To be the best leader possible for your business requires that you confront leadership behaviors that may be holding you back and focus on mastering those that will build success. In this post, I will first present the seven 7 leadership sins to avoid as a leader. These sins will not only thwart sustainable growth in your business, but greatly undermine and overshadow other positive leadership behaviors. After that, I’ll give you the opportunity to assess your proficiency of the 7 Essential Skills of Leadership.
The 7 Leadership Sins
Meddling and Micro-Managing – You spend too much time telling people “how” to do things vs. managing outcomes (the “what”). You meddle in the details so much that employees start waiting on you (better wait until we know if the boss approves) and you become the bottleneck of progress without knowing it. Manage the “what” and avoid creating a weak, un-empowered workforce that is afraid to execute and move things forward.
Suppressing engagement and creativity – Your words or body language dismiss new ideas and suppress employees’ enthusiasm and spirit. You respond with “oh, we’ve done that before,” or “that won’t work,” or you non-verbally you send the signals (dismissive posture, eye-rolling, etc.) that diminishes an idea or person and don’t notice.
Failure to Communicate Clearly – You either don’t have a clear vision and plan, or you simply fail to communicate clearly and often enough to engage your entire team in that vision and plan. You have employees that don’t know what they are working for other than a paycheck and you fail to harness their own passions and skills to achieve results as a team.
Lack of Candor – You do not give constructive candid feedback and you do not foster an environment where that is safe, desired, and expected. Employee growth is always achieved more quickly in an environment where it is safe to receive and give constructive, candid feedback. Employees that don’t want to grow will just get off the bus (which helps with the next sin).
Slow to get the Wrong People off the Bus – It’s true that it may be difficult to know if someone is the right fit, but I can tell you from countless situations that when your intuition is telling you someone is the WRONG fit for your company – specifically in terms of culture – you must move quickly to get that person off your bus! If not, their negative impact will spread like a virus.
Delaying decisions – Your job is making decisions – so make the decisions and get to execution quickly. A delayed decision is a “no decision.” I wrote earlier (see this blog post) about the role of intuition, judgement, and perspective in making faster decisions. Lack of execution will kill your company. Slow decisions and “no decisions” kill any chance of competitive execution.
Not KNOWING your Numbers – It’s simple. You must know and pay attention to the key performance indicators (e.g., financial, customer satisfaction, production, bookings, forecasts) that inform timely and appropriate leadership decisions. You cannot effectively lead your business if you cannot identify, regularly measure and monitor, and act upon the numbers that tell the story of your business.
The 7 Essential Skills to Focus On
There is no way I want to leave you out there with only the 7 Sins to avoid. What are the 7 Essential Leadership Skills that you should be focused on? I would like to provide you with an assessment tool that both introduces you to those 7 Essential Skills and also measures your current proficiency and your desired future proficiency regarding those skills. What will happen when you fill out the assessment. Simple – I will respond to you by sending you two important pieces of information: (1) Your assessment results in the form of a scatter graph to allow you to visually picture the “gaps” in your proficiency and where you should focus your time and energy, and (2) an offer from me to sit down with you (or virtual-web sit down) and go over these seven skills in more detail and bring you some links to resources that may prove helpful in your journey to improve. This is a complimentary session and no expectation of anything more.
