentality—“Why aren’t they performing better?”— “What’s wrong with that person? Why don’t they know their job? They should know their job.”

These actions or inactions are bad because they lead employees to believe that management disrespects them and does not care a whit for them. It also puts employees in the state of having to guess what management wants and management must be right about everything because no one else is allowed to make decisions. Bad leadership shuts off the natural creativity, innovation, and productivity of each employee and slowly but surely demotivates and demoralizes them. With the “I know better than you” and the “be quiet and listen to me” mentality often projected from management, the majority will act like robots waiting for instructions, even if that is not what management intended.

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